The 3-year-old has barely slept in six months. She wakes up in the middle of the night calling for her father. The mother rises, gives the girl milk to calm her down, and lies, saying her daddy is driving his truck farther away than ever, but he’s coming back soon.  The girl settles. A while […]

The post Ruptured Families: The U.S. Citizen Children Left Behind by Deportations appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais did not surprise anyone who has been paying attention. The 6-3 ruling on April 29 effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to dismantle majority-minority districts and clearing the way for a wave of mid-decade redistricting already underway in Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, and […]

The post The Response We Really Need to the Supreme Court’s Gutting of the VRA appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Former Tarrant County GOP Chairman Bo French is running what can fairly be called a fossil fascist campaign in his bid to unseat incumbent Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright in the May 26 runoffs. A victory for French would secure him the GOP nomination for a six-year term atop the agency that oversees, and is generally […]

The post Bo French’s Blood-and-Oil Bid for Railroad Commissioner appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In their book released this January, Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports, authors Ellie Roscher and Anna Baeth offer a distressing encapsulation of the extent to which recent laws and policies have severely limited and even denied transgender athletes access to sports. “When we started this project in 2023, we interviewed twenty […]

The post Let Them Play appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Wearing worn black jeans and a professorial tweed jacket, Rich Levy hoisted his fist into the air in the spotlight at the Alley Theatre, doing what he’s done so well for decades: Welcoming another bestselling author to Houston Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown Reading Series—the Bayou City’s sprawling nine-month-long book festival.  Levy, both a ham and […]

The post Leaving His Mark On Houston’s Inprint appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Just a few months ago, the smart home device company Ring paid millions of dollars to run a seemingly innocuous Super Bowl advertisement about finding lost dogs. Using the app’s now-defunct “Search Party” function, the ad showed how users could share a picture of their lost dog with Ring, which would access customer camera feeds […]

The post Why My Texas Town Took Action Against Flock Cameras appeared first on The Texas Observer.

For decades, March 31 was marked with civil rights marches, school commemorations, and community celebrations honoring Cesar Chavez and the labor leader’s championing of better working conditions for farmworkers. In California and Texas, his birthday was a state holiday. But when The New York Times published its investigation earlier this year on how Chavez groomed […]

The post Reckoning with History: What Should Become of the Cesar Chavez National Monument? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Ken Paxton wants you to join him on his high horse.  Since announcing his run for the U.S. Senate seat held by four-term incumbent Senator John Cornyn last April, Paxton has held two roles: Texas Attorney General and firebrand candidate. Using the official trappings of the powerful AG’s office, Paxton has spent the past year […]

The post Ken Paxton’s Glass House appeared first on The Texas Observer.

It’s 3 a.m. in Austin and Rodríguez is still awake, the glow of his phone illuminating his face in the darkness. He refreshes the page again. A painting job appears—$150 for a day’s work. His finger hovers over the screen for just a second. Too long. By the time he taps, it’s already gone. He’s […]

The post ‘What Kind of Life Is This?’: Five Desperate Cubans Weigh Their Odds in Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On February 19, two days after the death of the reverend and civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, the Observer’s longtime contributing photographer Alan Pogue emailed me a shot of Jackson shaking hands with Molly Ivins, our onetime co-editor and unofficial patron saint. In the moments following the photo, Pogue said, Ivins injected some of her […]

The post Jesse Jackson Comes to Town appeared first on The Texas Observer.

At an office tucked in the corner of the Universal Shopping Center in Houston’s Alief area, among Vietnamese restaurants and immigration service offices, I met Democratic state Representative Hubert Vo to talk about the runoff election for House District 149. Instead of meeting at his district office a few streets away, we met at the […]

The post In Diverse Southwest Houston, Longtime Incumbent Hubert Vo Forced into Runoff Row appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The ironies that affix themselves to the life and literature of Larry McMurtry are best exemplified by the title of his autobiographical meditation on storytelling, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, wherein the eponymous German cultural critic, who warned of the dehumanizing dangers of mechanical reproduction, is imagined at the fast-food eatery beloved by Texans […]

The post The Aesthete from Archer appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Three years ago, at the outset of the 88th session of the Texas Legislature, Salman Bhojani placed his hand atop a 19th-century Quran in the state House chamber and became one of the first two Muslims ever sworn in to craft Texas laws. The then-42-year-old lawyer, who was raised in Pakistan and Canada before coming […]

The post ‘McCarthyism with a Texas Accent’ appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Nota del editor: Esta es la segunda parte de una serie de dos partes respaldada por el Pulitzer Center y la Beca de Periodismo de Investigación de la Ida B. Wells Society. Vea la primera parte aquí. (Read in English here). En una tarde templada y nublada de finales de marzo de 2025, una multitud […]

The post Brownsville bajo la influencia appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: This is part two of a two-part series supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Ida B. Wells Society Investigative Reporting Fellowship. See part one here. (Leer en español aquí.) On a balmy, overcast afternoon in late March 2025, a crowd gathered outside Texas Southmost College’s auditorium in downtown Brownsville. With them came […]

The post The Gas Peddle appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Texas Observer reader,  Thus, it ends as it began as it begins as it ended. Or something like that. The state, and to some extent the nation, waits to see who prevails between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton in the May 26 runoffs. Trump could still endorse (and may indeed do so in the gap […]

The post Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our May/June 2026 Issue appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Last week the City of Kyle, a fast-growing Austin suburb, interrupted a string of recent victories won by local activists to thwart the further expansion of police surveillance technology across Central Texas.  On April 21, council members overwhelmingly voted 6-1 to authorize the Kyle Police Department to apply for another state grant—worth up to $381,200—to […]

The post As License Plate Readers Expand in Texas, Privacy Advocates Are Fighting Back  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Eight years before their heated congressional runoff, Colin Allred and Julie Johnson both rode into political office on the blue wave of the 2018 midterms.  Allred, an NFL linebacker-turned-lawyer, ousted the powerful Dallas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions. Johnson, an attorney from Farmers Branch, toppled the divisive firebrand Matt Rinaldi en route to the Texas House. […]

The post What Does the Allred-Johnson Runoff Tell Us About Texas Dems?  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In 1999, a Dallas County jury sentenced Charles Flores to death for capital murder after a burglary turned deadly in Farmers Branch. He had been placed at the scene of the crime by an eyewitness who identified him in court—but this was after an officer from the Farmers Branch Police Department hypnotized that witness during […]

The post Texas’ Top Criminal Court Has Stymied the State’s ‘Junk Science’ Law. Will SCOTUS Intervene? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

As President Donald Trump’s second administration rushes to wall off the Texas border, landowners along the Rio Grande are being pushed to let construction begin on their property before the federal government purchases or condemns it. Owners of real estate on the border are receiving letters from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) offering a […]

The post Trump’s New Tool to Speed Up Wall Construction May Be a Trap for Texas Landowners appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Fine thread nearly invisible in the early lightkept getting caught again and again in our mouths.We gave up after walking through the fourth web,turned around, and saved the outing for some other day. We crossed back over the river that by nowHad been getting lower and lower, nearly dried out—a coyote crossed with ease toward […]

The post LATE SPRING ENDING WITH LUNAR ECLIPSE appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Curtis Riser had some concerns about the problem of wrongful convictions. He wasn’t the only potential juror to raise this point ahead of the 2009 capital murder trial of James Broadnax, in which the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office was seeking death, but attorneys for the state used one of their limited peremptory strikes to […]

The post A Looming Execution Raises Questions of Race, Responsibility, and Rap appeared first on The Texas Observer.

“What’s in the water?” state Representative Erin Zwiener asked when talking to the developers of a proposed data center in her district, which covers most of fast-growing Hays County, south of Austin. “There are additives to try to help the water be more efficient with cooling, and I couldn’t get a straight answer. I asked, […]

The post When the AI Cloud Comes for Texas Water appeared first on The Texas Observer.

My grandmother sent me a photo last week. In it, a white candle burns inside a metal bucket. Balanced on the bucket’s rim are the cast-iron grates from the gas stove—the stove that no longer has gas. And, on top of the grates, sits the coffee maker. The idea is that the candle’s small, dying […]

The post Making Coffee with a Candle—and Other Notes from a Cuba Gone Dark appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Victoria Hernandez, 23, was brought into work at the Blanco Road San Antonio Starbucks location in August 2025.  She’d begun working for the company at 17, while still in high school, dutifully weathering the often thankless rush of caffeine-seeking customers for just $10 an hour—even throughout COVID. Soon, Hernandez was helping the $115-billion company open […]

The post As Contract Negotiations Drag On, Texas Starbucks Workers Have Learned the Power of Organizing appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The post Off the Charts appeared first on The Texas Observer.

It’s the day after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive her lawsuit against the local officials who orchestrated her arrest nearly a decade ago, and Laredo citizen-journalist Priscilla Villarreal is on Facebook Live to deliver a much-awaited statement. For several minutes, viewers are treated to little more than the radio playing in the background […]

The post ‘La Gordiloca’ Lost at the Supreme Court but Won in Laredo appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Houston ISD pays its state-appointed superintendent, Mike Miles, a base salary of $462,000, and the district also gave him a bonus of $173,660 approved by its state-appointed board in September. Yet, all along, the leader of Texas’ largest school district has also been moonlighting—earning another $190,000 over the past three years, according to receipts obtained by […]

The post Mike Miles Cancels Moonlighting Contract with His Former Charter School Network appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Last month, Meenu Batra, 53, who has lived in the South Texas border colonia of Laguna Heights since 2002, was on her way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to work another case. She’s been a court interpreter for over 20 years, the only one licensed in Texas for Hindi, Punjabi, or Urdu. Her language skills are requested […]

The post Longtime Immigration Court Interpreter Arrested by ICE at South Texas Airport appeared first on The Texas Observer.

If you have driven anywhere in the city of Denton over the past few years, you have noticed it. Orange barrels. Lane closures. Freshly churned earth where sidewalks used to be. Here is my opinion, formed by watching this city tear itself apart and rebuild wider: we are committing more than $1 billion to projects […]

The post Denton Promised Net Zero. Then It Kept Building Roads. appeared first on The Texas Observer.