Donald Trump and maga Republicans in Texas ignoring the voters with an aggressive political redstricting take over

Texas Representative Ann Johnson: Why I joined fellow Democrats in breaking quorum in the Texas legislature.

Opinion published in the Houston Chronicle:

The Texas Constitution says we draw political maps once every 10 years — after the census, during a regular session. We did that in 2021.

So why are we back in a summer special session, redrawing the congressional map again❓ (Especially when the state of Texas is mourning the disasterous 135 deaths by drowning, resulting from flash flooding in Kerr County and Hill Country!)

Because Republicans want to give Donald Trump five more seats in Congress. That’s it. This isn’t about policy or population growth — it’s about rigging the game while it’s being played.

Let’s be clear: Breaking quorum isn’t abandonment. Leaving the state — and thus depriving the House of the two-thirds quorum required for voting — is the only tool left to stop this assault on democracy. It’s not easy. It’s not fun. But I’ll take the heat from the governor and political opponents to protect the people I represent.

Because this map targets Houston — the most diverse, most populous city in Texas. It collapses historic Black and brown districts into one another. The 29th District, long rooted in East Houston’s Latino community, would no longer be a Hispanic district. This is surgical segregation: a deliberate attempt to divide neighborhoods, disempower communities of color and silence voters in one of the most racially dynamic cities in America.

The impact will endure, locking in diminished influence and making it harder for these communities to elect leaders who truly reflect their priorities.

I represent Southwest Houston. I know what abandonment looks like. It looks like leaders flying to Cancun in a storm. It looks like refusing to raise the age on assault weapons after the Uvalde massacre. It looks like draining public schools to fund private-school vouchers. 

That’s real abandonment❗

Breaking quorum is stepping between my constituents and harm. I did it in 2021; it was one of the hardest things I’ve done in public service. But some fights are worth it.

This special session includes 18 agenda items. After two weeks, the only thing moving is redistricting. There’s no flood relief bill. No real effort. If the governor wanted to help flood survivors, he could release the funds today. He’s choosing not to.

Some say we should just play harder under the current rules. But this isn’t the game. This is them moving the goalposts, redrawing the field and removing the referee.

And let’s be honest: If Democrats tried to redraw maps mid-decade, Republicans would break quorum too.

Redistricting is different from any other bill. Once it passes, it locks in political power for years to come. That’s why the Texas Constitution determines when we redraw the maps: Once a decade, and after each census. Changing the rules mid-cycle isn’t democracy — it’s cheating.

Democracy isn’t always convenient. But it’s sacred. And when those in power abuse it, we have a duty to resist.

Breaking quorum won’t stop Gov. Greg Abbott forever. But success isn’t just about stopping the bill. It’s also about showing that we stood up.

Because when the other team is on your one-yard line, you don’t just surrender.

You fight. Every down. Every time.And I won’t be complicit in this assault on our democracy, not in the state I love.

Ann Johnson is a three-term Texas state representative serving central and southwest Houston.

Aug 4, 2025
From Rep. Ann Johnson

Double Horror: Migrants illegally hunted like animals by ICE and exploited by people who take advantage of them

NEW BEDFORD, Massachusetts opinion published in the Boston Globe by Marcela Garcia:

New Bedford reels from ICE crackdown

Adrian Ventura sees federal immigration agents hanging around Acushnet Avenue, the heart of New Bedford’s Latino and Spanish-speaking community, almost every day — always in dark, unmarked SUVs with tinted windows.

Ventura, a former undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who now leads New Bedford’s Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, a labor advocacy group, said it seems like the city has been singled out for aggressive enforcement under the Trump administration.

“We haven’t seen the same type of enforcement activity in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance,” Ventura told me in Spanish.

Ventura said he’s even witnessed the agents parked in front of St. Anthony of Padua, the Roman Catholic church on Acushnet.

The federal presence has cast a chill on the avenue, which is lined with check cashing stores and establishments with Spanish names adorned with Guatemalan and Honduran flags selling tortillas and other Latino foods.

While there is no up-to-date official count, Ventura told me that his organization has recorded 27 immigration-related arrests in New Bedford since the new administration took office on Jan. 20. “There has to be more, those are only the arrests we know of.”

While there is no up-to-date official count, Ventura told me that his organization has recorded 27 immigration-related arrests in New Bedford since the new administration took office on Jan. 20. “There has to be more, those are only the arrests we know of.”

“We’re very stressed out,” he said.

Last month, the wider public caught a glimpse of the atmosphere in the port city, where roughly 20,000 residents, or 1 in 5, are foreign born.

In a jarring video that went viral, heavily armed, unidentified federal agents surround a car they had just pulled over on a quiet New Bedford street. Inside, Juan Francisco Mendez, a 29-year-old Guatemalan father, sat with his wife, calmly telling the men outside that his lawyer was on the way.

Moments later, one agent retrieved an axe-like tool and shattered the rear window; glass exploded everywhere and Mendez was pulled from the car and arrested. The whole time his wife had been filming the incident, her voice trembling.

Mendez did not have a criminal record and appeared to be in the country legally. Last week, a judge ordered him released.

But the footage has become a visceral symbol of what many advocates believe is a campaign of intimidation targeting New Bedford’s immigrants, especially the roughly 10,000 people who lack work authorization. They now have to weigh the risks of their every move.

Ventura is worried the workplace raids, much like the notorious 2007 operation at the Michael Bianco Inc. textile factory, could be next. That raid resulted in the arrest of 361 undocumented immigrants.

There’s a more subtle impact of the federal crackdown: It may lead to more wage theft and harassment because victims will probably be too scared to come forward.

It’s a well-documented issue: Unauthorized workers fuel New Bedford’s fishing industry, the city’s major economic engine. It’s often referred to as the country’s most lucrative fishing port based on the market value of its product.

The industry has also been a hotspot for labor violations, as reported by my Globe colleague Katie Johnston, who found in 2023, that migrant children were working grueling shifts in the city’s fish plants. Many used fake IDs to secure jobs through staffing agencies, while employers and agencies evaded responsibility, citing difficulties in verifying age and identity.

Ventura is now working on a wage-theft complaint he received from Mariana, a Guatemalan unauthorized immigrant who lives in Providence. Mariana is an alias; she agreed to talk to me if I didn’t use her real name because she is afraid of the repercussions of going public.

Mariana just turned 18 last month but has been working full time at a seafood-processing plant in New Bedford for more than a year. She does everything: cleaning fish, packing boxes, labeling product. Mariana told me that she got the job through a staffing agency. She works varying hours every week — sometimes it’s 8-hour days, sometimes 11-hour days — but, on average, the weekly check she gets from the agency is in the $500-$600 range.

But out of that check, she has to pay around $160 “to the boss who gives us a ride every week,” she told me in Spanish. That would be a third-party transportation provider, a Guatemalan man who provides roundtrip transportation for the workers — around 15 to 18 people each ride — from Providence to New Bedford, she said.

“It’s not fair. He tells us, ‘if you don’t pay, there is no job.’ People are afraid of speaking up. They don’t want to lose their jobs,” Mariana said. Or worse — they don’t want to be reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and be arrested.

She’s always afraid during the 40-minute ride in the van “because we can be stopped at any moment” by federal immigration authorities.

On Sunday — Mother’s Day — Acushnet Avenue looked a little deserted, with only a few families venturing out to celebrate with their mothers in the area’s restaurants. 

A grocery store was pretty much empty, an employee telling me that there would normally be a line at the register. A flier from a local advocacy group posted by the cash register advertised services to immigrants: Call us and we’ll shop for you; need to cash a check? We’ll do it for you.

The chill in the air may be the whole point of Trump’s crackdown. But the real winners will be exploitative employers, unscrupulous staffing agencies, and everyone else who stands to profit when immigrants recede back into the shadows. 😞😟😢

Marcela García is a Boston Globe columnist.

In support of Hispanic workers that create secure American standards of living

Echo Opinion: Latino workers are erased from a picture-perfect white world they help.  Published in the Los Angeles Times by Héctor Tobar.

"I see a pickup truck with scratched skin and garden rakes and shovels arranged in the back, and then another pickup, spick-and-span with a logo sticker on the door that announces the presence of a team of construction workers employed by a family-run business with a Spanish surname." 

The self-image of the “white” American middle class, as depicted in film and on television ad nauseam, begins with a block of large, orderly homes with big lawns. The kind you might see decorated with plastic reindeer at Christmastime, holiday lights dangling from the pitched roofs. Or the curving suburban tract of an early Spielberg drama, with cul-de-sacs and boys pumping the pedals on their bicycles to go faster. When the movie camera enters into the homes themselves, we see carpeted spaces, and polished dining-room tables, and mom at work in the kitchen in heels and an apron.

When I wander into these neighborhoods in real life, they do, in fact, have the otherworldly feel of a movie set. In the class structure of this country, the role of Latino people is to build the movie set of white perfection again and again.

"...we know that, as a collectivity, as a class of people, we are irreplaceable".

There are the sculpted bushes and trees you see in the most affluent corners of Southern California and southern Connecticut. The newly painted wood of a ranch-style home in tonier neighborhoods of suburban Arizona; the windows freshly washed, reflecting back mirror images of trimmed oaks and maples in greater Denver. I am taken in by the constructed perfection, disposable incomes spent creating scenic paintings in three dimensions. The magic here is that it all seems effortless. 

No one is sweating in these neighborhoods, unless they’re in jogging clothes, working out to make their bodies as taut and chiseled as the landscape around them.

Finally, I turn a corner, and I see a pickup truck with scratched skin and garden rakes and shovels arranged in the back, and then another pickup, spick-and-span with a logo sticker on the door that announces the presence of a team of construction workers employed by a family-run business with a Spanish surname. 

Or, a landscaping business named for a state or city in Mexico. I see a woman of Indigenous features, with weary eyes, walking down the street in her everyday work clothes, headed to the bus stop, and I can feel the clean kitchen counters and the scrubbed faces of the white girls and boys she’s left in her wake.

At the end of the day, the pickups and the maids file out, taking their Mexican and Central American and Caribbean and South American bodies out of these places, and the fleets of bloated SUVvehicles file in, bringing in the lords of these magnificent properties.

We see our mothers and fathers head out each morning to perform this work, when night is still darkening the dawn sky. The effort of erasing Latino labor from the self-image of the middle and upper classes subtracts from the United States’ knowledge of itself, placing affluent American families in a kind of dream-space untethered from grim and unpleasant socioeconomic realities. The Spanish-speaking help appears only fleetingly in their family photographs, if at all. The public image of the privileged is an illusion of affluence and control, and mastery of their surroundings. They would have us believe they summon the gleam and order of their gated communities and suburban “estates” with a mere snap of their fingers, a wink of their eye, like the famous, benevolent blonde witch of a bygone television sitcom.

Every day, Latino people help create the illusion of the effortlessness of pampered whiteness. We are very much conscious of ourselves in this role. It shapes our self-image.

I’ve seen a meme with a photograph of a group of Latino gardeners attacking a leaf-covered street with leaf blowers: the caption declares, “let me sing you the song of my people.” We Latino laborers drive and walk away from the perfect suburban neighborhood at the end of the workday with a sense of satisfaction.

Many of us have seen these spacious structures rise from empty lots thanks to our own labor with hammers and saws. But white people quickly forget our brown presence (unless we’ve broken a dish or mangled the tricky business of trimming the lawn). They internalize the sense of achievement that comes from the labor we’ve performed to create spaces that are uncluttered, polished, vacuumed.

But we live with the knowledge of a powerful truth: work and muscle are the basis of everything. We know where the beams are inside the walls; we have wiped the soiled face of a stranger’s bright child in our care, and heard her speak her first word. We’ve stood on the roof and seen and repaired the cracked asphalt tiles that keep the family inside dry and warm.

Whereas the people who employ us enter their perfect, mortgaged spaces and practice an act of self-delusion every day; because in erasing us from their minds they deny how interdependent we are. As individuals, we are disposable to them; but we know that, as a collectivity, as a class of people, we are irreplaceable.

Without us, without the labor of people of color, without our farmworkers and our mechanics, the citizens of the United States would wallow in their own filth and their cars would not run and their toilets would not flush. We, as “darker” people, as outsiders and newcomers, are forced to study white people, as people of color have since the idea of whiteness and color were invented.

Héctor Tobar is a professor at UC Irvine. This essay was adapted from his forthcoming book, “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino.’”

Mario Garcia Sierra: ICE creates panic instead of keeping the peace in Wisconsin

An echo opinion published in the Wisconsin State Journal newspaper:

When we leave our loved ones in the morning, we expect to come home to them at night. This is particularly true for children. This unspoken truth is the foundation of safety and security.

That foundation was shaky for Wisconsin immigrant families during four tense days in September, 2018, when armed federal agents conducted an unannounced operation. They detained 83 Wisconsin residents, including 20 in Dane County. Only 44 had criminal convictions. Other residents were detained for offenses that posed no danger to public safety, including those whose offense is a byproduct of our broken immigration system.

Some children came home to find a loved one was gone. Some children witnessed their loved ones taken from their homes by federal agents. Some children had opened the door to agents, unaware of how their world was about to change.

The agency responsible is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), formed after 9/11 to protect national security. ICE previously has taken actions to arrest criminals in the Madison area, following the agreed-on protocol for advance notice to local law enforcement. This step was designed to keep communication lines open and the community safer. In September, ICE did not follow protocol with the Madison Police Department, which includes a call to a specific number staffed 24/7 by a ranking member of the force.

Instead of keeping the peace, ICE created panic. Instead of protecting the most vulnerable, ICE traumatized children. Instead of sharing information with local law enforcement, ICE worked in secret.

As a result, parents were afraid to take their children to school, to go to work or even go to the grocery store. While parents remained strong for their children, and while Centro Hispano staff and allies rallied in support, no one should have to live in fear of federal agents summarily tearing their family apart.

No parent should have to teach a child what to do if they suddenly disappear.

Instead of threatening hard-working families who contribute so much to communities across the United States and right here in Wisconsin, let’s support fixing our broken immigration system.

Garcia Sierra is president of the Centro Hispano of Dane County, Wisconsin, Board of Directors. The rest of the board signed on in support of this column: www.micentro.org.

Dane County Wisconsin will be a community where Latino families can aspire upward, to reach their personal goals and dreams because they feel engaged and strengthened with the tools for success.