Texas Republicans supported by Donald Trump own the terrible disasterous drownings caused by inadequate warning systems

Texas Hill Country floods: Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster warning systems this year.

Echo report published in the Texas Tribune:

A GOP state lawmaker who represents Kerr County says he likely would vote differently now on House Bill 13, which would have established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure.
Echo reporting by Terri Langford and Carlos Nogueras Ramos

For the last three days, state Representative Wes Virdell is out with first responders in Kerr County, as they search for victims and survivors from the devastating floods that swept through Central Texas early Friday morning on July 4th, 2025.

“All the focus right now is let’s save all the lives we can,” Virdell, who was still on the scene in Kerrville, told The Texas Tribune on Sunday.  (As of July 10, 2025, there are 120 confirmed deaths with about 170 people who are still missing.  No survivors have been found since the floods devastated the Guadalupe River on July 4, 2025.)

Virdell’s closeup view of the havoc wreaked on his district has made a lasting impression, he said, and left him reconsidering a vote he made just a few months ago against a bill that would have established a statewide plan to improve Texas’ disaster response, including better alert systems, along with a grant program for counties to buy new emergency communication equipment and build new infrastructure like radio towers.

“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” said Virdell, a freshman GOP lawmaker from Brady.

The measure, House Bill 13, would have created a new government council to establish the emergency response plan and administer the grant program, both of which would have been aimed at facilitating better communication between first responders. The bill also called for the plan to include “the use of outdoor warning sirens,” like those used in tornado-prone Texas counties, and develop new “emergency alert systems.”

Authored by Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian (a city in Texas), the legislation was inspired by last year’s devastating wildfires in the Panhandle, where more than 1 million acres burned — including part of King’s property — and three people died. The bill failed in the Texas Senate, prompting newfound questions about whether lawmakers should have done more to help rural, cash-strapped counties stave off the deadly effects of future natural disasters.

As of Monday morning, at least 90 people had died in the floods. Of those, 75 were in Kerr County, many of them camping or attending a private summer camp along the Guadalupe River. (This number increases daily with about 170 people still missing.)

Virdell, a Hill Country native who lives about 100 miles away, made his way to Kerrville early Friday after seeing news that rains raised the Guadalupe more than two feet, swamping its banks in Hunt and other river communities that host thousands of holiday vacationers.

(Hmmmm❓ if an alarm system was in place, the sad news about the lack of alert would be less of an issue and Governor Greg Abbott would not have to use a ludicrous "football" analogy to deflect blame from his imcompetent administration.) New reported money for upgrades to flash flooding alerts was diverted to continue building an ugly border wall.  In fact, that stupid border wall will fall just like every other wall in history has fallen or deteriorated.  But, the over 119 lives lost by drowning in the Texas Kerr County flash floods will never be forgotten. Therefore, this is a stupid response, to stress that an alarm system may not have helped much in this instance because the floodwaters came so quickly. Between 2 and 7 a.m., the Guadalupe River in Kerrville rose from 1 to more than 34 feet in height, according to a flood gauge in the area. (HELLO❓ Campers were asleep....like SLEEPING❗ A siren would have awakened them.)

“I don't think there was enough evidence (ahhhh??? in "flash flood alley"❓ to even suspect something like this was going to happen,” he said. ”I think even if you had a warning system there, this came in so fast and early in the morning it's very unlikely the warning system would have had much effect.”  (IOW preventable dseatsh by drownings and denialism❗)

Virdell said he doesn’t recall the specifics of the bill or why he opposed it, though he guessed ”it had to do with how much funding” was tied to the measure.

Even if it had passed, it would not have gone into effect until Sept. 1, after the Hill Country flooding.

The bill’s initial $500 million cost drew heavy criticism from fellow Republicans including state Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington.

“This shouldn't be about anything other than the fact that it's a half a billion dollars,” Tinderholt, a hardline conservative and budget hawk, said during the April 1 House floor debate. “This is probably one of the most simple votes we should be able to take today. It's that this interoperability council is going to spend money to try and get these departments to be able to talk together.”❗

Steven Aranyi, a spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, noted that lawmakers — including the Texas Senate, which Patrick oversees — made several “unprecedented” investments in disaster response during this year’s legislative session, totaling $547 million. That included:$257 million for disaster response aircraft,
$135 million for regional operation facilities,
$90 million to provide ambulances to rural counties,
$65 million for emergency response drone technology.

The flaw with HB 13, Aranyi said, was that it proposed rolling out the local grant money over an estimated timeline of up to 10 years.

Texas Governor Abbott is a Roman Catholic who is treating innocent migrants like they are animals in cages

Echo report published in The Independent, by Josh Marcus.

Buoys, razor wire, and a Trump-y wall: How Greg Abbott turned the Rio Grande into an immigration ‘war zone’.  Texas governor has funnelled $12bn into a military-style border buildup with floating walls and razor wire. 

Josh Marcus speaks with a local business owner and lifelong riverman who’s suing the state to stop it.

He may be suing the governor of Texas, but Jessie Fuentes isn’t really a political guy. His disagreement with Greg Abbott is personal. Continental, in a sense. Spiritual even.

Immigrants in the Rio Grande

On 7 July, Mr Fuentes, who owns a small kayaking business, sued the state for its decision to install a 1,000-foot buoy wall in the town of Eagle Pass, within a stretch of the Rio Grande river.

In Texas, the river forms the legal border between the US and Mexico. More than just a legal argument that a state politician doesn’t have jurisdiction over an international borderline, Mr Fuentes, who grew up along the Rio Grande, feels that Abbott has crossed a moral line. The governor, he says, is violating a river that nourishes ecosystems, people, and a vibrant trans-border culture that’s existed far longer and far more freely than the rolls of razor wire multiplying across the banks suggest.

“I’m not a politician. I just say listen, I love that river. Nobody speaks up for it. I’m speaking up for the river. Man, I have the right to try to prosper from my love of the river, that allows me the opportunity to get out there, to bring people to the river,” he told The Independent.

“They don’t live here. I do,” he added of Texas’s state leaders. “You’ve taken a beautiful waterway and you’ve converted it into a war zone.”

Mr Fuentes is part of a group of local residents, human rights activists, and international officials who are pushing back on the floating barrier project. They face challenging waters ahead, though.

Governor Abbott's evil floating border wall in the Rio Grande River

Governor Abbott is a shrewd operator. He has combined media savvy and audacious use of government funds and powers to secure billions of dollars and heaps of political capital for his notion of a military-style crackdown at the border. 

Abbott charged ahead with little resistance, even though governors and presidents have spent decades taking this iron-fisted approach with little empirical success to show for it.

In mid-July, state contractors were nearly complete installing the floating border barrier, a $1m, 1,000-foot pearl string of giant orange buoys with strong netting in between, anchored to the river floor.

Discussing the plan in June, Mr Abbott described the floating wall as a key part of his larger buildup at the border, which has featured mass deployment of as many as 10,000 state troopers and national guardsmen at a time, as well as razor wire and sections of a new border wall on private lands.

"When we’re dealing with 100 or 1,000 people, one of the goals is to slow down and deter as many of them as possible," said Abbott, on 8 June. "Some may eventually get to the border where they are going to face that multilayered razor wire and a full force of National Guard and DPS [Department of Public Safety] officers."

An estimated 250 people died crossing the Rio Grande last year, but Texas officials have nonetheless claimed that installing what amounts to a giant net in the river will “prevent the loss of life due to drownings.”

The barrier technology, like much of Abbott’s border agenda, is a retrofitted version of what the Trump administration was pursuing. 

In 2020, the Border Patrol advertised on Twitter, then quickly deleted, a post showing a demo of a floating barrier system from the same company that built Mr Abbott’s wall, Cochrane USA, only the Trump version had large black spikes that wouldn’t look out of place in a dungeon.

The Texas buoy plan dropped the spikes but kept the same controversy that Trump’s attempts to seal off the border attracted.

Last week, Mexico’s diplomat said the barrier plan may violate international treaties over the Rio Grande-based border, and said she will send an inspection team to investigate the buoy wall.

Migrant advocates say the buoys, like generations of border installations before them, won’t actually slow down immigration, but rather will push migrants towards ever more remote places to cross the border, increasing the likelihood they will face a perilous and potentially lethal crossing.

This strategy, known as “prevention through deterrence” has more or less been the explicit policy of the US government since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, a policy choice many on the ground say is causing unnecessary deaths.

“It’s been proven time after time that these so-called prevention through deterrence strategies don’t work,” Fernando García of the Border Network for Human Rights told The Independent. “They have not stopped immigration flows, but what they have done is they have put immigrants at risk.”

“It’s very likely that with [the floating buoy wall] they are looking for more remote and isolated places to come across so that whenever they are in danger by heat exhaustion, by drowning, they will not have anybody to help them,” he added, saying he worries it could be a record year for migrant deaths in the Rio Grande.

“All of this is death by policy.” 😈

According to leaks from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state’s border scheme, this policy includes intentionally putting migrants into harm’s way.

In a series of emails shared with news outlets including The Independent, a border medic described questioning orders from superiors to push exhausted migrants back into the river and to refrain from giving them water if captured.

“We were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning,” the trooper wrote.

The DPS source also claimed in the span of one week in late June, a teen mother was trapped in razor wire at the border while having a miscarriage, a 15-year-old broke his leg as he tried to find a way around the deterrence buoys, and a man lacerated his leg while trying to rescue his child from razor wire placed on a buoy.

Texas officials have defended the use of the razor wire while denying reports troopers were told to push people into the river.

“The Texas National Guard mission is to work alongside our Texas law enforcement partners to prevent, deter and interdict transnational criminal activity between ports of entry,” the Texas Military Department told The Independent in response to news about the emails. “There is no order or directive instructing Service Members to push illegal immigrants back into the river or deny them drinking water.”

“Texas is deploying every tool and strategy to deter and repel illegal crossings between ports of entry as President Biden’s dangerous open border policies entice migrants from over 150 countries to risk their lives entering the country illegally,” a spokesperson for the governor told The Independent earlier this week.

The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to requests for comment on this story from The Independent.

Beyond just putting migrants at risk, the border barriers are cutting into the deep cross-border cultural ties in the region, residents said.

Mr Fuentes, the business owner suing the state, said the locked-down border is only a recent historical development. His grandfather used to be able to casually ride into Mexico on a donkey to get supplies. He says that Texas politicians fomenting fear about immigration miss the fact that many who live along the US-Mexico border don’t feel the same way. The walls aren’t stopping some hypothetical invasion of immigrants. They’re dividing a community that’s older and bigger than boundaries on a map.

“That’s the beautiful thing about America,” he said. “We’ve got our culture on the border. The way it’s being misinterpreted right now, them saying we’re a war zone, things are out of control. We’re not that. We’re a community on the river. We get along with our neighbours.”

“I don’t think we’re under siege from an inflow of immigrants,” he added. “We’re under siege by law enforcement.”

When Mr Fuentes encounters migrants on the river, he offers them a blessing and any spare water if it he has it.

You wouldn’t know about these sorts of ties by watching the governor on TV. The Fox News regular frequently describes the situation in places like Eagle Pass as an “invasion” of drug-pushing cartel members, though drugs like fentanyl are overwhelmingly brought across the border by US citizens at official points of entry.

It’s not an accidental choice of words calling the situation an “invasion.” In November, the governor invoked a clause in the US Constitution allowing states to take military actions if they are under “invasion” to defend his policies, a theory legal scholars and critics say is both nonapplicable to immigration and an echo of the white-supremacist rhetoric that fueled incidents like the 2019 El Paso shooting, where 23 mostly Latino people were killed.

It may not be legally bulletproof, but it’s another savvy move from Abbott, (who is supposed to be a Roman Catholic!) who has proved (ambitiously) adept at using crises in recent years to further his border agenda.

The governor declared a state disaster at the US-Mexico border in 2021, freeing him up to use additional emergency powers, and used creative accounting to funnel an estimated $1bn in federal Covid relief funds to Operation Lone Star, the umbrella plan Mr Abbott has used to send troopers to the border and bus thousands of migrants out of Texas to liberal states.

Despite massive investments from the state and the federal government over decades from leaders of both parties, immigration levels at the US-Mexico border in late 2022 and 2023 are about the same as they were during their previous most recent peak around the year 2000.

A spokesperson for the governor’s office declined to answer specific questions from The Independent about the floating border barrier, and criticisms that it’s illegal and dangerous for migrants.

The governor’s office said Operation Lone Star had led to the apprehension of more than 393,000 unauthorised immigrants and the repelling of more than 49,000 illegal immigrants, as well as over 31,000 arrests, “all of which would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and our country thanks to President Biden’s open border policies,” according to spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris.

The Department of Justice is investigating Operation Lone Star for alleged civil rights abuses. Immigration is a concern of federal law, but thousands of immigrants have been arrested by state personnel for trespassing on private property, allegedly being held in jail for weeks without facing charges.

According to an investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and The Marshall Project, state officials were arresting far more trespassers than cartel members, and allegedly inflated data on Operation Lone Star by citing arrests on crimes like cockfighting, sexual assault, and stalking in their success statistics, even though these offences had no clear link to immigration enforcement.

Everything in Texas appears to be extreme: Excessive heat, political extremism and gun violence

Why would anybody want to live or remain in Texas?

Echo report published in the Texas Tribune by Yuriko Schumacher, Alex Ford and Erin Douglas:

Record-breaking heat is becoming the new normal in Texas, an analysis of temperature data by The Texas Tribune shows, as climate change steadily warms the planet and shifts the range of typical temperatures higher.

A dust storm blows over cotton fields ahead of a late-summer thunderstorm in Terry County in August 2022. A Texas Tribune analysis shows that extreme heat is becoming more common across Texas due to climate change, but the effects aren’t felt the same everywhere. Credit: Justin Rex for The Texas Tribune

Some parts of Texas are seeing bigger temperature increases

A dangerous heat wave this month has brought three weeks of 100-degree temperatures from the state’s border with Mexico all the way to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The heat wave has shattered records and prompted excessive heat warnings across most of the state.

Such heat waves — and the record-breaking temperatures they bring — are becoming more common and severe due to climate change, scientists told the Tribune.

Over the last 10 years, there were more than 1,600 days when a heat record was matched or broken at one of 22 weather stations across Texas. That’s more than 1,000 more record-breaking days than the 561-day average at those stations in the decades prior to 2013, the Tribune’s analysis found.

Weather data shows that record-breaking cold is occurring less frequently.

Texas is burning up!

Those trends are being driven by climate change, experts said, as the planet warms due to decades of human activities that have pumped huge quantities of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere peaked at 424 parts per million in May, continuing to reach levels that have not been recorded for millions of years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Heat is one of the deadliest consequences of climate change. It’s already the most dangerous type of weather, typically killing more people annually than hurricanes, tornadoes or flooding. A Tribune analysis found that more than 275 people in Texas died from heat-related illness last year, a two-decade high that experts say is almost certainly an undercount.

Heat waves “are so large, they impact a huge swath of area, and they persist for so long,” said Hosmay Lopez, an oceanographer at the NOAA who has studied heat waves. “Heat has so [many] compounding negative effects on human health.”

Extreme heat is presenting new challenges for communities across the state that rely on infrastructure built for a climate of the past.

James Doss-Gollin, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University who has researched adaptation to extreme weather, said the state’s electric grid and dams are two examples of infrastructure that are greatly impacted by increasing temperatures. Just a few degrees of difference, he said, can jeopardize the availability of electricity and the structural integrity of dams.

The grid, for example, is stressed by higher demand when extreme heat causes more people to crank up their air conditioning. At the same time, when high temperatures arrive earlier in the spring and last later into the fall, power plants have smaller and smaller windows to make routine repairs.

“We have a lot of infrastructure that’s very, very sensitive to small changes in the underlying climate,” Doss-Gollin said.

Many dams are small, are privately owned and were built decades ago, when extreme rainfall events like the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 — which dumped as much as 50 inches of rain on some parts of the Gulf Coast over five days — were much less common.

“You don’t know what sort of conditions it’s designed for,” Doss-Gollin said. “It’s a huge challenge.”

But extreme heat isn’t impacting every part of Texas the same. While every county in Texas has seen an average increase in temperatures over the last decade, three areas of the state have seen the biggest jumps in record-breaking temperatures: West Texas, the Panhandle, and the Gulf.

Amarillo, for example, had 100 days of record-setting heat between 2013 and 2022 — the most recent 10 years for which data is available. That’s more than four times the number of record heat days expected for an average decade in Amarillo prior to 2013, according to the Tribune’s analysis.

El Paso saw 113 record hot days in the last decade — more than five times the expected number of records in an average decade in the state’s westernmost city.

Areas of East and North Texas close to the Louisiana and Arkansas borders, with their forests and abundant rain, have seen comparatively fewer days of record-breaking heat.

For example, in Longview, less than 50 miles west of the Louisiana border, the Tribune’s analysis shows 27 record highs were recorded, slightly below the 30 that would be expected in an average decade there. At a weather station in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, only 35 record hot days were recorded between 2013 and 2022, just slightly higher than the 29 to be expected in an average decade there, according to the Tribune’s analysis.

But Nielsen-Gammon and other climate experts cautioned that precipitation, soil moisture and vegetation can’t explain all the variation in extreme heat trends. Other factors, like whether the weather pattern La Niña or El Niño is in effect and proximity to the Gulf of Mexico can also affect the number of days with extreme heat.

Lopez, the NOAA scientists, pointed out that the rapid growth in areas like Houston and Austin could be exacerbating the urban “heat island” effect, a phenomenon in which large cities tend to see more extreme heat than rural areas as buildings, driveways and roads absorb heat. Still, it’s “virtually impossible” to find a perfect correlation between weather, climate and extremes, he said.
As temperatures rise globally, places that have less rain and fewer trees to absorb excess heat are more frequently experiencing record-setting heat, experts said.

“Summers are getting drier faster in West Texas,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas’ state climatologist. “That can contribute to increases in record high temperatures.

And, as Nielsen-Gammon pointed out, the variation among locations “could just be random.”

Nielsen-Gammon added that the relatively slow pace of warming in wetter and forested regions “is not something that is expected to continue.” In other words, scientists have projected that those ecosystem buffers will not be enough to offset climate change in the future.

(Unfortunately ❗ 😟😠😡) Politics still play a major role in perceptions of climate change: Some studies have observed Republicans and Democrats who experience the same extreme weather event characterize the impact of climate change differently. But Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said the program’s surveys show that an increasing number of Americans believe climate change is occurring.

Almost three-quarters of Americans think global warming is happening, according to a nationally representative 2023 survey conducted by Yale and George Mason University researchers, compared with 15% who think it is not. And 44% of Americans say they’ve personally experienced the effects of global warming, according to the same survey.

“The weather changes are not the same as what we’ve been seeing in the past,” Marlon said. “The heat waves are hotter, the spring [temperatures] are ending earlier, and nighttime temperatures are higher than they used to be.”

“So experience is starting to play a bigger role,” she said.

“More people are accepting the problem — and it is a process of acceptance for a lot of people, because originally, they were skeptical,” Marlon said.

Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Climate change is causing food insecurity and corn crops are the harbinger to demonstrate danger

Essay published in the Texas Tribune by Jeff Goodell, an Austin-based journalist and a Rolling Stone contributing writer who covered climate change for more than a decade, is the author of “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,”

Extreme heat is threatening corn in South Texas — and the state’s food supply.

In the 19th century, early white settlers considered the Rio Grande Valley, where the once-mighty Rio Grande defines the border between the United States and Mexico, to be a forest of thorns and cacti where tarantulas crawled into your boots and ocelots slinked by just beyond the campfire.

Nomadic tribes of Native Americans had thrived in the Valley for centuries, and both Spanish and Mexican soldiers had long been marching through the region. 

But among the waves of settlers from the East Coast and the Midwest who came looking for farmland, few people thought the region would be good for much beyond cattle.

Then around the turn of the 20th century, ditches were dug in the banks of the Rio Grande to let water irrigate the land. Because it was hot, farmers planted sugarcane, which grew well in the tropics. It flourished. And landowners in the Valley realized that with a little water, this was an agricultural paradise. There were no big winter freezes and a long growing season, with plenty of sunshine and rich river-bottom soil.

With water, they discovered, heat could be tamed.

Soon there were canals everywhere and grapefruit trees and tomatoes and corn and cotton and lettuce. Whatever you planted, it grew. A nickname emerged for the Eden-like region: the Magic Valley.

And for the last hundred years or so, it has been magical. The Rio Grande Valley — which, in fact, isn’t much of a valley at all, just a big flat expanse of river-bottom land created over centuries by the ever-changing Rio Grande — is one of the most agriculturally productive regions in America, growing everything from watermelons for Fourth of July picnics to sorghum for animal feed to papaya for salads and smoothies.

But when I visited the Valley in 2022, the Southwest was suffering from the worst drought in 1,200 years. 

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 99.8% of the region was in “extreme drought.” Decreasing snowpack in the Rockies had diminished the Rio Grande’s headwaters. Golf courses and condos along its banks, as well as farmers who grow water-intensive crops like pecans, leached the river’s flow. The water that is left is increasingly salty and tainted by nitrogen runoff and other pollutants.

As the heat rose, good water was needed more than ever. 

But there simply wasn’t enough to go around anymore.

“When you cut the water off, everything changes. Not only nature, but you change people’s way of living, the economy, the biodiversity,” says Estela Padilla, 77, a retired state worker who has lived along the river her entire life. “It is so colossal. It’s like a crime scene.”

The challenge the Valley faced was at once local and global. 

All over the world, extreme heat is hurting crop harvests and driving hunger. Since 2019, thanks in large part to global warming and the war in Ukraine, the number of people facing acute food insecurity has soared — from 135 million to 345 million. To meet the expected demand for food by midcentury alone, global agricultural output will have to rise by more than 50%. But that output will have to grow as global temperatures rise, threatening crop productivity.

In the Rio Grande Valley, the river that drives agriculture in the region is shifting, becoming more polluted and drying up. Droughts like the one in 2022, have forced farmers to limit watering. Extreme storms, including once-rare major freezes, are damaging crops.

Farmers in the region don’t talk about the impact much — “it usually only happens after several shots of tequila,” said Alexis Racelis, an associate professor of agroecology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Instead, they practice what amounts to a just-in-time adaptation strategy, shifting to different crops and planting times as conditions change, he said.

But questions linger over what will happen if the heat keeps rising and water keeps becoming more scarce.

Racelis lives in a 1960s suburban-style house with a big mesquite tree and a shaggy vegetable garden in the front yard. When I arrived at 7 a.m. one morning in early 2022, he was up and loading gear into his black Nissan Pathfinder. He’s 46. He was wearing a khaki shirt and well-worn work boots, and if you didn’t know who he was you would guess he was a farmer.

Racelis, the son of Filipino immigrants, grew up in San Diego and, after getting his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he went to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, focusing on invasive species. At UT-RGV (University of Texas- Rio Grand Valley), he spends most of his time working with farmers to find ways to grow food with less water and less dependence on Big Ag for seeds and fertilizer.

“We have a long growing season here, which has always been a big advantage,” he told me as we drove out of town in his Pathfinder. “But in the summer, it’s so hot that it’s basically our fallow season.”

Nothing can bear fruit when it gets above 95 degrees, which it does from May to September. And the number of hot days is increasing. Racelis said farmers face a challenge of getting the crops in and out of the ground before it gets too hot in the spring.

“If this heat keeps up,” he said, “broccoli and cauliflower is going to start bolting, which is a big problem.”

Racelis drove 45 minutes across fields of onions and watermelons, as well as giant squares of land waiting to be planted with sorghum and corn, before we arrived at a 700-acre aloe farm. It was a beautiful place, with a row of palm trees on the main road and a big farmhouse nestled in some trees on a small hill. The temperature was a balmy 92 degrees. Not bad — except, that it was February.

Out in the field, we met Andy Cruz, a 40-something man in rough, muddy boots who was in charge of growing things on these 700 acres. He had been a farmer in the Valley all his life, he told me, and had grown all kinds of food. 

Now, those 700 acres were growing exclusively aloe. Aloe is not primarily a food crop (although people do use it to cook, and for flavor in yogurts and desserts). It’s grown mostly for the aloe vera gel that is found in the leaves of the plants, which has been used for thousands of years for skin care and other health reasons.

By all accounts, aloe should be the perfect crop for the Valley. To begin with, it’s a succulent — a plant with thick, fleshy tissue that’s well adapted to water storage. It evolved in the heat of Africa and, like many succulents that emerged in hot places, it has developed a unique capability to in effect hold its breath during the heat of the day and breathe only at night when it’s cooler. During the day, the aloe’s stomata — the small mouthlike structures on the underside of plant leaves and stems — close up tight, minimizing the water loss that would otherwise occur while the plant is inhaling CO2. Then at night, when the temperatures are cooler, the stomata open and the plant breathes.

Aloe has another, even more remarkable heat adaptation: if it gets too hot and dry for too long, the plant can put itself into what amounts to a temporary hibernation, slowing down its metabolism to the point that its water and CO2 needs are minimal. 

Then when it rains, or sufficiently cools down, the plant wakes up and comes back to life.

Despite these wonders, the 700 acres of aloe have been a world of trouble for Cruz. For one thing, a plant that’s well adapted to heat is not necessarily well adapted to the lack of heat. A cold snap in the Valley in the winter of 2020 killed half his plants. “It was bad,” Cruz told me. “We were out here for two days and nights with burners trying to keep things warm. This climate change thing is making the weather like a Ping-Pong ball — you never know where it is going to bounce.”

But even the cold weather giving Cruz problems might be the result of a warming world. The Arctic is warming four times as fast as the rest of the planet, and as a result, it is pushing the jet stream farther south, allowing the cold arctic air to move down to Texas.

“Up until five years ago, things were fairly predictable,” Cruz told me. “But now, you never know what’s coming. It’s different. Something’s changed.”

In struggling to keep his aloe alive, Cruz had already moved on from growing a crop that might have gone further to address global hunger: corn. The Texas A&M AgriLife Extension lists corn as one of the main field crops grown in the Rio Grande Valley. Farmers were growing it on more than 100,000 acres in the region in 2019. But of all the commercial food crops, corn may be the most vulnerable to heat.

It does have some advantages, however. Most plants use what’s known as C3 photosynthesis to convert sunlight into food (it’s so named because the carbon compounds produced contain three carbon atoms). But C3 photosynthesis is problematic because about 20% of the time, these plants make a mistake and instead of a carbon molecule they grab an oxygen molecule, which is useless to them.

Corn is a C4 plant (others include sorghum and sugarcane, two of the other four main field crops in the Rio Grande Valley), which uses a different process that avoids the mistake of confusing oxygen with carbon. That makes the plant’s metabolism more efficient. Also, similar to aloe and other succulents, it closes up its stomata on hot days, allowing it to conserve water and better tolerate heat (corn moderates its breathing depending on temperature, while aloe breathes only at night, regardless of temperature).

Like aloe and other succulents, corn evolved in a warm place. Its wild ancestor, a grass called teosinte, thrived for 10,000 years in the Balsas River Valley in south-central Mexico, where the temperature is a steady 80 degrees. That means that deep in its ancestral gene pool, it has more tools to handle heat than many plants.

But 80 degrees is very different from, say, 102 degrees. As the world heats up, corn is nearing the limits of its adaptive (or “permissive”) temperature range. To put it another way, it’s already growing in hot places and now those places are getting hotter. Add a modest heat wave to those already hot places and corn has trouble coping. Add an extreme heat wave and it may not recover at all.

Corn is in particular trouble if that heat wave hits during the reproductive cycle. “Heat disrupts the development of the pollen tube, which is deployed from the pollen to deliver the sperm into the female plant’s ovule,” said Donald R. Ort, a plant biologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “So the plant never fertilizes, there is no ear.”

Corn is also vulnerable because, at least here in the United States, big seed companies like Monsanto and BSF have had their way with the corn genome for years. 

Growing it requires huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizers, which end up polluting rivers and lakes, causing huge algae blooms. In the right conditions, commercially bred corn is a superstar. But if heat spikes and rains don’t come at the right time, it’s vulnerable. In the highly engineered varieties of corn that most farmers grow, much of its rich genetic diversity has been bred out and what is left is an army of high-yielding inbred hermaphrodites, exquisitely suited for a narrow range of conditions that exist in the Corn Belt. Or that existed there before climate change started making a mess of the weather.

In July 2022, corn growers across Texas began harvesting a couple weeks early because high temperatures caused plants to mature ahead of schedule. John Paul Dineen in Ellis County, near Dallas, said his 700 acres of corn were “pathetic and scraggly.” He’d walk out in the field and peel back an ear and it was dry and hard and only half covered with kernels. There wasn’t much to harvest. The stalks were only 5 feet tall at most, compared with 6 to 7 feet normally. “Yields are 50% of an average year,” he said. “We might get 50 bushels per acre,” which was far below the usual 100 to 110 bushels.

By midsummer, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 42% of Texas corn acreage was in poor or very poor condition. Only 3% was in excellent condition. 

David Gibson, executive director of Texas Corn Producers, a trade group, said the heat and the drought had been devastating for many farmers even though the market price for corn was high.

“When you’ve got no corn to sell, a good price doesn’t keep you in business,” Gibson said.

So why not just plant corn in cooler places? It’s not so simple.

“If you plant corn in the Central Valley in California and you give it unlimited water, it does amazingly well,” Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, a corn geneticist at the University of California, Davis, told me. “It’s just not economically feasible. The profit margins are such that you’d rather be growing grapes or almonds or something in California if you’re going to spend a lot of money on water. 

So I don’t think it’s as simple as saying temperatures are going to push everything north and we’ll be fine, because it is a combination of soils and water and government regulations and agronomic practices and even contract preferences.”

The vulnerability of corn matters because it’s the industrial food stock of American life. Processed foods, from breakfast cereals to ice cream, are saturated in corn syrup. Corn is a prime feedstock for animals, which have themselves been engineered to ingest and digest huge amounts of corn and transform it into animal protein. In this sense, a McDonald’s hamburger is better thought of as a McDonald’s corn burger. Corn fuels your trip to McDonald’s, too. More than half the corn grown in Iowa actually ends up as ethanol, which is mixed with gasoline and is an essential ingredient in fuel.

If corn productivity declines, there will be more pressure to clear land to grow more, which is bad news for places like the Amazon rainforest. It will also raise prices for many food staples, especially meat. How exactly that will play out will be different in different places at different times. But as the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated, higher food prices are inextricably linked with political instability, chaos, and war.




Racelis and I drove out to a 12,000-acre ranch on the western edge of Hidalgo County. He wanted to check in on an experiment he was running that measured the effectiveness of cover crops at keeping moisture in the ground. The temperature had dropped 40 degrees overnight and there was a slight drizzle, which, given the epic drought the region was facing, was a good sign. Racelis talked about how farmers were waiting for one heavy rain before putting crops like cotton and sorghum in the ground.

“Growers have been informed that there is enough water for them to have one good watering this year,” Racelis explained. “Usually they get two or three. So if they can, they want to wait to plant until we get a good rain, so they can save their irrigation water for later in the spring when they really need it.”

“That said, growers here are very resourceful,” Racelis explained. He talked about how farmers practice what amounts to a just‑in‑time adaptation strategy, shifting to different crops and planting times as conditions change. “Things like okra will always grow by the river, as long as the river is flowing,” he added. “But how much okra does the world need?”

After about an hour, we turned down a narrow farm road. In the distance, I saw three or four people out in the field, a few trucks pulled over on the side. We parked beside them, then walked into the field. Racelis introduced me to a few of his students, then to some farmers he was working with. One of them was Avan Guerra, a weathered-looking man who wore his jeans tucked into his boots. He is a former parole officer who got into farming and now has 300 acres. Guerra owns his own tractor and other equipment. He grew up here, and remembers the heat when he was a kid, but it didn’t seem that bad back then.

Texas are dying premature death caused by extreme heat

File this under "What Texas Governor Greg Abbott needs to know".

Echo report published in The Texas Tribune by Erin Douglas.

Firefighter and EMT William Dorsey lifts a migrant woman suffering from heat exhaustion onto a stretcher near the border city of Eagle Pass on Saturday. A stifling June heat wave in Texas has caused deaths and hospitalizations across the state. Credit: REUTERS/Kaylee Greenlee Beal

Emergency room visits surge, Texans die amid dangerous heat wave. After weeks of extreme heat, Texas health officials have reported numerous deaths, while emergency departments across the state are seeing record numbers of people seeking treatment for heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

A dangerous heat wave that blanketed Texas this month has prompted a public health crisis that’s particularly affecting older people and outdoor workers across the state, local and federal health data shows.

At least nine people have died from the heat in one South Texas county, the local medical examiner reported, eight of them older than 60. In sweltering Texas prisons, at least nine inmates, including two men in their 30s, have died of heart attacks or unknown causes in facilities that lack air conditioning.

And in one particularly harrowing incident, a 14-year-old boy and his stepfather, 31, died after hiking in Big Bend National Park last Friday. The stepfather died after crashing his car as he raced to get help after the boy lost consciousness on the trail, while the boy’s 21-year-old brother attempted to carry him back to the trailhead on a day when temperatures in the area reached as high as 119 degrees, according to the National Park Service.

The unrelenting 100-degree temperatures across the state shattered weather records this month amid a heat wave that’s stretching into its fourth week in some parts of Texas. The heat dome is moving east, so Texans could finally see some relief after weeks of oppressive heat.

Such heat waves and the record-breaking temperatures they bring are becoming more common and severe due to climate change, scientists told The Texas Tribune.

Emergency department visits related to the heat also surged across Texas this month as alarmed medical examiners and local public health officials alike are warning residents about health risks from the life-threatening heat.

Heat is one of the most dangerous types of weather, typically killing more people annually in the U.S. than hurricanes, tornadoes or flooding.

“Heat waves can have a significant impact on human health,” said Jesse Berman, an environmental epidemiologist and an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota. He said the public should keep in mind that although the heat might not seem deadly, it’s just as dangerous as other types of extreme weather.

“Heat waves don’t have that major visible impact the way a hurricane or tornado can, but they certainly have major impacts on population in a sneakier way,” Berman said.

A dangerous heat wave blanketed Texas in June 2023. 

Thousands of Texans have sought emergency medical care in June related to the heat, data from the Texas Department of State Health Services and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. Only about half of health facilities report heat-related illness data to the state’s health department, meaning the real toll on Texans’ health is almost certainly much worse.

In the last two weeks, a CDC region that includes Texas and the states that border it set three new daily records for the number of heat-related emergency department visits since 2017, the first year for which data is available, according to the CDC.

On June 20, for example, more than 1,100 people per 100,000 emergency department visits were treated for heat-related illness by emergency departments in Texas and its neighboring states, a record high for the region.

Texas’ state health department does not yet have complete data on how many Texans died from the heat this month. Lara Anton, senior press officer for DSHS, said the state will likely have a more complete picture of the human toll from the heat wave in about six weeks.

In Webb County, where nine people have been pronounced dead due to the heat, the chief medical examiner, Dr. Corinne Stern, begged the public to take precautions at a commissioners court meeting in Laredo earlier this week.

“This is heat like we’ve not seen here before,” Stern said. “Deaths ruled by heat stroke are ruled accidents, and accidents by definition are preventable.

“All of these deaths could have been prevented,” she added.

Stern said for each of the nine deaths reported in Webb County this month, she heard family and friends recount how their loved one claimed they’d be okay because they’d endured the heat in the border community many times, or how the deceased person had meant to fix their air conditioning but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

The early-in-the-season heat wave likely left people underprepared, she said.

“Our county was caught a little off guard,” Stern told the commissioners. “These high temperatures are higher than what we normally see, and I think many of us thought, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be another couple hot weeks in our county.’”

Dr. Richard Chamberlain, Laredo’s health director, said that emergency responders noted that the patients’ homes were “extremely hot” or that the individual had worked outdoors prior to returning home.

Hospital Visits Soar, Cooling Centers Open In Searing Texas Heat Wave

“It’s an unfortunate situation — any loss of life that is abrupt is concerning,” Chamberlain said. “Myself and members of the community have become very concerned.”

In Hidalgo County, which includes McAllen, emergency rooms are swarming with workers suffering from heat exhaustion and other complications related to the high temperatures. Dr. Iván Meléndez, the health authority for Hidalgo County, estimated about 15-20% of the emergency department patients he’s admitted in recent weeks had medical complications related to heat.

For example, Melendez said, he saw a handful of patients this week with heart failure after drinking too much water “because it’s so damn hot.” And about a quarter of the psychiatric patients he admitted this month were those who became aggressive or violent, a symptom he attributed to the heat.

“When the temperature goes up, you see a lot more hostility, assaults, aggression and domestic violence,” Melendez said.

Melendez said that when he was growing up in Hidalgo County in the 1960s, his family didn’t have air conditioning, so they used fans and water to cool their rooms. Now, he said, “it’s impossible. There’s no way you’re going to sleep without an air conditioner.”

In Dallas County, a handful of people with heat exhaustion and heat stroke began to appear in emergency departments in early June.

But by the middle of the month, dozens of people were being rushed to medical help per day. On one particularly hot day when temperatures reached almost 100 degrees, more than 40 people in Dallas County sought emergency care for heat exhaustion or heat stroke, data from hospitals and the Dallas County medical examiner’s office shows.

In the last two weeks alone, roughly 130 people in Dallas County were treated by emergency departments for heat-related illness, county data shows. That’s more than double the number of cases the county had in all of June last year.

Most of the patients in Dallas were men between the ages of 18 and 44, data shows. Christian Grisales, a public information officer for Dallas County Health & Human Services, said that indicates most patients were likely exposed to the heat during the workday.

“We are encouraging the community to take [the heat] seriously because the heat can kill them,” he said.

Dallas County offers a program to assist low-income households with fixing air-conditioning units or providing air-conditioning window units. “We give priority to the elderly, disabled and families with small children,” Grisales said.

In Southeast Houston, some residents are taking precautions to avoid the emergency room. Erandi Treviño, 31, said that she’s waking up two hours earlier than usual to tend to the nursery that she owns, so that she can avoid the hottest part of the day. 

Even so, last weekend while she was working in the greenhouse, she said she quickly began to fall ill.

“I thought I was going to have a panic attack because of how hot it felt,” said Treviño. “It was hard to take a deep breath.”

Treviño, who is also a coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force, an environmental organization that advocates for better air quality, added that she’s also concerned about the health impact of high ozone levels in the Houston area during the heat wave. 

Heat exacerbates ozone pollution.

President Joe Biden must support the Afghan military asylum seeker

Echo report by Allison P. Erickson published in The Texas Tribune

Afghan soldier jailed in Texas for crossing border should receive presidential pardon, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee says.

Abdul Wasi Safi, who worked as an intelligence officer in the Afghan National Security Forces alongside U.S. troops, hopes to apply for asylum in the U.S. but is awaiting a criminal trial in a Texas detention center.

The Houston Democrat said she has sent a letter to the White House asking the Biden administration to ensure Abdul Wasi Safi starts his life in America without a criminal record.

HOUSTON — U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is demanding the release of a former Afghan soldier seeking asylum in the U.S. who is being held at a Texas detention center after he attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border to reunite with his brother.

Wasi, as he is known, worked as an intelligence officer in the Afghan National Security Forces alongside U.S. troops. He fled Afghanistan in 2021 as the Taliban began targeting citizens who had previously helped the U.S. during the decades long war. 

Wasi crossed three continents to make it to the Texas border, where he hoped to meet his brother, who is now a naturalized U.S. citizen. Instead, he was arrested and has been in custody since Sept. 30.

“I’m calling on Biden’s administration to release my brother,” said Sami-ullah Safi, Wasi’s brother. “He believed in this mission of this country in Afghanistan. That’s why he fought alongside the United States Special Forces … to eliminate terrorism.”

In a letter to President Joe Biden, the congresswoman requested that he issue Wasi a pardon, stating an owed debt to our allies ought to be honored by the country.

“When their service exposes them to credible threats, we must redouble our effort to keep our word because doing so also protects our troops stationed around the world today and into the future,” the letter reads.

And to ensure Abdul Wasi Safi begins his life in the U.S. without a criminal record, Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat, has sent a letter to the White House asking the Biden administration to pardon the Afghan veteran for any crimes related to his crossing the border seeking asylum.

“This is a mistake that needs to be corrected immediately,” she said at a news conference.

Jackson Lee, is a co-chair of the House’s Afghanistan caucus, and she is the highest-profile official to demand Wasi’s release. Previously, several military and immigrant rights groups called on the White House to intervene in Wasi’s case.

Jackson Lee said Friday she believed the White House had not received those messages. Jackson Lee stood at a podium in the Mickey Leland Federal Building flanked by supporters of the Safi brothers, including local Afghan community members in Houston, military veterans and new members of Wasi’s legal team.

Wasi, who is facing criminal charges for attempting to cross the border without proper paperwork, was expected to have a plea hearing earlier this week. However, a new legal team asked for an extension. Wasi has also begun to cooperate with the federal government. He was interviewed by the FBI earlier this month.

The congresswoman said Wasi must be granted asylum without a criminal record.

“I characterize this as a logistical error and nightmare for Mr. Safi,” she said. Jackson Lee specifically underlined the criminal misdemeanor charges as the major cause for Wasi’s asylum case delays.  A new court date has been set for mid-February.

“I’m the last person that wants to jeopardize the national security of this nation, or to jeopardize any security for the American people, but I think it is important to try to be fair across the board,” Jackson Lee said.

A Houston-area volunteer started a GoFundMe account in the name of Wasi’s brother, Sami, to cover likely medical expenses from a team of periodontists, dentists, audiologists and mental health professionals on standby to assess Wasi after his release.

Meanwhile, Abdul Wasi Safi’s physical and mental health are deteriorating as he waits at a detention center near the border.

Cruelty by Texas Governor Greg Abbott - his political stunt turned boon for migrants

 Echo opinion letter published in The Washington Times by John Huerta:  (Maine Writer- I'm thinking those desperate migrants at the Southern Border are quickly figuring out how to get themselves into the next available bus going to the U.S., sanctuary cities.)

What may have been a nightmare for the governors of Texas, Florida and Arizona has turned into a major boon for migrants, who are now willing to leave Latin America for the freedom of the United States (“Texas migrant busing crosses 10,000 mark,” Web, Sept. 9).

What (cruel!) Texas Governor Greg Abbott did to distract migrants from entering the country has not actually worked in his fight to get Donald Trump’s wall built. It has not gone over well within his political base.

Governor Greg Abbott;"..'heartless' Christmas Eve drop-off of migrants, children" reports the Houston Chronicle. 

Nor has the same tactic worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who put 50 migrants on a bus to Washington, only to have them show up at the Naval Observatory residence of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Texas Tribune: Fight over border security escalates after governors send migrants to VP Kamala Harris’ home and to Martha’s Vineyard.

The real horror show will be them facing the wrath of Texas, Florida and Arizona voters. This was their legacy, and it has turned into a major boon for the Democrats.

John Huerta 
Merced, California

A failed border wall is not an immigration policy!

International Boundary and Water Commission: 
The IBWC is an international body created by the United States and Mexico in 1889, to apply the rules for determining the location of their international boundary ...

Report warning that private border wall in Texas could collapse.

Trauma doctors say migrant injuries and deaths rose sharply as the border wall grew taller.

The report confirms a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation that found the privately built fencing could collapse during major flooding. The federal government resisted making the findings public for more than a year.

Echo report published in the Texas Tribune by Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo 

This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. 

A private border wall built along the Rio Grande in South Texas could collapse during extreme flooding, according to a federally commissioned inspection report that the government sought to keep secret for more than a year.

The 404-page report, produced by the global engineering firm Arcadis, confirms previous reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It also shows for the first time that the federal government independently found structural problems with the border fencing before reaching a settlement agreement with the builder, Fisher Industries, in May.

On May 16, 2022, an underground tunnel the length of a football field was discovered under the border wall between Tijuana and San Diego.

Under the agreement, which ended a nearly three-year legal battle between the International Boundary and Water Commission and Fisher Industries, the company must inspect the fence quarterly, remove bollards and maintain a gate that would allow for the release of floodwaters. It must also keep a $3 million bond, a type of insurance, to cover any expenses in case the structure fails.

Engineering and hydrology experts told the news organizations the bond is inadequate to cover the kind of catastrophic failure described by Arcadis and raised concerns that the federal government’s decision to settle the case cuts against the report’s findings.

The company modeled different scenarios using the extreme weather conditions caused by Hurricane Beulah, a 1967, storm that dumped about 30 inches of rain in some areas of the border region and caused the banks of the Rio Grande to overflow. The modeling showed that the fence “would effectively slide and/or overturn” during major flooding, and that it starts to become unstable during much smaller and more frequent floods.

Erosion can be seen along a privately funded border wall in Mission, Texas in June 2020.

According to the report, the fencing doesn’t meet basic international building code and industry standards and has a foundation far shallower than border barriers built by the federal government.

“Every single conclusion in the report points to it not needing to be there and shows it is actually negatively affecting the area,” said Adriana E. Martinez, a professor and geomorphologist at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. (She was not involved with the report.)

Martinez, who studies the impact of border barriers in South Texas, questioned how much more evidence the state and federal governments need to take down the fencing and prevent future construction along the Rio Grande.

Arcadis referred questions about its assessment to the Department of Justice, which represented the IBWC in the lawsuit, arguing the fence violated a treaty with Mexico that requires both countries to approve any development that can affect the international boundary. A DOJ spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about the settlement or about why the government fought the release of the report.

The news organizations obtained the report on November 15, after multiple Freedom of Information Act requests and 15 months of back-and-forth with the federal government, which initially denied the request. The DOJ reversed course and released the report after ProPublica attorneys threatened legal action.

As part of the settlement, federal officials ordered that Fisher Industries and its subsidiaries destroy all copies of the Arcadis report, alleging that it contained “proprietary information.”

“Reading this and seeing the settlement that came out of this, it’s as though they completely disregarded the Arcadis report,” said Amy Patrick, a Houston forensic structural and civil engineer and court-recognized expert on wall construction. “I can see why they were dragging their heels so much on letting it get out because [the report] basically completely dismantled this idea that the fence will be OK.”

Mark Courtois, an attorney for Fisher Industries, said that the construction company “strongly disagreed with the opinions in the Arcadis report and refuted those opinions to the satisfaction of the IBWC.” He said the company worked with the IBWC, which is charged with oversight of the international treaty, to “reach a mutually agreeable resolution of all matters pertaining to the fence, including any issues raised by the Arcadis report.”

“Construction of the fence was completed nearly three years ago, and we continue to be confident in its design and construction,” Courtois said.

Sally Spener, a spokesperson for the IBWC, denied that Fisher was able to counter the conclusions in the Arcadis report to the agency’s satisfaction.

In an email to the news organizations, Spener said that the agency accepted the report’s findings, which showed a far greater impact on the flow of the Rio Grande than the builder had claimed. Despite that, she added, the settlement agreement’s requirements address the agency’s concerns that the barrier would violate the treaty.

But the settlement agreement won’t address the report’s findings that the fence was built on a flawed design and featured construction shortcomings that could contribute to its collapse, said Alex Mayer, a civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.

“It just shows the shoddiness of the whole effort. It worries me even more,” Mayer said.

Tommy Fisher, president of Fisher Industries, started to construct the fence in 2019, with financial support from the online fundraising campaign We Build the Wall. (Maine Writer: But wait!  Mexico was supposed to pay for this border wall.  In fact, if Mexico had paid to build the wall - or the fence- the construction would have been reliable and consistent with building codes.)

The nonprofit was set up to help former President Donald Trump build his “big, beautiful wall” along the length of the border. In the end, four of the nonprofit’s top leaders, including Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, were arrested on fraud and other charges connected to the fundraising scheme.

Trump pardoned Bannon in January 2021. But in September, Bannon was indicted on state charges in New York. Bannon called the charges “nothing more than a partisan political weaponization of the criminal justice system.”

The three other men, including Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran who led the organization, face sentencing on January 31, in federal court on various fraud and tax-related charges. Kolfage and another man pleaded guilty in April. The third man was convicted in October.

Soon after construction of the fence began, the DOJ filed a lawsuit in federal court to try to halt the work, claiming that Fisher Industries was violating the treaty with Mexico. A state district judge in Hidalgo County granted the government a temporary restraining order to stop construction, but a federal judge later reversed it.

During a January 2020, court hearing, Fisher claimed that his bollard wall design would bring security to the actual border by addressing the flooding and erosion concerns that previously prevented the federal government from building near the river’s edge.

The 3-mile project was completed in February 2020, making it the first border fence built directly on the riverbank in South Texas. We Build the Wall contributed about $1.5 million of the $42 million total cost, with the rest coming from Fisher, according to court testimony.

The areas around the private border fence soon started to show signs of erosion. Six hydrologists and engineers told ProPublica and the Tribune in July 2020, that the foundation of the fence was too shallow and that a series of gashes and gullies where rainwater runoff had scoured the sandy loam beneath the foundation raised stability concerns.

Following the organization’s news articles, Trump tried to distance himself from the project, saying on Twitter that it had been constructed to make him look bad.

Fisher called the news organizations’ reporting on engineering concerns “absolute nonsense” during a 2020, podcast interview hosted by Bannon.

“I would invite any of these engineers that so-called said this was gonna fall over, I’ll meet ’em there next week. … If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you probably shouldn’t start talking,” he said. “It’s working unbelievably well. There’s a little erosion ❓ maintenance we have to maintain.” (So, what is meant by "a little"?)

As climate change contributes to more extreme weather, better understanding the erosion that is occurring is critical, Martinez said.

“We know that there are more extreme hurricane seasons that are occurring due to climate change, so we know that it’s more likely that the fence is going to get flooded out in the Rio Grande,” Martinez said. “It’s just a matter of time before something happens.”

The fence outside Mission is one of two private border barriers built using private funds, but it may not be the last.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has embarked on an effort to build fencing along the state’s 1,200-mile border using a mixture of state funds and crowdsourced private dollars. And Trump said he would continue border wall construction while announcing last month that he would again run for the country’s highest office.

Ryan Patrick, a former U.S. attorney whose office first filed the lawsuit against Fisher, said that by settling the case and requiring a bond, the government limits the risk of losing at trial. 

Patrick left office before the settlement was negotiated. He continues to believe that the judge should not have allowed Fisher to build the fence.

The settlement doesn’t prevent someone from constructing on the floodplain in the future, he said, but it shows that the government will not give unrestricted authority to potential builders. “You are going to have long-term care and custody of that thing,” he said.

Amy Patrick, who is not related to Ryan Patrick, offered a different perspective.

The structural engineer said that the government’s handling of the legal case, and what she sees as an apparent indifference to its own engineering report, could set “a precedent that credible engineering will be disregarded in similar projects in the future.”

P.S. by Maine Writer:  "disregarded"?- the facts about border walls are historical predictors about the future for any kind of engineering, because even the purpose for the Great Wall of China failed to achieve its intended goal and erosion was not the root cause for its ineffectiveness. The fact is, the Texas border with Mexico is too long to police and putting a fence or wall up to prevent illegal migration only serves to be a challenge for those that will risk their lives to breach the barrier.  Instead of wasting millions of dollars to build failed border walls, the government must enforce an immigration policy that will somehow manage the dire political situation while caring for the innocents who are waiting patiently for entry to the US.  Although I offer no solutions, my instinct reinforced by border wall history makes me confident that building a barrier that will eventually fall apart is no way to manage immigration or migration. 

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