Editor’s Note: This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Amid the widespread destruction, brutal heat, heavy rains, and ongoing outages along the Gulf coast, relief organizations are…
Houston Independent School District (HISD) Superintendent Mike Miles claims to be a financial wizard. But controversy has followed the former military man-turned-school administrator to nearly every Texas school district he’s served. In…
Update: On July 16, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Ruben Gutierrez a stay of execution just 20 minutes before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection. The stay gives the high court time to decide whether to take up Gutierrez’s case to…
Frank Pinkard stood before six legislators from the Texas Penitentiary Investigating Committee at the Clemens State Prison Farm in Brazoria County, revealing scars left from 39 lashes. Even after a year and a half, the braided rivulets ran…
When Hurricane Beryl entered the Gulf of Mexico, the city of Houston had little reason to believe it was about to take its first direct hit from a tropical cyclone in decades. Initial forecasts predicted the storm would make landfall in…
Petra Molnar is an anthropologist and attorney focused on human rights and migration. Molnar, who is based in Toronto, serves as the associate director of York University’s Refugee Law Lab and as a faculty associate at Harvard University’s…
Editor’s Note: This story, co-published here with permission, was produced by Public Health Watch, a nonprofit investigative news organization. The announcement last month from Texas Governor Greg Abbott was easy to overlook. The governor,…
Following the lead of the Texas National Guard, the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office is buying pepper ball and tear gas launcher rifles to potentially use against migrants to prevent them from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. At a county…
Editor’s Note: This story—produced in collaboration between palabra, a multimedia initiative of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the Texas Observer—was translated from Spanish by Lygia Navarro. I met Coyote 1 outside…
Michael Garrett had been incarcerated since 1994 and had suffered nightly, unable to get any real rest for nearly 20 years before he decided to sue the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). He told his mother he was going to change…
Republican state Representative Bryan Hughes’ bid to oust House Speaker Joe Straus back in 2012 was hampered by a glaring flaw. He was a trial lawyer. With a lot of campaign money from other wealthy trial lawyers. Even for the East Texas…
As I write, the temperature outside is 91 degrees Fahrenheit, nowhere near the worst to be expected this summer. According to data from the Climate Impact Lab, there is now an average of 105 days at or above 90 degrees in Arlington,…
Texas Observer readers, One challenge of practicing journalism over the long haul is the feeling you get when—despite all the bombshell investigations, the longform humanizing features, the television exposés, the biting commentaries, and…
In the over three years since Winter Storm Uri, there’s been far more attention paid to and media coverage of Texas’ oft-precarious electric grid. Highly contentious debates have raged around how to regulate power generators, address…
Back in her hometown in the state of Portuguesa, Venezuela, Magnaly Márquez had to make a choice: Buy her 3-year-old son a pair of shoes, or pizza. She didn’t have enough money for both—despite having studied business administration,…
On April 19, Governor Greg Abbott spoke at the Young Conservatives of Texas gala at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, voicing an opinion that would later become enshrined in the Texas Republican Party platform and spreading misinformation…
Earlier this month, a bombshell report from the religious watchdog group Wartburg Watch roiled one of the largest megachurches in Texas. Robert Morris, the founder and pastor of the influential Southlake-based Gateway Church, had in the…
On June 2, Claudia Sheinbaum from the governing Morena Party won Mexico’s presidential election in a landslide, setting her up to become the country’s first woman president in October. A former mayor of Mexico City and an engineer, her…
Update: The State of Texas executed Ramiro Gonzales by lethal injection on June 26. The State of Texas plans to execute 41-year-old Ramiro Gonzales next Wednesday, June 26. Not for the first time, his lawyers are pleading with Governor…
Suzette Baker, from unincorporated Kingsland, Texas was feted recently by The Authors Guild in New York City as a “Champion of Writers”– the first-ever recipient of a national award established to honor librarians who fight book bans. In…
Around Galveston, Sam Collins III is better known as Professor Juneteenth. For the past 20 years, Collins, 54, has devoted his life to educating the public about Juneteenth—the commemoration of June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon…
For over a year, employees of the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) have been subject to a dress code that is transphobic and potentially illegal. The policy has caused turmoil within the agency, emails obtained by the Texas Observer…
I was 19 and attending a Spanish study abroad program in Madrid through the University of Houston, when a stranger approached. I’d been at a restaurant with a large group of friends and acquaintances whining about not being able to call my…
Editor’s Note: This story was produced by the students at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, an initiative of the Scripps Howard Fund in…
“Can you take us in your car to the next gate?” the group of migrants asked. I was in Ciudad Juárez, along the U.S.-Mexico border, with another doctor and members of my organization, Hope Border Institute. It was early May, and we were…
A former legislator who chaired a powerful state House committee is under investigation by the Texas Ethics Commission (TEC) for his alleged violations of a Texas revolving-door law that restricts lawmakers from leaving office to become…
Writer, director, and actor Jake Allyn grew up in Dallas, a city whose professional football team (as well as my nearby high school) proudly flies the banner of the cowboy, one of the most enduring, and caricatured, symbols of Texas…
On February 23, 2001, professor Thomas Guderjan accompanied other Texas Christian University (TCU) researchers and a librarian to the locked door of storage room L10C in the basement of the Mary Couts Burnett Library. The group intended to…
This article was originally published by Deceleration, a nonprofit environmental justice newsroom based in San Antonio, Texas During the seemingly endless slog that is summer in South Texas, the smell of cayenne pepper from the La Fiesta…
Originally published by Houston Landing; republished with permission. JUÁREZ – Dayana staked out a spot in the shade at marker 36 along the Juárez border Tuesday afternoon to try to cross into the U.S. for the fourth time in 24 hours. The…