A well-known warrior in the #ChurchToo movement reveals in a new book how she escaped from an abusive Texas home and an abusive Southern Baptist church. Christa Brown, a former Texas appellate attorney, is revered as perhaps the best-known of the brave women (and men) who blew the whistle on abusive clergy and coverups at churches in the powerful Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). She began her quest at age 51, by bravely sharing her own story of being repeatedly sexually abused as a teen by her youth pastor, Tommy Gilmore, the man she’d gone to for counseling at her church in Farmers Branch. She first came forward as a whistleblower in 2009.

The new Alliance for Texas History calls for working everyone’s stories “into the fabric of Texas history.”. Nearly 150 members of the new Texas Alliance for History, including university professors and students, community historians, and staff members of historical sites and museums gathered Saturday at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth for the event, “Looking Back, Moving Forward.” Their collective goal: to form a group dedicated to sharing untold stories of Texas history, efforts that seem even more crucial in an era when various efforts to diversify the state’s historical record are under fire.

A version of this story ran in the May / June 2024 issue. In an otherwise strong State of the Union address this March, President Joe Biden breathed new life into a term the immigrant rights movement has spent years pushing out of the Democratic vocabulary. He was stumbling over a sentence; right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was heckling him from the audience about a young woman in Georgia who’d allegedly been killed the month prior by a non-U.S. citizen. Apparently parroting Greene, Biden confirmed that the woman, Laken Riley, had been killed “by an illegal.”

A version of this story ran in the May / June 2024 issue. This is my first time writing to you in this space, though I’ve been writing for y’all for the last eight years. I started my journalism career as an intern here at the Observer in 2016. My only qualification then was that I worked at a migrant shelter and spoke Spanish, and the hiring editor found that intriguing. For months, I struggled to find my footing. But one day the Observer found itself in need of a series about federal immigrant detention, perhaps the only topic for which I had sources and was qualified to cover. I wrote that series and was rewarded with a cub reporter job assisting our former border and immigration ace Melissa del Bosque. Later, I graduated to full-fledged staff writer, then assistant editor, and today I write to you as the Observer’s interim editor-in-chief.

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A version of this story ran in the March / April 2024 issue. Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”

A UT professor and expert on freedom of expression weighs in on the controversial arrests of 57 individuals, including a journalist, at a campus demonstration. In a statement to the Observer, a UT-Austin spokesperson said that about half of those arrested were unaffiliated with the university. “Thirteen pro-Palestinian free speech events have taken place at the University largely without incident since October,” wrote Brian Davis, the spokesperson. “In contrast, this one in particular expressed an intent to disrupt the campus and directed participants to break Institutional Rules and occupy the University.”

A version of this story ran in the March / April 2024 issue. I was born and raised in Mexico and lived at the Texas-Mexico border for eight years. As a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, I began to research Mexican organized crime groups that operate transnationally. Since 2009, I have studied illicit networks involved in U.S.-bound migration and the drug trade. My interests have to do mainly with the fact that I started my U.S. academic career as an immigrant, some of my relatives arrived here as undocumented immigrants, and because my father and brother were victims of extortion by Los Zetas in 2006.

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New plaintiffs have expanded a 2023 lawsuit against TDCJ, accusing the agency of “cooking [prisoners] to death." Last June, Bernhardt Tiede suffered a likely stroke while living in a prison cell that regularly got up to around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The 65-year-old—whose story inspired the 2011 Richard Linklater film “Bernie”—is housed at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville. Now, several new parties have joined and expanded a lawsuit Tiede filed last year against the prison system and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton related to its inadequate heat safety measures.

To submit a poem, please send an email, with the poem as an attachment, to [email protected]. We are looking for previously unpublished works of no more than 30 lines, by Texas poets who have not been published by the Observer in the last two years. Pay is $100 on publication.

Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...

Texas officials go to bat for oil and gas while the climate-fueled Smokehouse Creek Fire still rages. On February 26, a tiny flame sparked a mile north of the ranching community of Stinnett, Texas. This part of the Texas Panhandle is sparsely populated—Hutchinson County has 20,000 people and roughly the same number of cows—so no one saw the smoldering patch of tall, dry grass where two county roads intersect. By the time area residents took notice of the smoke, it was too late: The fire had already spread into fallow fields and untamed barrow ditches, morphing into a monster in mere hours. By evening, the blaze—soon dubbed the Smokehouse Creek Fire—had reached 62 square miles. Firefighters were dispatched from all over Texas and beyond to try to prevent the entire Panhandle from going up in smoke.

Some arrestees in Austin lack legal representation at a stage that can determine their cases’ outcome. The ACLU and some officials want to change that. In Travis County, the magistration process—the initial bail hearing after someone is arrested—isn’t cinematic. Arrestees are either led to a small room within the jail’s central booking area, or a Travis County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) employee might bring a computer to their holding cell. At the end of a short conversation, during which the arrestee can either remain silent or try to plead their case to get released on a personal bond instead of cash or surety bail, a magistrate—a judge who handles pre-trial hearings—determines the conditions of release.

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A high-tech chemical company has purchased the last available water in the Nueces River to make hydrogen and ammonia for export. Avina’s Nueces Green Ammonia plant plans to separate the hydrogen from water, convert it to ammonia and export it as a high-tech fuel alternative to oil and gas. It’s one of several such projects currently proposed in Texas, driven by federal subsidies. Governments and scientists say this technology plays an important role in the transition away from fossil fuels.

The Texas senator’s iHeartMedia deal, which sent over $600,000 to an aligned super PAC, may have broken campaign finance laws—or exploited a new loophole. Cruz struck a deal in 2022 with San Antonio-based radio giant iHeartMedia to pay for the production, marketing, and distribution of his “Verdict” podcast, where he pontificates about various right-wing grievances several times a week. The sweetheart arrangement has raised myriad ethics concerns ever since.

To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section, or find Observer political reporting here. All of the Texas Observer’s articles are available for free syndication for news sources under the following conditions:. Articles must link back to the original article and contain the...