Abbott's Border Wall Boondoggle - Texas Observer July/August 2023 Issue

By JUSTIN MILLER

By DELGER ERDENESANAA

ABBOTT’S BORDER WALL BOONDOGGLE THE SHAPE OF WATER TO COME SPARSE JUSTICE IN RURAL TEXAS

By ROB D’AMICO

DEBORAH MOUTON: BUILDING BRIDGES WITH HER WORDS

By GAYLE REAVES

By DELGER

INVESTIGATING TEXAS SINCE 1954

JULY/AUGUST 2023

EDITOR- IN - CHIEF Gabriel Arana

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Ivan Armando Flores

SENIOR WRITER & EDITOR Lise Olsen

EDITOR-AT- LARGE Gayle Reaves

DIGITAL EDITOR Kit O’Connell

SENIOR WRITER & ASSISTANT EDITOR Gus Bova

SENIOR WRITER Justin Miller

STAFF WRITERS Delger Erdenesanaa, Josephine Lee (McHam Fellow), Michelle Pitcher

EDITORIAL FELLOW Sara Hutchinson

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Tyler Lewis

POETRY EDITOR Naomi Shihab Nye (emeritus)

STAFF CARTOONIST Ben Sargent

COPY EDITOR Adam Muro

FACT CHECKER Chris Collins

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Rob D’Amico, Samiyah Green, Monica Potts, Dinah Waranch

CONTRIBUTING ARTIST

Walter Stanley

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Christopher Lee, Jordan Vonderhaar, Briana Vargas

BUSINESS MANAGER Nikki Kobiljak

TEXAS DEMOCRACY FOUNDATION BOARD

Lize Burr (president), Peter Ravella (treasurer), Terri Burke; Carlton Carl, Mark Horvit, Kathleen McElroy, Skye Perryman, & Lizette Resendez

EDITORS EMERETI: Jake Bernstein, Nate Blakeslee, Lou Dubose, Dave Mann, Bob Moser, Kaye Northcott, Karen Olsson, Geoff Rips, Andrea Valdez, & Forrest Wilder

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Michael Agresta, Asher Elbein, Alex Hannaford, Christopher Hooks, Steven G. Kellman, Robert Leleux, James McWilliams, Bill Minutaglio, Rachel Pearson, Robyn Ross, Brad Tyer, & Daniel Blue Tyx

FOUNDING EDITOR Ronnie Dugger

OUR MISSION

We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Republicans like to say they believe in limited government and oppose wasteful spending. But as Senior Writer Justin Miller’s cover story argues, Governor Greg Abbott’s $20 billion border wall puts the lie to this myth. It is not the job of states to enforce immigration law, and there’s no invasion—asylum-seekers are not an invading force. Extending the wall will not stop illegal immigration, either; most of those in the country without authorization came here legally, with visas, and overstayed them.

Elsewhere in this issue, contributor Rob D’Amico kicks off our series on domestic violence with an installment examining murders in smaller counties that go unresolved or unprosecuted. In culture, Editor-at-Large Gayle Reaves profiles Houston’s multitalented poet laureate emeritus, Deborah Mouton.

Continuing our coverage of women’s healthcare, midwife and former hospital nurse Dinah Waranch examines the U.S. and Texas’ outlandish maternal mortality rates. Contributor Monica Potts examines the economic plight of less-educated whites, who have racialized their economic resentment.

McHam Fellow Josephine Lee speaks with two schoolvoucher opponents from Pastors for Texas Children about Abbott’s plans to pit urban and rural communities against each other with vouchers that defund public education. Lee also visited the site of the former community of Bettina, a socialist utopia founded by German immigrants.

In her final piece for the magazine, former Environmental Reporter Delger Erdenesanaa examines reservoirs running dry in part because officials have failed to take climate change into account when drafting plans to maintain the water supply. Erdenesanaa is off to the New York Times as a climate fellow, and we will miss her dearly.

Every article in this issue is yet another reason Texas needs an Observer . With our readers’ generous support, we continue the fight.

Gabriel Arana

GABRIEL ARANA Editor-in-Chief

PAXTON’S NINTH LIFE

Impeached and in peril, the walls may finally be closing in on the allegedly criminal Texas attorney general.

by JUSTIN MILLER

One could be forgiven for dismissing the prior three weeks as a prolonged fever dream. The Texas House had voted to impeach a statewide officer for the first time since Governor James “Pa” Ferguson over a century earlier, delivering the sort of political and legal wallop that Paxton had been shrewdly ducking at the ballot box and from courts, prosecutors, judges, and the FBI for the past eight-plus years.

Now Buzbee—with a Trumpian tan and a neon-pink tie—was counterpunching on Paxton’s behalf, railing against the Texas House’s sudden hearing and vote to approve 20 articles of impeachment, ranging from bribery to obstruction of justice, against the state’s long-imperiled top lawman, calling it a “kangaroo court.”

“The speaker’s followers and himself thought that they could pull off what could only be described as a drive-by shooting on a holiday weekend,” Buzbee said. “Ken Paxton will never be convicted in the Senate.”

News of the House’s investigation into Paxton broke in the final week of the regular legislative session after the attorney general—presumably upon learning of the inquiry himself—launched a preemptive

attack against Speaker Dade Phelan, accusing him of legislating while drunk.

The House General Investigating Committee had a team of investigators conducting a panoramic review of Paxton’s alleged lawbreaking and ethical improprieties, from his near-decade-old indictment for securities fraud to the more recent allegations that he was using his office as a personal concierge service for friend and embattled Austin real estate magnate Nate Paul. At Paxton’s request, Paul also gave a job to a woman with whom Paxton, a social conservative notably married to a sitting state senator, was having an affair.

This all prompted several of Paxton’s top deputies in 2020 to drop a dime to the FBI, igniting a political firestorm in Texas and

On an early June morning, in front of a backdrop of Republican Party of Texas logos at the state party headquarters in downtown Austin, the famously enigmatic Houston trial lawyer Tony Buzbee addressed a room full of TV cameras and reporters about his newest client: the freshly impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The legal hole Attorney General Ken Paxton has been in for years suddenly got deeper in June. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

prompting an ongoing federal investigation. A handful of those deputies were summarily fired, prompting them to file a lawsuit alleging that the AG had violated state whistleblower protection laws. This came with new details about Paxton’s alleged corruption, including that he routinely used burner phones and that Ken and his senatorial spouse Angela’s house in Austin got an expensive remodel courtesy of Nate Paul.

In typical fashion, Paxton fought to delay and defuse the lawsuit by appealing the case up to the Texas Supreme Court—on the grounds that the state whistleblower law didn’t apply to him because he was an elected official, not a government employee. Before the high court had the chance to make its ruling, a $3 million settlement was reached between the AG and his fired deputies. But the Legislature first had to approve funding for the payout, and lawmakers made clear they had no interest in doing so.

That appeared to be the end of that. With Paxton arguing that the whistleblower case settlement could hang in perpetuity until the Lege approved funding for the settlement—in the next session or the one after—it looked like he might yet wriggle out of another tight corner.

But unbeknownst to almost everyone in the public and the Capitol, Paxton’s $3 million settlement request prompted a secret House investigation to dig through Paxton’s cemeterial closet. Perhaps more shocking than the fact itself is that, in the gossipy funhouse that is the Texas Capitol, this was kept under wraps.

House investigators presented their findings to the committee, a broad accounting of Paxton’s alleged crimes and wrongdoings.

Most of the material had already been covered by the press at one time or another, but there were some new allegations: that Paxton’s extramarital dalliance had not ended as finally as believed and that the AG got his paramour the job with Nate Paul so she could be close to him in Austin, that Paxton had his executive aide personally deliver a manila envelope of documents to Paul suspected to have contained unredacted records regarding the FBI’s investigation into the real estate mogul, and that Paxton was heard telling a contractor that his wife wanted an upgrade “to the granite countertops” in their kitchen, to which the contractor, citing a cost of $20,000, replied: “I’ll have to check with Nate.”

Paxton and his defenders have not denied the factual thrust of the findings but rather sought to dismiss it as ancient history known to the public and litigated in high-profile primary and general election campaigns that Paxton handily won. His defense has largely focused on the quick-fire House impeachment process and the nature of the investigation.

Except for the whole countertops thing. In what will surely go down as one of the greatest lines in the history of Texas politics, the AG’s chief of litigation Chris Hilton vied to correct the factual record at a press conference: “The attorney general’s countertops are tile, not granite.”

Weeks later, Buzbee returned to the matter, showing a picture of Paxtons’ kitchen and, zooming in on the countertops, asking, “Is that any sort of granite you’ve ever seen?” He also showed receipts for around $120,000 that Paxton paid for the renovations in an attempt to disprove the charge

that Nate Paul had paid—though this only raised different questions since the name of the company on the wire transfer from Paxton was owned by a known business associate of Paul.

In classic Texas fashion, the Paxton impeachment has become a showdown between the most high-powered legal titans in the state. The House has hired two of Houston’s storied defense attorneys, Rusty Hardin and Dick DeGuerin. In their first pronouncements on the case, Hardin said the scope of Paxton’s corruption is “10 times worse than what has been public.”

Paxton’s political fate is now in the hands of the Texas Senate, where the ultra-conservative body will hold a trial and vote whether to convict. Conflicts abound there, with concerns about whether Paxton’s wife will recuse herself. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has said the Senate will draft the rules of the trial this summer and begin proceedings by late August.

Unlike his other legal troubles, Paxton’s impeachment means that he is suspended from his powerful office until the Senate trial is over—while Governor Greg Abbott’s appointed replacement John Scott keeps his seat warm.

Even with friends in Texas’ upper chamber, Paxton’s (allegedly) incessant criminality has left him in a deep hole—one that may yawn even wider in the weeks to come. Just a day after Buzbee’s press conference, Nate Paul was arrested in Austin and charged with eight counts of financial crimes. As the AG’s defense attorney told the Dallas Morning News, “You don’t have to be Nostradamus to assume that they’re going to try to flip Nate Paul to testify against Ken.”

STAR STATE

SAVE THE MOTHERS

Maternal mortality rates are too high in Texas and the U.S. in general. We could fix that.

by DINAH WARANCH

The United States has the worst maternal mortality rates of any wealthy country, by a lot, and the rates are increasing. The rate of Black mothers dying is more than twice as high as that for white women. Texas’ rate is about the 12th worst among American states.

Americans have heard this before, but they don’t seem to understand or know what they can do about it. Perhaps when we realize that in the United States 20 new mothers die every year for every one Dutch mother, for instance, we can begin to grasp the scale of the problem. And for every Dutch mother who dies, 50 Black American mothers die. Researchers have found that the majority of these deaths are preventable. That means that in this country every year, hundreds of young women die needlessly, each death a tragedy for her and her family, and for her newborn. There are things we can do to change that.

Like other states, Texas has a Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee (MMMRC) that analyzes maternal deaths and regularly reports its findings and recommendations. Sometimes legislators and stakeholders pay attention, find some money, and take action. The committee is important and potentially powerful.

I am a midwife. Before that, I worked as a hospital nurse, so I know the medical system from the inside. But now I work in the community, attending births at a birth center and in homes. Many of my clients depend on Medicaid for their healthcare coverage. This gives me an inside-outside perspective as well as a deep, lifelong commitment to women and to making maternity care work for them. I have been following the work of our Texas committee for the last several years and have become acquainted with some of the professionals and with a community representative, all of them volunteers. Their work is thankless, difficult, and depressing.

In Texas the work is made much more difficult by a

requirement that nurses redact the death records prior to review, due to a statute designed to protect nurses from liability. The resulting delays make it difficult for the committee to review them in a timely manner, and the data that the committee publishes can suffer. The Legislature considered a bill to change that requirement this year but didn’t pass it.

Given the depth of the crisis in the African-American community in Texas, I was shocked when I first went to a committee meeting. The lack of diversity on the panel was jarring. Thankfully, the committee now has a slightly more diverse professional membership, and there is a Black community activist who is also a survivor of serious childbirth complications. But she cannot represent all the women and families of Texas. Such committees in other states not only are more diverse racially but also include more members of the public, as well as doulas and community-based midwives.

In order to truly see a system, a significant portion of the committee should come from outside of that system. The current MMMRC in Texas is overwhelmingly composed of specialized maternity care professionals. Obviously their technical expertise is essential. But to change a system that is not working, more people who can see the system from the outside are needed. At the moment, this change can only happen by statute. Other states have nominating committees to ensure breadth and depth of membership.

Texas is one of very few states that rely entirely on health records and vital statistics as their main sources in death reviews. Other states also use court records, emergency medical service records, mental health records, and much more. But perhaps most important are the family interviews. A record cannot truly reveal whether and in what ways racism influenced the death of a mother. Racism is something that is assessed by hearing from the people

who were there—and only in that way. It cannot be guessed at from what is written down. When three times as many Black women as white women are dying, no review is complete without understanding racism’s potential effect. The Texas MMMRC must begin using interviews to fully understand what happened, as 20 other states already do and as the CDC recommends.

In reviewing maternal mortality committee reports from other states, I learned that when Arizona officials broke down death data by mode of birth, they discovered that 70 percent of women who died had experienced caesarean section. As they point out, this absolutely does not imply causality. But it is true that two of the leading causes of maternal deaths in all U.S. states are hemorrhage and infection. Both causes are significantly increased in the case of caesarean births. It has been a nominal goal of U.S. obstetricians to decrease the rate of caesareans for decades, but it remains stubbornly stuck at about a third of all births. Our Texas MMMRC would do well to add analysis of birth methods to its review of maternal deaths.

It was heartening to see that the Texas Legislature approved extending Medicaid coverage for new mothers from the current two months postpartum to a full year. Many of the women who die of causes related to childbirth do so in the first months after they give birth. Getting insurance coverage for that time is an essential step in improving outcomes. The Texas MMMRC has noted this in several biennial reports. But that’s not enough. The committee has concurred with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in saying that women should be assessed for the need for more than the conventional single office visit at six weeks postpartum. (A significant portion of women do not even show up at the six-week visit.) But all women need assessment and support in their own homes postpartum. This is part of the magic sauce that is standard of care in European

healthcare systems. And it could be done here.

Texas has an amazing, underused program called Family Nurse Partnership in which nurses visit mothers both before the birth and for an extended time afterward in their own homes. But there are restrictive rules about who can access the program and when. All mothers deserve such care; it has been shown to save lives. Texas also has an underutilized community health worker program that could provide in-home assessment and support. When women are dying of preeclampsia (hypertension) a week after they give birth and leave the hospital, it is not enough to assess, three weeks after the birth, whether they need more office visits. Women must be assessed at home in person within days. The MMMRC can recommend that we do so. International and not just interstate comparisons are important when maternal mortality is in crisis across this country. The World Health Organization recommends midwives as an evidence-based way of reducing maternal mortality. The Texas MMMRC could look into whether funding midwifery programs and increasing the midwifery workforce would save Texas women’s lives.

FOR EVERY DUTCH MOTHER WHO DIES, 50 BLACK AMERICAN MOTHERS DIE.

The Texas public must monitor and support the work of the MMMRC. The statute requires that at least one meeting a year be open to the public (check the Texas Department of State Health Services website for the next meeting date). It makes a difference when more people show up. Come and join me.

Dinah Waranch worked as a city planner, then as a postpartum, labor, and delivery nurse before becoming a midwife. For 25 years, she owned a birth center and home birth practice in Dallas and still runs a small home birth practice.

ABBOTT GETS SCHOOLED

Two anti-voucher advocates declare another win, for now at least, in the long fight against privatization.

INTERVIEW BY JOSEPHINE LEE

This year, Governor Greg Abbott made “school choice,” or vouchers, one of his top legislative priorities. He counted on riding the wave of “parent rights” crusades into the national political arena. But Texans didn’t buy it.

Since 1995, the Coalition for Public Schools in Texas has assembled a broad spectrum of religious, child advocacy, and education organizations, now with 50 groups representing some 4 million Texans. Its member organizations range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Texas Baptist Christian Rights Commission. For 28 years, the coalition has beaten repeated efforts to privatize public schools through a voucher system. This year’s regular legislative session was no different.

Abbott and the state Senate made multiple attempts to implant vouchers— after the House voted not to use public dollars for private schools—including offers to buy off rural school districts, backdoor deals to vote without any hearing, and busing in a scant showing of supporters at the governor’s expense. These were countered by thousands of emails and phone calls and dozens of opposition rallies featuring coalition members. Still, Abbott has promised a future special session on vouchers. The Texas Observer spoke with Charles Luke, who coordinates the coalition, and the Rev. Charles Johnson, who leads the member organization Pastors for Texas Children, who together suggest that Abbott give up and focus on Texans’ real needs.

Can you describe Abbott’s attempts to convince rural residents to support vouchers and pit them against urban communities?

Charles Luke: There was a measure that would have given districts $10,000 for each student on a voucher if that district had less than 20,000 kids. It would be a period of two years and then after that it was upped to five years. Also, the lieutenant governor, when he was running for office and doing his tour of Texas, said he was going to bracket out the rural districts from the voucher programs. He got a lot of pushback from people saying, “If this is such a good idea, why are you leaving us out of it?” So he quickly changed his opinion and even reportedly told senators who were also using that as a talking point in their campaigns to stop talking about vouchers because it’s not popular.

What are the conditions in rural schools?

Charles Johnson: The big headline is we’re sitting on a $33 billion pot of money. And

the governor wants the money to go to private schools instead of public schools. That’s the nub of the matter right there. So we didn’t get the classroom support we needed; we didn’t get the teacher salary increases, even though our classes are too full. And with teacher retention so low, you have fewer teachers working harder, longer hours without the fair pay associated with that extra effort. All this time, we have money in the bank; we have all these infrastructure needs, and we’re spending all our time using the voucher issue to hold hostage school finance.

Luke: The other issue that hasn’t been talked about is that schools are trying to make it under double-digit inflation. Everything they’re purchasing, from construction materials to food for the cafeteria, has gone up since COVID. So they’re doing all of this without any extra money. At the same time, we’re limiting their ability to raise local taxes.

Why did Abbott’s fearmongering about “critical race theory” and other efforts fail?

Johnson: Because it’s ludicrous. When [rural Texans] really look around the school, they see their family members and their church members. For example, the Baptist preacher’s wife is the principal or their teacher is the mayor’s daughter. In a rural community, where people know each other and have organic relationships, this is the key. They’ve grown up together, the children have been in school together. There are cross-racial relationships. The teacher who harbors a humanistic concern for the well-being of every child is going to guard the freedom and dignity of the child’s religious expression. But there are shrill and well-funded political interests in this country that do not want to have that kind of diversity. It does not advance a particular right-wing political agenda.

Do you think the anti-”critical race theory” narrative is on its way out then?

Johnson: Absolutely. We’re addressing all these manufactured crises that don’t have any real direct existential connection to where Texans live and what they need: a great public school

for ranch kids, roads to get products to market, broadband, water. All those things are very important. That’s what we ought to be addressing here in Austin.

Luke: I think the people of Texas are just worn out. They’re angry and frustrated, and then there’s this narrative that keeps on coming up, this baloney narrative that we don’t really see happening anywhere. After decades of being in the schools, I can count on one hand the number of times somebody taught something that shouldn’t be taught. But here’s the problem: A lot of these people, who are pushing

this problem and pushing the privatization of public schools, haven’t been inside a public school in years. And every time I hit a pothole that didn’t get filled in because the state spent money fighting “critical race theory,” well, that’s a frustration for me.

What should religious liberty look like in the public schools?

Johnson: This is our number one objection to the privatization of public education. The public school is the laboratory of American democracy, where children learn to respect

of the foundational pieces of curriculum in a public school is tolerance, respect, and anti-bullying. It is the social and emotional support that children need to grow up into full adulthood. So, it is an egregious violation of human rights for public dollars to advance a religious doctrine.

Dr. Luke gave the best response this session to [Republican state] Senator Mayes Middleton.

Luke: Mayes Middleton had asked me [during a Senate Education Committee hearing] to explain a tweet from Pastors for Texas Children: “The governor is leading in the indoctrination of children by promoting vouchers.” Well, if you’ve got a child in a religious school, be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever, they’re gonna teach that child their religious doctrines and that’s the dictionary definition of indoctrination.

What do you foresee for Abbott’s special session on vouchers?

each other across all kinds of differences. And the protection of religious liberty is a fundamental human right. Government has no proper authority over religion. Period. Now our children can already express themselves religiously in schools in all kinds of ways. They can have a silent prayer. Religious organizations can meet on their own time before or after school or during lunch hour for a prayer group. Principals spend a good bit of their time protecting individual religious expressions of children and teaching tolerance to children for all the diverse expressions of religion. One

Johnson: If Abbott calls a special session to get a voucher program, we’ve been told by a lot of House members that the opposition to a voucher program will increase. This has already been quite an embarrassment for Abbott. Now, he wants to call the legislature back into session, after what they’ve been through these past 140 days, just to once again vote on something that they have defeated time after time after time for the last 28 years.

The Reverend Charles Johnson introduces former Texas state Senator Beverly Powell at a Coalition for Public Schools event. (Courtesy of the Reverend Johnson)

MISSION

State park officials asked for help via Facebook when a camera caught footage of a furry, potbellied creature with stubby legs. “We’re scratching our heads trying to identify this elusive creature. Is it a new species? An escapee from a nearby zoo? Or just a park ranger in disguise?” wrote officials at the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. Among the 400 responses was this winner: an American badger.

TEXAS OBSERVER STAFF

TRINITY RIVER

An angler reeled in what Texas newspapers described as an “absolute monster”—a 251-pound alligator gar that may set a world record. Art Weston, of Union, Kentucky, flew to the Trinity River specifically to fish with Texas alligator gar guide Captain Kirk Kirkland. The fish he caught (and released) in mid-April appears to beat the current International Game Association fishing world record (for an 80-pound line) by at least 50 pounds, the Houston Chronicle reported. The century-old fish was too big for the boat, so they had to land to reel it in.

AUSTIN

This year’s regular session of the Texas Legislature ended with GOP lawmakers failing to pass a number of party-priorities bills, while passing some legislation targeting vulnerable Texans including transgender kids. It seemed like a new low even for the Lege. But then, out of the blue, a Texas miracle: Attorney General Ken Paxton was impeached in an overwhelming House vote.

TEXAS OBSERVER

To the Texas Observer Community,

I’m writing to you as chair of the Texas Democracy Foundation, the nonprofit publisher of the Texas Observer, to update you on our status. I am happy to report that, today, the Observer is in a far better position than it was when the organization faced the prospect of layoffs in March. Between the extraordinary success of the staff-led GoFundMe campaign and the continued generosity of longtime donors, the Observer’s immediate financial position has stabilized.

The Observer still faces serious challenges, as do other excellent publications navigating the constantly changing waters of nonprofit journalism. Ensuring the Observer’s longterm well-being is the Texas Democracy Foundation’s sole mission–and at the heart of every action we take.

Right now, TDF’s focus is on the Observer’s financial stability. We are working to secure funding required to keep publishing through the end of this year and beyond. While we strongly believe that we will meet this goal, we are not yet there. Disclosing this kind of uncertainty may be unorthodox, but we would rather our community know where things stand than experience the shock we all felt earlier this year.

We are deeply grateful to the individuals, the publications, the foundations—and most meaningfully, the readers, that have reached out, and we accept your offers of support with a sense of partnership in charting the Observer’s future. And today we ask you to consider a gift (or additional gift) to help us bridge the gap in our immediate 2023 budget and lay the foundation for the coming year.

The good news is that this is a moment of rich potential for the Observer. And this brings me to happier news: This spring, spurred by the crisis, our community of paying members increased by a stunning 40 percent. That is, our readership stepped up to show us the strength of our community and the breadth of the support for the Observer. We view this as evidence of our potential and are pursuing other opportunities for growth and innovation. We’re also planning our next events, including an evening with On Juneteenth author Annette Gordon-Reed and the 2023 MOLLY National Journalism Prizes, and will share the details as they’re finalized.

Next year, the Observer will celebrate its 70th anniversary. Since 1954, the Observer has been “dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy.” In this time of ever-increasing extremism and authoritarianism, Texas needs an Observer more than ever.

It is our honor and privilege to publish the Texas Observer. Thank you for standing with us in this fight.

Sincerely,

Lize Burr President, Texas Democracy Foundation

Staying Afloat

Lessons for the future of Texas water from the Medina and San Antonio rivers

Editor’s note: This is Part 4 of Drifting Toward Disaster, a Texas Observer series about life-changing challenges facing Texans and their rivers.

by DELGER ERDENESANAA

Photography BY JORDAN VONDERHAAR

A fisherman reels one in near Red Cove Marina on Medina Lake, where water levels are at 5 percent of total capacity.

During busy summer days, more than 200 recreational boats launch from Red Cove Cafe & Marina in the unincorporated community of Mico, west of San Antonio. But on a Wednesday morning this May, only two boaters’ cars sat in the parking lot on the shore of Medina Lake. Chance Heyen, the young proprietor, said his family closed their cafe in 2021 because of the lake’s dropping water levels and dwindling numbers of tourists.

Given Mico’s tiny population, “we pretty much rely on traffic coming from out of town,” Heyen said.

Medina Lake stretches for 18 miles, forming a skinny dragon shape on the border of Medina and Bandera counties. It was built in 1912 by damming the Medina River to create an irrigation reservoir for farmers. Mico, less than an hour’s drive west from San Antonio, was named after the Medina Irrigation Company and then morphed into a seasonal vacation destination. To thrive over the decades, the family-run marina and cafe has had to adapt to a boom-andbust water and tourism cycle.

Right now, the community is stuck in a deep bust. This sliver of Texas on the edge of the Hill Country has been the epicenter of an intense statewide drought that began in fall 2021 and has never fully broken. At the beginning of May, Medina Lake was only 5 percent full. Most of the reservoir’s 164-foot dam was exposed, and many homes’ private docks sat stranded on dry land.

Heyen said his family has come to expect dry years, and hopes to reopen Red Cove Cafe whenever the water level rises again.

But not even local farmers depend on this reservoir as a reliable water supply anymore. In fact, Medina Lake is one of the places where the state’s water woes are most glaringly visible.

The reservoir is owned and operated by the Bexar-Medina-Atascosa Water Control and Improvement District. During a visit to the water district’s office this May, printer paper signs declaring “Stage 4” drought were taped to the customer service windows. Board members had instructed staff not to speak to the press. Instead, office manager Bonnie Tapp Sallee handed the Texas Observer a copy of a letter sent to the district’s 2,200 customers—mostly farm owners—in October, announcing

a temporary halt to water sales. The moratorium is still in effect.

The City of San Antonio used to draw some of its water from Medina Lake but hasn’t done so since 2015 because of the reservoir’s dramatic ups and downs.

Ironically, Texas officials’ proposed methods of securing water for the state’s growing population rely heavily on reservoirs, despite challenges posed by climate change.

Texas’ 2022 State Water Plan, published every five years by the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), calls for building more than 20 new major water supply reservoirs. According to the plan, statewide demand for water is expected to increase by 9 percent between now and 2070, mostly due to growing cities. Texas’ population is projected to swell from about 30 million people now to more than 51 million in 2070.

On top of the TWDB plan, state Senator Charles Perry—a Republican from Lubbock and chair of the Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs—introduced a major bill and accompanying joint resolution this session to fund infrastructure repairs and new water supplies, with a particular focus on building desalination plants and using water produced during oil and gas drilling. Lawmakers passed the legislation at the end of May, allocating $1 billion for the effort.

Those plans won’t solve everything, according to experts, given the realities reported by Texans who once relied on reservoirs like Amistad and Falcon on the Rio Grande, which shrank to recordlow levels last year. There, communities have already learned the hard way that neighbors like Mexico and New Mexico don’t have enough water to share even if they wanted to.

The current State Water Plan basically ignores climate change, instead using the 1950s drought of record as a benchmark for the most severe drought Texas needs to prepare for. While the plan refers obliquely to “climate variability,” it states that “there currently isn’t much agreement among climate models (or scientists) about the nature of longterm changes to water resources in Texas,” especially on a regional scale.

This at least could soon change. Last year, the Sunset Advisory Commission, which reviews state agencies’ performance,

Residential docks at Medina Lake, comfortably afloat when the lake is nearly full, sit on dry land in late May.

recommended that TWDB authorize its regional planning groups to consider worse future droughts than that of the 1950s. This recommendation was included in a sunset bill passed by the Legislature and signed by Governor Greg Abbott in May. And a new project is underway at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University in San Marcos to model climate change at the local level, with millions of dollars in federal funding secured.

Meanwhile, a growing chorus of water experts point to conservation, efficiency, and redistribution as better strategies for securing Texas’ water supply into the future. One advocate for conservation is Jennifer Walker, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Texas Coast and Water Program. She co-authored a report recently on the 500,000 acre-feet of water Texas utilities unintentionally lose each year through leaking pipes and other infrastructure problems, and has been advocating for the state to invest in stemming these water losses first.

“We need to have a culture of efficiency in our state,” Walker said. There’s plenty of ideas for conservation and reuse of water in the State Water Plan that need funding, she said, especially in smaller rural communities that don’t have as much technical expertise as larger cities and their utilities. “There’s a lot of good things we can be spending money on.”

While both the legislation and the current state water plan acknowledge that Texas also needs to conserve water and fix existing water systems, so far leaders seem more focused on grander plans to build new infrastructure.

But desalination and reservoirs are costly, controversial due to their environmental impacts, and vulnerable to climate change.

Jeremy Mazur, a senior policy advisor at the Dallas-based think tank Texas 2036, has lobbied for major water legislation. Mazur and his colleagues are concerned by signs of failing infrastructure around the state, like the more than 3,000 boil water notices issued by Texas utilities last year, including particularly high-profile cases in Houston and Odessa.

“Water infrastructure has gotten to a point

where it’s so old, so leaky, and so deteriorated that it warrants legislative attention this session,” he said. “The political momentum and consensus is there.”

But debate continued in the last legislative session about how much money will be provided by the state and what percentage will be dedicated to plugging leaks and fixing old infrastructure versus building new desalination plants, new reservoirs, and other costly projects.

Senate Joint Resolution 75, the legislation introduced by Perry, proposed an amendment to the Texas Constitution that would create two new pots of state funding for water projects: the Texas Water

produced water from oil and gas wells. The House added aquifer storage (a kind of underground reservoir) and water reuse as eligible projects as well. The Senate, however, did not accept all of the House’s amendments and the two chambers reached a compromise in conference committee to replace water imports with aquifer storage. While the governor was expected to sign the bill, voters would also need to approve the related constitutional amendment in November 2023.

Mazur acknowledges that the water supply strategies in this legislation, like desalination, are expensive and controversial. But he feels Texas has reached a point where the state simply has to bring in or create more fresh water, by whatever means it can.

“All of it needs to be moving forward at once,” he said. “I think we should be pursuing this ‘all of the above’ strategy.”

Not everyone agrees. As Walker points out in the recent Texas Living Waters report, shoring up deteriorated infrastructure would also increase the state’s water supply by saving water that’s unintentionally lost and wasted. Walker thinks more drastic measures like importing water from Louisiana or desalinating water from the ocean may be on the table in the future, but “they’re not at the top of the list for us right now,” she said. “We have a ways to go before we need to be investing in strategies like that, I believe. And we also need to put guardrails in place to ensure that we’re not causing more harm than good.”

Fund and the New Water Supply for Texas Fund. Senate Bill 28 specified how these funds would be used.

The Texas Water Fund would supplement several existing water infrastructure funds with money earmarked for smaller cities, rural communities, and water conservation efforts. The New Water Supply for Texas Fund is more specific, with the version passed by the Senate focusing on importing water from out of state, building desalination plants, and treating

This February, emissaries from water utilities across the state gathered at the San Antonio Botanical Garden for the 13th annual Central Texas Water Conservation Symposium to discuss what utilities can do first. Despite the conference’s geographic specificity, people traveled from as far as Laredo and the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs to talk water conservation, many proudly sporting blue polo shirts emblazoned with their cities’ names. Walker was the unofficial mayor of the conference, greeting everyone as they arrived and making introductions left and right.

After yet another tough year of drought, the mood was at once concerned and hopeful, especially when a meteorologist with the Lower Colorado River Authority predicted that three years of dry and hot La

“The water in our rivers is overallocated and underprotected.”

Niña conditions would finally give way to a cooler, wetter El Niño reprieve in 2023. But throughout the day’s official presentations— even the one on meteorology—nobody mentioned climate change.

Instead, experts spoke about strategies to get through droughts, how to educate lay people on the need to conserve water at home, and opportunities to shore up aging water infrastructure.

Walker moderated a discussion on her recent report, which she and her co-authors have been promoting all year. They explained in a presentation dense with numbers that by simply preventing unintentional losses from water systems, Texas would save enough water to meet the annual needs of Austin, Fort Worth, El Paso,

Laredo, and Lubbock combined. There is still a role for new water supplies and new infrastructure, Walker and other experts say.

In fact, leaders in San Antonio, the conference host city, are already demonstrating how cities can proactively explore alternative water resources.

The day after the Central Texas Water Conservation Symposium, about 20 conferees took a special edition of the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) “Rain to Drain” tour, normally offered to the public once a month. Field Education Programs Coordinator Heather Ginsburg guided the whirlwind trip with stops across Bexar

County, narrating with seemingly endless reserves of enthusiasm. First up was a set of caves connected to the Edwards Aquifer, San Antonio’s original and largest source of water. Next, the charter bus drove past the newest and most controversial source, the Vista Ridge Pipeline which imports groundwater from wells in Burleson County, east of Austin. The tour then moved on to SAWS’ main water distribution plant, which was explicitly designed to show off the city’s diverse water supply strategies. The H2Oaks Center in southern Bexar County— built in 2017 on a 6,000-acre campus of restored native grasses—encompasses groundwater wells, desalination of brackish groundwater, and underground water storage. The building’s lobby welcomes visitors

Heath Ginsburg, field education coordinator for the San Antonio Water System, leads municipal water workers from across the state on a tour of the San Antonio Water System.

with an art installation representing the water cycle, including abstract light fixtures evoking clouds and a wall built from the same sandstone that surrounds some of the city’s groundwater. The desalination system’s 2,000 pipes are on full display, surrounded by glass walls for tour groups to peer through.

San Antonio is an anomaly among Texas cities because it uses so much groundwater—most other municipalities depend on rivers and reservoirs. But the city was forced to diversify its water supply, originally because lack of water in the Edwards Aquifer was threatening resident endangered species like the Texas blind salamander. The Sierra Club sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1990s

over this issue, forcing the creation of the Edwards Aquifer Authority, which still regulates how much water San Antonio can withdraw from the aquifer.

“What was seen as negative at the time, this endangered species lawsuit, turned out to be the best thing for the City of San Antonio,” Ginsburg said during the tour. “Here we are decades later, in a really watersecure position because of that lawsuit.”

These days, SAWS—which serves 2 million people in Bexar, Medina, and Atascosa counties—has nine different sources of water. The utility can now draw from four additional underground aquifers, its own recycled wastewater, and three reservoirs, including Medina Lake. But because of drought, San Antonio hasn’t

used Medina Lake for years.

SAWS has invested instead in its “advanced storage and recovery” system as a better insurance policy. The utility doesn’t always use its full annual water rights from the Edwards Aquifer, especially during rainy times. So SAWS has turned to injecting extra Edwards water into a different rock formation directly below the H2Oaks Center, the Carrizo Aquifer, to use later during dry summers and droughts. Utility staff refer fondly to this reserve as “the bubble.”

All this water used in homes, businesses, and public buildings throughout San Antonio eventually flows from drains and toilets downhill to the city’s lowest elevation point, where SAWS has built its

In the lobby of the city’s main water distribution plant, a model—complete with a tiny Alamo and Tower of the Americas—shows San Antonio’s water system.

wastewater recycling plant. Here, trash— mostly “flushable” wipes that in reality are not at all flushable—gets screened out of the water, and the plant’s workers diligently cultivate microbes that eat the city’s biological waste.

At the end of this lengthy process, the treated water flows into the Medina River, just above where the Medina itself flows into the larger San Antonio River. The water entering the river looks clean, like a small waterfall more than anything. Trees surround the wastewater plant’s outfall, the air smells fresh, and birds fly by.

“You should take us for granted,” said SAWS CEO Robert Puente, who previously served in the Texas Legislature and chaired the House Natural Resources Committee, in

an interview with the Observer. The utility has plenty of water for at least the next decade, and longer if San Antonio’s recent population growth levels out, he said.

Puente credits the new Vista Ridge Pipeline for this security, as well as the switch from old-school reservoirs to the underground bubble.

Medina Lake’s water supply simply isn’t predictable enough for San Antonio and its suburbs to rely on, he said. “Because it fluctuates so much, we have chosen to just not use it anymore.” He doesn’t think above-ground reservoirs are the best strategy in general for securing a water supply, especially in a warming climate with greater evaporation.

“Oftentimes, unfortunately, the biggest

user of surface water is evaporation,” Puente said. “Luckily, our water is underground and doesn’t evaporate.”

The CEO is just as concerned with the water his utility puts back into the environment. During summers of drought, “the San Antonio River would cease to flow if we didn’t discharge our wastewater into it,” Puente said.

It may sound counterintuitive that a city’s treated wastewater could benefit an ecosystem, but that’s exactly what Puente and others argue: Failing to discharge enough water would have dire consequences for natural ecosystems downstream, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

The San Antonio River winds for 240 miles—through downtown San Antonio,

Water officials from around Texas watch as treated water from San Antonio’s system is released into the San Antonio River.

past the city’s famous missions, and through the rural counties to the southeast, before joining the Guadalupe River and draining into San Antonio Bay. There, fresh water from the rivers helps maintain a delicate balance of salinity for coastal species like struggling wild oysters and endangered whooping cranes, whose population has rebounded slowly thanks to a National Wildlife Refuge established along that bay.

As grim as the situation is on Medina Lake, things are improving downstream for San Antonio Bay—at least for now. State legislation passed in 2007 requires new surface water permits to account for “environmental flows,” or the water needed to flow down rivers to sustain wildlife and healthy ecosystems. A federal lawsuit over whooping cranes further solidified requirements for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to conserve endangered wildlife by ensuring environmental flows.

But many other thirsty Texas cities are focused on capturing more water for their residents rather than diversifying supplies, shoring up leaks, and leaving enough to support wildlife. “The environment continues to get lost in much of the water supply discussion in Texas,” Walker said. “The water in our rivers is over-allocated and under-protected. And with all this growth, there’s tremendous pressure to push environmental needs to the side.”

Some city and industrial users with older water rights are exempted entirely from the environmental flow requirements. Rivers still sometimes run dry—as happened to the Rio Grande last year. And much of what enters the bays and estuaries along the Gulf currently comes from water rights that were long ago sold to someone but not currently used. As demand for water grows with the state’s population, and as climate change makes droughts more intense, conflicts between users will heat up and more rivers and reservoirs will run dry, experts warn.

“We’re kind of headed toward this critical juncture,” Walker said. “As more water rights get more fully used, what happens to our rivers?”

Reporting and photography for this series has been supported by the Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation and by the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

Lines on the Medina Lake dam, as well as on the surrounding shores, show how low the lake is—in May, nearly 83 feet below the conservation pool level.

SOPHI’S MURDER AND THE UNANSWERED CALL FOR JUSTICE

Investigations and prosecutions of homicides involving alleged domestic violence are uneven across Texas.

BY ROB D’AMICO

ILLUSTRATED

BY

WALTER STANLEY

Friends of Sophia Sullivan say she was enjoying a rebirth of sorts, cherishing her time working as a teacher in the far West Texas town of Marfa and beginning an active social life. They watched the energetic 31-year-old make new friends and inspire high school kids in her role as an early college coordinator.

Still, Sophi—as everyone close to her called her—always seemed to be looking over her shoulder at the past, which meant figuring out what to do about her failing marriage. Sophi told friends that her husband, Danny Sullivan, was controlling and manipulative. He demanded access to her cellphone and questioned her whereabouts, her friends say, and became jealous of anyone spending time with her and their 7-year-old son. They all shared a modest home in Fort Davis, just 21 miles north of Sophi’s job in Marfa. But Danny, then 30, worked as an electrician in Odessa. To avoid a two-and-a-half-hour commute each way, he stayed in a trailer home on weekdays and returned to his family on weekends.

Sophi soon realized she needed a permanent break from Danny. “She talked about being at a place where she was personally ready to move forward with saving up money,” said her friend Emily Steriti, who met Sophi when they taught together in Marfa. “She was working on an online job that would help her to do that. And she talked about being afraid of hiding money from [Danny].”

A divorce seemed imminent. But Sophi never made her escape.

On March 16, 2018, she lay dying on the floor of her Fort Davis home. Some 40 stab wounds left her unable to move, and she eventually bled to death. Her 7-yearold son, unable to help, stayed by her side through the early hours of that Friday, then watched TV—too petrified to move or go anywhere because he feared his mom’s killer was still near, he later told police.

His father, Danny, claimed he did not come home Thursday night and instead arrived from Odessa around 6:50 p.m. Friday to find Sophi dead, then scooped the boy into his arms and ran to a neighbor’s house to have them call 911. But his son

has testified to a very different story: Daddy was the masked man who killed his mother.

The last five years have been agonizing for Sophi’s friends and family, who watched the man they believe to be her killer go free after a mistrial.

Danny Sullivan said he is innocent.

But others blame a bungled investigation, officers who failed to look for key evidence and a new district attorney who has not yet set a retrial date for the case. (That DA serves Jeff Davis, a county with fewer than 2,000 residents, along with three other sparsely-populated

to Odessa, Texas, where her mother, Theresa Blain, lived on a ranch with Sophi’s stepfather, Gregg. Sophi met up with Danny again when she returned to Illinois in 2006. The feelings they had for each other in high school were still alive and, within a year, they moved to Texas together. Danny worked for Greg Blain, learning the electrician trade, while Sophi did office work. After a long engagement, they wed in the Blains’ living room on Valentine’s Day 2009.

Sophi was soon expecting a child, and Tyler was born in May 2010. (The Texas Observer is not using their son’s real name to protect his privacy as a juvenile witness.) For five years, Danny and Sophi kept working at the family company. But then they decided to strike out on their own. With the Blains’ help, they moved to Fort Davis and purchased a house.

Danny initially worked electrician jobs in neighboring Alpine but by 2017 he’d taken a position in Odessa for better pay. Marfa ISD hired Sophi as a teachers’ aide and helped her obtain a teaching certification. Friends say that Sophi fit her new role perfectly: She enjoyed the kids and social camaraderie with co-workers.

But Sophi’s friends said the distance from his wife made Danny even more possessive. He remained a loner, spending work weeks at his trailer without forging close friendships or socializing with neighbors.

counties, Brewster, Pecos and Presidio.) Unfortunately, a look at fatalities involving domestic violence that were reported in sparsley populated Texas counties from 2015 to 2019 (the five years prior to the pandemic) shows that many cases go unresolved or unprosecuted.

Sophi and Danny met at Manteno High School in a small town about an hour south of Chicago. They shared a crush, but at that point, Sophi had many friends and Danny was more withdrawn, had troubles at home, and was too shy to ask for a date.

After graduating in 2004, Sophi moved

Sophi’s friend, Marfa teacher Emily Steriti, later testified that Sophi told her that Danny once exploded over an innocuous note she got from a colleague, which he found in her work bag. “Danny was very angry and she was worried that he was going to leave,” Steriti testified. “And I think she was beside herself. … She knew she hadn’t received any sort of love letter, and I think that’s how it was interpreted.”

Their relationship was strained further when Danny was arrested for felony possession of drugs with three other men while driving through Dimmit, Texas, on December 3, 2017, about three months before Sophi’s murder. Danny said that he an others went to Colorado to buy THC products and marijuana and were stopped for a missing license plate light. Worse, Danny had lied to Sophi and their son—who’d begged him to stay home that

“She talked about being afraid of hiding money from [Danny].”

weekend—by claiming he had to work and instead going to Colorado, Britney Mann, an Odessa woman who considered herself Sophi’s best friend, said. “She felt lied to and betrayed and deceived. … And she told me that that was the moment that she realized she couldn’t use the excuse to stay with him because he was a good father, because a good father doesn’t do that to their child.”

On March 15, the day before her murder, Sophi spent most of the day with Steriti taking Tyler to a 4-H event in Marfa for spring break. The idyllic Thursday was darkened when Tyler started using rough, demanding language toward his mother. Steriti wondered if Sophi was facing verbal abuse that Tyler was mimicking. It was then that Sophi confided she had considered leaving Danny. “That was when we talked about [some] kind of a survival guide for domestic abuse,” Steriti said. “Where you, you know, try to save money away, cash if possible, so that it’s not anything someone can find. And she was worried that he would be upset if he found out. And I just said, ‘I think you would much rather have that when you need it if you need it, right?’”

Then Sophi told her Danny would be coming home a day early—Thursday evening—instead of his usual routine of arriving on Friday, Steriti told the Observer.

On Friday, Britney Mann, Sophi’s best friend from Odessa, began texting Sophi about plans to get together over the weekend, but got no answer. “And she was normally a pretty quick responder. And then I texted her the next morning about what time she wanted to meet up for coffee, and she never responded. So, then I started calling. I called all day and then. … I saw a CBS 7 headline that said a Marfa teacher was stabbed and killed. I immediately told my husband we had to go to Sophi’s house because I was really scared it was her. We went to her house, and it was a crime scene.”

In 2018, when Sophi was killed, 174 Texas women died in domestic violence incidents, all outlined in an annual “Honoring Texas Victims” report from the Texas Council on Family Violence (TCFV). The nonprofit

annually compiles statistics on “intimate partner homicides” and maintains data on each killing, with notes on the method of homicide, location, children of the victims, and numerous other details to draw attention to a major problem in Texas that increased during the pandemic.

By 2021, 204 Texans were victims of intimate partner homicide. This number includes 169 women and 35 men, including 12 LGBTQ+ victims. In many cases, the alleged killers were men who were immediately arrested or killed themselves. That year, authorities charged 112 men with capital murder, murder, or manslaughter in connection with the deaths of their partners, according to the nonprofit. Another 56 men died by suicide after killing their partners, two were killed by law enforcement, and two died by other means. Authorities charged 30 women who killed their partners with capital murder, murder, or manslaughter. Two women died by suicide.

Separation, the step that Sophi had planned, poses a significant risk for intimate partner homicide and injury. In 2021, of the homicides identified by TCFV, 45 percent of victims had taken steps to either end their relationships or seek interventions to enhance their safety. Thirty-eight percent of women killed had already separated or ended their relationships, and 33 percent of women had sought other help, such as reporting abuse to law enforcement, seeking alternative housing or protective orders.

When the Observer looked back at what happened to the men and women arrested for domestic violence deaths in lowpopulation counties from 2015 to 2019, very few of those identified as the killers had been sent to prison. Only 17 of the 834 domestic violence homicides in Texas from 2015-2019 (as reported on by this nonprofit ) occurred in rural counties with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. Of those, arrests in 13 of 17 cases were reported by the nonprofit.

By 2023, only four people arrested for killing their partners in rural counties were serving time in state prisons. The prosecutor in Danny’s case, then-83rd District Attorney Sandy Wilson, said many rural areas lack the law enforcement expertise and resources needed for any

kind of murder trial. Wilson, who served as DA from 2017 to 2020, said she had handled homicide cases before but nothing as complex. “It was such an overwhelming case that I had to try by myself. I made my share of mistakes, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. We worked day and night and weekends doing a lot of investigation because law enforcement had not done their job in the beginning.”

At this point, it’s unclear whether Danny will ever be retried for the alleged murder of his wife. He currently lives in another state and is seeking shared custody of his son, the prosecution’s key witness. “He was my best friend,” Danny said in an interview. “They took that, and they destroyed it.” It’s been almost five years since he’s seen his son, he said. “I don’t know what my son looks like. I don’t know what my son sounds like.” Shared custody remains a possibility. In a different recent Texas domestic violence murder case in Galveston, another father maintained visiting rights even after being convicted of killing his child’s mother.

Danny’s version of what happened on the night of his wife’s violent death is that he drove home from Odessa to Fort Davis on Friday March 16, 2018, to find the front door locked, though they never locked the doors in their rural, big-lot community on the outskirts of Fort Davis. When no one responded, he circled the house and found the back door unlocked. “Hey, I’m home,” he recalled shouting out on entering. Then he heard his son yell: “Mommy’s murdered! Mommy’s murdered!”

He said he found Sophi lying in their bedroom in a pool of blood. Tyler was sitting on his parents’ bed. “The first thing I did was just kind of get through to grab [my son], picked him up. I guess I must have leapt over her. … I got around her.” Danny took Tyler to call 911 at the home of neighbors, he said, because he knew they were ex-police officers from Houston.

When Jeff Davis County Sheriff Bill Kitts and other officers arrived at the scene, they found Danny rocking back and forth on the ground, unable to talk coherently. Deputies

eventually led him to the sheriff’s office, where he spent several hours denying he killed his wife.

Investigators heard something else from the lone eyewitness—Tyler. One of the ex-police-officer neighbors—Jeanne Hughson—later testified that she brought Tyler into her home while deputies cleared the Sullivan house to ensure no perpetrators were inside. He began talking about how he had witnessed the attack on his mother. And when the two stepped outside, Tyler pointed to his father, saying he was the murderer.

The sheriff arrested Danny on a charge of first-degree murder.

But according to court transcripts and body-cam video played in court, Sheriff Kitts, Chief Deputy Jerry Walker, and Constable Clay Woods made a crucial error when they arrived around 7:10 p.m. that Friday: They surmised the killing must have happened recently because the blood looked fresh to them.

Misinterpreting the time of death would be the first of a string of mistakes that later left Sophi’s friends, family, and jurors wondering if the brutal slaying will remain forever without a conviction.

According to District Attorney Wilson, officers only pulled video footage from a nearby convenience store for the few hours preceding the discovery of Sophi’s body Friday. Later it would become clear that Sophi likely died about 15 hours prior. Any possible video evidence of Danny’s car driving to or from Odessa to home was lost. “Do you think they even bothered to get [video footage] 24 hours before?” Wilson told the Observer. “That’s what I had to work with.”

While the Jeff Davis County Sheriff’s Department is a small force unaccustomed to investigating homicides, like all rural departments it could call on the Texas Rangers. Ranger Jeff Vajdos arrived in Fort Davis shortly after midnight to assess the situation. Vajdos had been with the Rangers for 12 years and had investigated other homicides.

Yet, both Vajdos and Kitts later admitted in court that they never pursued a search warrant for Danny’s trailer in Odessa—an obvious step considering that no weapon was found at the scene, Sophi’s phone was missing, and Danny was the lone suspect

and might have brought evidence with blood back to his trailer. (Prosecutors eventually obtained a warrant months later, but by then the trailer had been sold to someone else.)

The investigators did send the clothing Danny was wearing Friday evening to the Department of Public Safety lab in El Paso; no blood evidence was found.

Investigators said Sophi’s phone continued to ping (connect to) cellphone towers in the Fort Davis area into Saturday, but they never found her phone. Danny told the Observer that he had Sophi’s Apple password and claimed that if officers had asked, he could have used the Find Your iPhone app to locate it. Mann, Sophi’s Odessa friend, said she also told investigators that Danny had the password, but they didn’t seem to grasp how the technology worked. Mann twice asked prosecutors if they could subpoena Sophi’s Google account, which could have provided more precise locations of where her phone had been, but said the requests were not pursued. “It feels like there could be more processing done with both cell phones, with his and with hers,” she said.

Like all rural Texas counties, Jeff Davis lacks any medical examiner. Under Texas law, death investigations are often conducted by justices of the peace, who have minimal training. In this case, Fort Davis’ only JP was out of town and the body was shipped off for an autopsy. Observers later questioned why the Sullivan house wasn’t searched and photographed more thoroughly.

An autopsy report showed Sophi was missing a valuable ring she always wore— given to her by her grandmother with a peridot stone. Missing too from her corpse was another ring and a watch she usually wore.

Several months after his arrest, when Danny was free on bond, he was living in Sophi’s car, a black Lincoln MKX SUV. When Danny’s bond was revoked on February 14, 2019, his boss, Greg Blain, took the car—since he was the legal owner—and brought it back to Odessa. Blain asked a law enforcement officer to help him inventory the car. Found amidst piles of trash and clothing was a small box carrying Sophi’s missing rings and watch.

Danny told the Observer that he has

an explanation for that too.“I had that stuff because I was able to go back to my home after and retrieve stuff. I was trying to collect some family heirlooms since I didn’t know when I would have access to my home again.” Danny said he found the items in a jewelry box in the closet—an area not pictured in crime scene photos—although he thought one ring was on the vanity.

Had police established that jewelry was missing from the scene of the homicide— with a more thorough search of the home—they could have made a case that Danny took those items after killing his wife, possibly removing the peridot ring from her finger.

There were delays in interviewing witnesses too. Vajdos, the Texas Ranger, has admitted he first contacted key sources about nine months later (though trial witnesses and some of Sophi’s friends and family told the Observer that they weren’t interviewed for more than a year.) Nor did Vajdos ever watch the bodycam videos of the crime scene, according to Wilson. “You don’t know how many times I asked him to please review your video,” she said. “That’s the kind of nonsense I dealt with.”

The die was cast before the trial started. Wilson, the DA, would be working with a traumatized child’s testimony and precious little corroborating evidence, while the defense would send a clear message to the jury: If bumbling cops screwed up on every turn, how can you be sure they got the right guy?

By the time Danny’s trial started on October 23, 2019, in Fort Davis, prosecutors had learned more about the events surrounding Sophi’s slaying. Through interviews with her son, Tyler, they had placed the time of death sometime just before 4 a.m. on March 16, 2018.

Video interviews of Tyler played at the trial also showed the boy saying that the killer was wearing a mask, with a thin wisp of beard coming out the bottom. (The Observer was not allowed to view body camera or interview videos because authorities said they were evidence in an ongoing investigation

for a possible new trial.)

An autopsy report prepared by a Lubbock medical examiner could not estimate a time of death closer than 12-24 hours before Sophi was found at 7 p.m. But that report showed Sophi had been stabbed at least 40 times in her head, chest, and back and later bled out after collapsing. Within a couple of days of his arrest on March 19, Danny’s family helped arrange to post his $130,000 bond. The conditions of release stipulated no contact with Tyler, who was staying with his maternal grandmother in Odessa.

Danny described a chaotic, rough life in the following year. He couldn’t return home, so he lived out of cars, in an El Paso apartment briefly before being evicted, and in temporary housing in Odessa provided by his pastor. Danny’s bond was revoked after he was accused of trying to communicate with his son through his pastor’s wife and of failing to call his probation supervisor. He also sent an admittedly aggressive email to Wilson complaining about her accusations of his

conduct while on bond. He spent about nine months in jail awaiting trial.

Tyler continued to live with his maternal grandmother, attending Montessori school then transitioning to homeschooling. Blain said the boy was traumatized but began to recover even as he prepared to testify against his father. At trial, District Attorney Wilson set out to prove that Danny, upon hearing that his wife was leaving him, or upon finding texts from a male friend, launched into a jealous rage, stabbing Sophi repeatedly in anger.

Defense attorney Jim Darnell declined comment for this story, but jurors interviewed said it was clear he planned to portray investigators as incompetent, with “tunnel vision” on Danny as a suspect, and to emphasize that the only eyewitness was a traumatized child, who gave conflicting statements about his father’s involvement.

The vote to convict was 9-3, resulting in a mistrial.

The Observer interviewed six members of the 12-person jury. Some asked for anonymity out of fear of retribution in

their small community for how they voted or comments made about mistakes by local law enforcement. Those who voted to convict worried about the lack of physical evidence but believed Tyler’s testimony, thought the circumstantial evidence was solid, and came to the conclusion: Who else could have done it but Danny?

What astonished all six was the admission by the police that they had never searched Danny’s trailer. Ranger Vajdos and Sheriff Kitts seemed to be almost arguing on the stand over who was to blame. “This was a joint venture,” Kitts told the court. “Initially, it would be myself, and then later it was turned over to Ranger Vajdos.” Regarding not searching the trailer, Chief Deputy Jerry Walker told the court, “To be perfectly honest, it was an oversight.” (Kitts did not return multiple calls for additional comment; Vajdos declined because he might have to testify in a possible new trial.)

One juror, Lisa Gandy, said police missteps made her decision to vote to convict extremely difficult. “Maybe I watch

too much TV, but I would think that if you had done [this murder], you would have blood everywhere, and that’s why I was disgusted that the trailer … wasn’t immediately searched because I would think that there would be some evidence of blood somewhere.”

For his part, Danny said he would have welcomed a thorough search of his trailer and of his car, saying that would have bolstered his case for exoneration.

Several jurors said the prosecution spent too much time hashing out irrelevant phone records instead of emphasizing that the two last spoke at 5:35 p.m. on Thursday, which Danny had taken off as a sick day.

By Danny’s own admission, there was a narrow window of time in which he could have killed Sophi. Phone activity records show him in Odessa at 8:16 p.m. Thursday night. Testimony from Tyler (and rough estimates by a medical examiner) puts Sophi’s time of death at about 4 a.m. Friday morning. Given that

it’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Fort Davis to Odessa, Danny could have made the trip, stabbed Sophi, cleaned up and then reported to work, where records showed he arrived by 8:38 a.m. But to him, that timeline doesn’t make sense: “I would have to leave right then, then go to work the next day, be completely cool in composure, and work with people.”

At trial, officers testified that the family’s two dogs—a large Rottweiler and a medium-sized mutt—were present at the time the attacker stabbed Sophi and were barking ferociously at police, who asked Danny to escort them out. The prosecution was arguing that only Danny could have gotten in the house to murder Sophi without risking attack. Juror Cameron Pratt of Fort Davis, said that evidence almost convinced her to vote to convict. “If somebody came in that didn’t know the dogs, I think the dogs would’ve gone off barking,” she said.

All jurors said the key element was the only eyewitness: Tyler. Neighbor

Jeanne Hughson told the court that while her husband dealt with Danny on the porch, she tried to comfort Tyler inside. “He began talking to me about what had happened. And he said that a man had come into the house and stabbed his mother and that he thought it was his father. But then he decided that it maybe wasn’t his dad because [his dad] had cried a little.”

Later when an officer arrived, Hughson went out to the porch with Tyler. “And when we got there, [Tyler] pointed over at Mr. Sullivan, who was standing near a tree … and he looked me in the eyes and he says, ‘There is the murderer. Is he going to murder me?’”

Those close to Tyler at the time of his mother’s violent death described him as a unique boy who seemed socially awkward. He struggled

with some simple tasks while also displaying immense creativity and a knack for memorization, like identifying countries on a world map.

Tyler was ushered into the courtroom on the sixth day of the trial. He explained that he woke up and realized the bathroom light—which he always kept on—was off. “I wanted to go check what was going on. … So, when I got into the kitchen, I remember seeing the time is 3:36 a.m…. I see a man wrestling with my mommy.” Tyler said the man confronted him and asked “Who am I?” And Tyler responded, “My daddy.” When the man said, “No” and continued to ask Tyler who he was, the boy eventually responded, “The Golden State Killer.” He knew that name because of a documentary he’d watched on the serial killer.

One lingering impression that Sophi’s friends and family say they found frustrating was that they never heard testimony about what they saw as the true Danny—someone occasionally prone to violent outbursts, who admitted to buying illegal drugs, and who tried to isolate Sophi.

Introducing testimony about a pattern of emotional or physical abuse can be very important in proving the motive in a domestic violence case. But the DA, Wilson, lacked help from experts in domestic violence. Testimony from the victim’s parents about prior abusive or threatening incidents they wanted to share was blocked because Wilson hadn’t provided the information to the defense in advance, and the judge ruled it inadmissible.

When Theresa Blain was on the stand, she tried to describe her daughter’s troubled marriage but the judge shut her down. In an interview, Blain said she saw Danny corner Sophi one day and launch into an angry stream of obscenities. “He was yelling in her face, every name under the sun. He called her the ‘B word’ and the ‘C word.’ My daughter told me that he often called her a ‘whore’ or used that term to control her. He was always very suspicious and concerned that she was

whoring around. She had to give the exact time she left my house to the exact time she made it to her house.”

Theresa’s husband, Greg Blain, was unable to testify about how Danny once confronted him in an angry outburst that was so threatening Blain considered getting his gun. What resulted were depictions of Danny that made him out to be shy, aloof, a great father, and completely cooperative with investigators.

When the jury deadlocked, Judge Roy Ferguson thanked them for their efforts and time. Sophi’s mother was devastated.

After the trial, she filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Danny in Ector County civil court. She’d already won legal custody of Tyler after Danny’s arrest, and a court order stipulated that Danny could have no contact or communication with his son. But the lawsuit could further protect Tyler from future custody battles, and allowed for a civil determination that Danny was responsible for the death of his wife.

The lawsuit contained information not presented in the criminal trial. It alleged Danny had called a local State Farm Insurance agent within days of his wife’s violent death to request the $150,000 life insurance benefit for Sophi, and told the agent her manner of death was “undetermined.” Authorities alerted State Farm about the murder investigation to halt any disbursement of money.

Blain won her lawsuit on March 30 after Danny failed to file a response, resulting in a summary judgment against him. At a May 10 hearing, the judge awarded $7 million in damages. That ruling also means Blain will have access to the life insurance money, which will go to Tyler.

Danny told the Observer that he didn’t defend himself against the lawsuit because it wasn’t worth it. “I mean, I’m not going to fight her,” he said. “If she wants life insurance for [Tyler], then she can have it as long as it goes for [Tyler].”

Danny said he has dated several new women since his wife’s murder. “I’ve had three girlfriends … but everyone’s known. I’ve told everyone about it beforehand.” He said the first woman he dated left him after being harassed by Sophi’s friends.

Sophi’s father, Chuck Sabey, says he’s forced to think about Sophi’s slaying every day because he lives and works in Illinois

near Danny. “I have to drive to and from work through their town and pass where Sophia’s buried. So, oh my God, it makes this something that comes to my mind nonstop and every day.” For three and half years, he’s pinned his hope for justice on a retrial.

But the prosecutor who tried the case— Sandy Wilson—lost her bid for reelection for district attorney. The current DA, Ori White, said in July 2022 that he hoped to conduct a new trial by early 2023 in a larger city, where it would be easier to find impartial jurors. By April 2023, he’d moved the date to “later this summer.” Sophi’s friends and family said they believe White will never retry Danny. Some hope yet another new district attorney will. Others feel, at this point, it would be better to just accept the wrongful death lawsuit ruling and move on so that Tyler never again has to testify.

In a May 7 phone interview, Danny said he’d heard no trial would be held in 2023. He said living without a new trial date has left him “lost.” “I don’t know how to be a human. I don’t have any friends because I don’t want to lie to people. It’s my own cowardness of hating to be judged by people for these things, and it’s scary.” He still works as an electrician but often doesn’t see the point of his life.. “My only hope is one day, one day I’ll be able to see [Tyler] again. And I’m never going to do anything stupid because that’s the only thing that motivates me.”

Caroline Crawley, a juror who voted to convict Danny, said the case haunts her. “It does really bother people at their core. And I think it also bothers me as a woman to see this, this other woman who obviously tried to get help. I felt like she did the right things. She told people what was happening. She made plans to exit the marriage and leave with a little boy. And it still didn’t help her. It’s just really upsetting as another woman to see that happen and then just watch the guy not have to face the repercussions for that.”

Rob D’Amico is a freelance investigative journalist and podcaster based in Far West Texas. His latest podcast is: Witnessed Borderlands, a true-crime investigative podcast.

Abbott’s Billion Dollar Barrier

Without haste or good cause, Texas’ border wall is rearing its head—concerns about wildlife, public thrift, and property rights notwithstanding.

By JUSTIN MILLER

Photography By CHRISTOPHER L EE

The portion of the border wall being built near Del Rio angers some property owners.

Mary Ann Ortiz has deep roots on Vega Verde Road, which runs along the Rio Grande west of Del Rio. Ortiz was born and raised in this border town of 35,000 in Val Verde County, a couple hours southwest of San Antonio, where her father owned a sizable ranch on the north side of the road. When he passed away, the ranch was sold off in various parcels. She bought her 16 acres of land in the 1990s and raised her family here.

Nowadays, the retired teacher raises goats in a pen in her backyard. Her sister lives just down the road, as do her three children. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s home. It’s quiet and peaceful. Or it was—until all the construction trucks started whizzing by nonstop. And there have certainly been effects of increased migration from across the border. It’s not uncommon to see small groups passing through, and some properties on the river side of the road have been vacated by owners after migrants started squatting in the houses, she said.

The increased rate of crossings from Mexico into this rural community was part of the reason she and the rest of her neighbors agreed to let the Texas Military Department build a 10-foot fence along their land next to the roadside, free of cost, in 2021. It’s helped stop, or at least slow, migrants crossing through her property— though the visibly patched chain-link barrier obviously isn’t perfect. Plus, the tall cyclone fencing topped with razor wire makes her feel like she’s living in a prison.

Ortiz takes pride in the fact that you can identify where her property line starts and ends, along with the rest of her family’s, because they were the only ones who opted not to have razor wire installed on top. But now she’s dealing with the threat of another, bigger fence. Like many of her neighbors, land agents first contacted Ortiz early last year to see if she’d be interested in allowing the State of Texas to build a border wall along the back of her land. As it turned out, her home was right in the middle of a nearly 7-mile stretch of 30-foot steel wall that the state was planning to build on orders from Republican Governor Greg Abbott.

From the start, Ortiz was a firm “no.” But the land agent, who worked for a private company contracted by the state to acquire

border properties, “kept coming back and coming back,” Ortiz recalls, giving an initial quote for payment, then coming back later with higher offers. “So he was kind of lowballing us at the very beginning,” she said. “I kept telling him, ‘You’re wasting your time. ... I love my house. I love my ranch, no.’”

Ortiz’s predicament was the result of a highly politicized, multi-billion-dollar border security scheme rolled out by Abbott in 2021. Key to the governor’s border gambit, dubbed “Operation Lone Star,” was a promise familiar to anyone with a pulse during the administration of former President Donald Trump: to build a great wall dividing Texas from Mexico. At first, this may have seemed like so much political bluster. Presidents from George W. Bush to Trump had struggled to build a wall along Texas’ privately owned, nigh untamable, and riverine border—and unlike them, Abbott didn’t even have the power of eminent domain to wrench land from residents.

Nevertheless, Abbott’s scheme is slowly and inefficiently becoming what could be one of the largest and most expensive public infrastructure projects in state history. At his direction, the state government has identified about 800 miles of border supposedly in need of a barrier; at the state’s current pace, that would put taxpayers on the hook for nearly $20 billion over 30 years. The Legislature has already shoveled nearly $1 billion to the governor for a first installment of roughly 40 miles, with close to another billion dollars on the way for the next phase. Abbott’s wall is primed to become a permanent strain on taxpayers’ wallets, a direct threat to border communities, wildlife, and landowners who fear they will be railroaded by the state, and a new source of cronyism as the state wheels and deals with political patrons to advance the governor’s pet project.

After ramping up slowly and quietly in the background of the governor’s broader border offensive, Abbott’s wall is now quickly becoming reality. For Ortiz and others who live along Vega Verde Road, that reality has become an unwelcome incursion.

Whatever the state was offering, Ortiz knew it wouldn’t account for the impact of a hulking wall on the value of her land and house. “This,” she said, pointing to her home, “is not going to be worth what it’s

supposed to be worth. … Who’s going to want to buy a house with a big border wall saying, ‘Okay, you belong to Mexico; you belong to [Ciudad] Acuña’?”

But the state acquired the rights to build its wall on land owned by many of her neighbors. Since construction began this spring, the wall has grown closer to both sides of her property, and Ortiz fears it will just funnel traffic from across the border through her home. She and others on Vega Verde worry that, eventually, they may be forced to take whatever the state offers.

Ortiz’s son Raul Gaona, who moved with his family four years ago into a house just down the road, is in an even worse position. The state wants to build right through his property, too, but the wall would end up coming within a stone’s throw from the front door of his home. He rejected their first offer, and when they came back offering twice as much, he declined again: “$18,000 won’t last me too long, and I’ll have that fence here the rest of my life.”

Gaona cherishes the solitude of sitting on his front porch with no one around. If he had an ugly wall looming over him, he said he would probably move away. “I’m going to wait it out, see what happens,” he said. “We just got here. … I really don’t want to just up and leave already.”

Two years ago, Abbott came to Del Rio for a border security town hall at the local civic center, where he trumpeted the rollout of his nascent Operation Lone Star. Gearing up for a third-term reelection bid, Abbott was facing increasingly heated threats of primary challenges from his right flank, and he was using this newfangled operation, the latest in a long line of theatrical border security surges in Texas, as a way to burnish his immigration hawk credentials.

His town hall speech climaxed with an announcement that he would soon begin construction of a border wall in Texas, picking up Trump’s wall-building mantle, which had been shirked by President Joe Biden. The pronouncement drew rapturous applause and cheers from the crowd, which Abbott paused to soak in for nearly 20 seconds.

“It’s a Third World country where these farmers and ranchers are living with their lives on the line every single day,” Abbott said, in an interview days later, of the need

Mary Ann Ortiz of Del Rio has refused to sell her property for border wall construction.

for a wall in places like Del Rio. “Somebody has to step up for these people. And that’s the governor of Texas.”

Some Texas GOP leaders like ex-Governor Rick Perry and Senator John Cornyn, possessed of at least a passing familiarity with the state’s border, have been skeptical of physical border walls. But Trump completely shifted the Overton window such that building the wall eclipsed everything else, including concerns about the feds infringing on private property rights and the exorbitant cost to taxpayers.

“Governor Abbott had to build this wall. There was no choice politically. This was the direction the party was going,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor. “He had to follow along or be left behind.”

The Trump administration targeted nearly 750 miles of U.S.-Mexico border for wall construction at an average cost of about $20 million per mile—a rate five times higher than the cost of fencing built by prior administrations. Ultimately, Trump completed only about 400 miles of wall, much of that in the form of replacing existing smaller barriers in Southwestern states where the borderlands were already federally owned. Even with federal eminent domain powers, Trump struggled to wrench land away from Texas fronterizos—whose land is often passed down by family through several generations with tangled webs of ownership records—building only 50 miles in Texas, about 20 of those miles in the Rio Grande Valley.

When Biden took office in early 2021, he ground almost all wall construction to a halt, suspending billions in awarded contracts and throwing condemnation lawsuits into limbo. The State of Texas promptly sued the feds, claiming that Biden was legally mandated to continue construction, in a pending case. Since Biden’s ascension to the White House, “The border wall has become a living symbol of the Republican Party’s desire to put a fork in the eye of the federal government and to use that as political leverage in Texas,” Rottinghaus said.

A week after his Del Rio summit, Abbott, flanked by a coterie of top Republican lawmakers in Austin, issued a directive ordering the Texas Facilities Commission (TFC)—a small agency in charge of

constructing and maintaining state government offices—to direct his massive, politically driven wall-building project. And Abbott signed a letter to Biden demanding that the president return any private property seized by the feds to landowners so the state could negotiate with those landowners for its own wall.

At Abbott’s side, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick humbly declared that the governor’s directive was more consequential than any

“Governor [Greg] Abbott had to build this wall.”

other action taken by a governor in modern history. “This document will go down as one of the most important documents in the history of Texas. Because it’s reclaiming our land, our border, our country, our state, for the people of Texas and America,” he crowed. “We are being invaded.”

Abbott’s critics met the rollout of his border wall project with outrage over the use of state money to continue a federal project, along with skepticism about whether this was all just a big campaign stunt. But, regardless of the original motivation, Abbott seems to have committed to the bit—and he’s validating

virtually all his detractors’ concerns along the way.

Since its launch, the state has provided little in the way of public information or transparency about the details of its border wall plans. TFC has refused to provide or confirm basic details about the project, citing concerns about homeland security and terrorism. The agency has also declined the Texas Observer’s requests to interview the TFC executive director or commissioners.

Over the past several months, the Observer has filed numerous public information requests and scoured public contract documents, state expenditure data, and county land records to track where the wall is headed, how taxpayer money is being spent, and to get an inside look at how the state government has navigated its entry into the perilous business of wall-building.

Abbott’s wall-building scheme, like its federal predecessor, has so far proven itself to be a slow-moving, billion-plus-dollar boondoggle that has produced very little completed wall and plenty of logistical quagmires, delays, and soaring costs, while sparking resistance and resentment among many landowners and local leaders who find themselves in the project’s path.

Local officials have often been kept in the dark about plans developed and approved hundreds of miles away in Austin to build wall in their communities. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled Legislature eagerly rubberstamped $1 billion for the governor’s wall in 2021. This session, a bill by GOP state Senator Brandon Creighton that would have given TFC eminent domain powers to construct its wall—citing the need to build more quickly—died without a floor vote. But, with hardly any public oversight and debate, lawmakers approved a budget that gives the governor roughly another billion dollars for the wall.

Driving along the peaks of a rolling caliche road in western Starr County in mid-May, stretches of border fencing peek out through the rolling green chaparral and scrubland, cutting through the landscape for thousands of feet like a rust-colored wound. An orchestra of rare birds chirping competes with the faint

din of heavy machinery down in a valley— the beeping and grinding and whirring of bulldozers and concrete trucks.

A few weeks earlier, botanists and plant enthusiasts from around the Rio Grande Valley received an emergency bat signal and flocked to a private ranch that runs along the river in remote western Starr County. The pristine land features a largely undisturbed habitat home to a diverse array of rare plant and animal species. For years, it’s been a destination for birders and naturalists to visit with permission from the owner.

In January, though, the landowner—a family who asked that their name not be used in this story—had signed an easement granting the State of Texas permission to build a border wall through the property, county land records show. Now, construction crews were beginning to raze a path over 2 miles long through the ranch, destroying any habitat in the way. The plant-lovers’ plan was to rescue as many specimens as possible and transplant them to a new home on a private property a few miles away.

One of those who came to help was an amateur botanist who goes by Joey Santore. He produces a popular YouTube channel called “Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t,” featuring his self-described “low-brow, crass approach to plant ecology as muttered by a misanthropic Chicago Italian.” In early April, he ran an episode that documented the devastating impact of Abbott’s wall on this land as volunteers scrambled in 100-degree fahrenheit heat to save as much as they could.

His camera panned across a portion of land that had just been bulldozed as he asked, “How much cool stuff was just destroyed this morning?” He showed a bulldozer in action, stirring up a massive plume of dust on what had become a barren swath of land. Aerial drone footage showed the immense footprint of the coming wall. All this, he mused, for a stupid political stunt: “This is just Abbott basically just trying to flex his muscle and put on some showmanship.”

Stakes in the ground marked what would soon be cleared. “Everything that way is getting smushed,” he said. He pointed to a giant clump of coryphantha macromeris nipple beehive cactus—to yucca constricta

and hechtia, to dahlia hedgehog, fish-hook cacti, and peyote: rare and native plants, highly resilient species that thrive in this arid, rocky habitat with strong, nutrientdense tuberous roots. Santore noticed a bed of large fossils that he said was from the Eocene Epoch when, over 30 million years ago, this land was at the bottom of a shallow ocean. “This is fuckin’ morbid man. Texas just does not give a fuck.”

A biologist in the video told Santore that volunteers had recently found a handful of prostrate milkweed plants around the

construction of a border barrier.”

The governor’s office also chided Biden for kowtowing to woke wildlife. “Instead of stepping up to protect innocent lives from human traffickers and stopping the influx of deadly drugs like fentanyl from coming across our border, President Biden has instead chosen to focus on protecting plants,” an Abbott spokesperson told the Texas Tribune last February.

Even with the federal designation, it’s not clear that the presence of endangered prostate milkweed would halt construction of the state wall in this part of Starr County, since the Endangered Species Act provides fewer protections for vulnerable plants on state and private land than on federal property. Records show that TFC and its project contractors knew there was a possible presence of prostrate milkweed and Zapata bladderpod, another endangered plant, on the ranch that could be impacted by the wall construction; it’s not clear what, if any, measures were taken. TFC said in a statement that its program manager, the Michael Baker & Huitt-Zollars Joint Venture, “is responsible for ensuring compliance with environmental and regulatory requirements from a program perspective.”

Starr County had been among Trump’s primary targets for his wall, with the administration essentially planning to wall off the entire county. The feds seized many riverside properties but managed to build almost nothing before Trump left office. The ranch featured in Santore’s YouTube video was spared condemnation during Trump’s term. Then the state came knocking with its plans to build 7 miles along a stretch of land west of the border town of Roma.

property, including one in the impact zone of construction, which they were able to save. Just weeks earlier, in late February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had officially listed the rare plant—which exists in just a few populations in South Texas and northern Mexico—as an endangered species. When the agency had initially announced its proposal a year earlier, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton promptly filed a 12-page letter complaining that the Biden administration was restricting the state’s ability to implement border security measures—“including but not limited to

The state awarded the contract for the ranch in Santore’s video to a company called BFBC, which was among the top wall builders for Trump. The firm is getting $47 million to build the 1.75 mile segment, a rate of nearly $27 million per mile. Timothy Barnard, the founder and chairman of BFBC’s parent company, is an active GOP donor. After BFBC got its state contract last September, he cut a $5,000 check to Abbott’s campaign—his first donation to a state politician in Texas. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Other landowners in the area, such as the

“This is fuckin’ morbid man. Texas just does not give a fuck.”

Valley Land Fund, a conservation group that owns a small bird preserve on the banks of the river in Saliñeno—a popular spot for birders visiting from around the country— are standing firm against the state. “We have just chosen to take a stand to not allow the state to access our land,” said Debralee Rodriguez, executive director of the group. Building a wall through their property, which is just 2.6 acres and under 300 feet wide, would almost certainly force the reserve to close: “If you did that to our small land, you’d wipe out all our vegetation.”

Despite the Fund’s resistance, the state appears to be going ahead with plans to build right next to its northern property line, on a piece of land owned by a local water supply company, according to county property records. If that happens, the bird sanctuary would be surrounded on either side.

The state’s proposed wall route in Starr includes dozens of land parcels, many of which were seized or targeted by the feds under Trump. Courts have since returned

much of that property, but Texas is having a hard time persuading these landowners to voluntarily sign over land rights.

Abbott and TFC have publicly said that most people are willing to accept the wall on their land and that “hard no’s” are few and far between. But in contract documents from February, the state’s program manager painted a less rosy picture: Along the first 45 miles targeted by the state, only 25 percent of landowners were participating.

In the nearly two years after the wall project was launched, very little new fencing was completed. By the end of 2022, the first segment of wall along 1.7 miles of farmland, owned by the state’s General Land Office in rural Starr County, was only just getting completed—roughly five months behind schedule and at a cost of about $35 million, contract records show. And that was supposed to be the easy part.

Texas has awarded contracts worth nearly $850 million to build 40 miles in various segments from Brownsville and

Los Indios, near the Gulf, upriver to Starr County, through big ranches and tiny towns in Webb County, to Del Rio.

Millions of dollars have been spent on a small army of land agents, appraisers, and title agents who’ve swarmed across South Texas working to convince landowners to sign over their land for Abbott’s wall. Yet TFC has obtained just a fraction of the land needed to complete its first phase of construction. As of May, the agency had closed deals for about 15 miles of property, with 25 miles still in the negotiation process, records show. Only 3.48 miles of wall had actually been completed—out of the over 700 miles that Abbott wants in total.

“The planning here is very piecemeal and doesn’t appear to have a systematic goal, except to just show the flag and pretend that something approximating the Trump effort is still continuing,” said Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law who specializes in government contracting. “The Trump effort had the resources of the federal government

behind it. Even that wasn’t enough.”

The agency that Abbott has put in charge of all this, the Texas Facilities Commission, is run by Michael Novak, a tall, silverhaired former construction executive from San Antonio who once ran a failed bid as a Chamber of Commerce conservative against incumbent state Senator Donna Campbell. He served for several years as a commissioner at TFC until he was tapped to become executive director in 2018.

Novak described his agency’s assignment as needing to essentially replicate the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government’s civil engineering outfit that designed and directed the Trump wall effort. TFC has done this by effectively outsourcing the entire operation to a pair of private contractors: Broaddus & Associates, which advises the state agency, and the Michael Baker & Huitt-Zollars Joint Venture, the project manager in charge of construction.

“Sending the TFC out to build a wall along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border is like calling up Angie’s List to get someone

to build a fortress,” Tiefer said.

Abbott specifically ordered the wall to be built to the exact same specifications as Trump’s, so the design phase may have been a light lift. But his early promises that landowners would volunteer property and that money would flow in from redblooded Americans nationwide have fallen flat. A crowdfunding effort Abbott launched in 2021 pulled in a little over $50 million, with 98 percent coming from a hermetic billionaire heir in Wyoming.

Baker & Huitt’s initial contract, for $10.3 million, has since tripled in cost through a series of amendments as the project expanded and more resources were pumped into the state’s land acquisition campaign. By mid-November of 2022, the firm had exhausted its budget, meant to last through March, due to protracted land acquisition challenges, requiring a contract amendment for another $2.5 million just to keep going. “It is obvious that a different model for negotiations will need to be employed to curtail endless negotiations with landowners on these projects,” the

company wrote in its amended contract proposal. A few months later, TFC extended Baker & Huitt’s contract through the end of 2024.

Abbott has acknowledged his wall’s molassal pace, while claiming things are improving. “One thing that has slowed our process a little bit is getting those rights to build the wall,” he said in January at a press conference in the tiny border community of Los Indios, where he celebrated the start of a less-thanmile stretch of wall and announced a new “border czar.” But the governor’s bullish on his project’s future: “With the work of the Facilities Commission, we have accelerated that process of acquiring the land rights.” In a TV interview later that month, Abbott predicted that in 2023, “We may wind up adding more border wall than President Trump was able to add in his entire presidency.”

More wall means more money for the lucky few contractors that were selected, through an open bid process, to build the first 40 miles of wall: Posillico Civil,

Southwest Valley Constructors, BFBC, Fisher Sand & Gravel, and SLSCO. All of these firms had collectively received billions in federal contract awards to build the Trump wall, and one of them—Fisher— built a private wall in Hidalgo County that was originally connected to a fraudulent crowdfunding scheme run by nowconvicted Trump allies. That wall is now in danger of collapsing into the Rio Grande.

By spring, four of these contractors had finally begun construction on six different sites totalling close to 15 miles. “We feel the program has reached a tipping point and we are gaining significant momentum,” Richard Cellon, one of TFC’s project consultants, said at a March meeting. But the effort was still well behind schedule. TFC had initially estimated that the five construction projects would be completed by mid-2024, records show, but ahead of this year’s legislative session,TFC had pushed its estimate back to the fall of 2025—four years after the border wall funds were approved.

As sine die approached in late May, Texas had completed less than four miles of border wall. The Facilities Commission had paid out about $150 million in total for the wall, including $90 million to its builders and over $40 million to Gibraltar Fabrication for 13 miles worth of steel bollard panels—which the state claims to have bought at a steep discount because of the feds halting wall construction. TFC had also paid about $3.75 million to acquire land rights from dozens of property owners.

At least one of these land deals has also raised the specter of possible cronyism. In February, the state struck a deal to acquire the rights to build five miles of wall through Faith Ranch in the vast, unpopulated terrain of far western Webb County. The ranch is owned by Houston oil and ranching heir Stuart Stedman, a longtime ally of the governor who has given his campaign over $1 million since 2015. The state paid him $1.5 million in the deal—effectively funneling public dollars to a major Abbott donor to boost the governor’s pet project. TFC then awarded the construction contract to build the wall through the ranch to none other than Fisher Sand & Gravel.

It will cost Texas taxpayers $120 million for Fisher to build the 5-mile-long wall through the ranch of the governor’s buddy,

about $24 million per mile, which will require building an access road through the ranch to the nearest county road. Stedman’s agreement also stipulates that the wall will include several gates, openings for irrigation and drainage pipes, and construction of a new cattle fence— accommodations that not all landowners are receiving.

TFC told the Observer that it couldn’t comment on negotiations or other specifics about the Faith Ranch project due to “security concerns and protecting procurement integrity,” though the agency did say the governor was not involved. Stedman did not respond to requests for comment. The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment about this and other matters for this story.

Back along Vega Verde Road, on a late Tuesday morning in early May, one landowner looked regretfully across a swath of razed land along the back end of his small ranch as construction crews crossed into the western edge of his property and began installing rusty reddish steel bollard panels. If he’d known what he did now, he would have never signed up for this.

Land agents from a company called Universal Field Services, which is contracted to acquire land for the state, first contacted the retired rancher—who did not want his name used due to privacy and safety concerns—about a year ago with an offer to acquire the rights to build a border wall through his property.

While the state was prohibited from using eminent domain to seize land for its wall, the landowner said the landmen implied he would be wise to sell now lest that change. “Whether you like it or not, it was going to be built,” he said, summarizing their pitch. So he bargained their initial offer up to $25,000 and signed a contract granting the state a permanent 50-foot-wide easement to build its wall and a patrol road along his back property line, a decision he now wishes he could take back.

A former mechanic at Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio, he bought his 40-acre piece of land nearly 20 years ago for his retirement. The ranchette wasn’t a moneymaker, but over the years he’s been able to raise some cattle, goats, pigs,

and horses. The payment from the state last year covered a substantial amount of what he originally paid for the property. He figured a big wall along the edge of his ranch, which abuts a railroad track, wouldn’t be a big deal.

But once construction crews began clearing the back portion of his land in April, the landowner realized the wall wasn’t going to be built along his property line as agreed. Instead, it would run 30 feet inside that line—lopping off the back of his ranch. Apparently, the electric company that runs its power lines along the railway had recently told the state it had to realign its wall route.

The state’s land agents, he said, didn’t inform him of the change until he confronted them, and he spent weeks trying to get the state to compensate him for the additional land and comply with other terms of his original agreement— all while construction continued through his property.

The state ultimately offered to pay him $15,000 more, he said, but no final deal had been reached as of mid-June—in part because he said the state reneged on a promise to install an access gate.

“Due to security and privacy concerns, specific project details are not being released at this time,” a TFC spokesperson said in a statement. The agency, and its team of contractors, “works diligently to address all construction concerns with stakeholders.”

As he watched the wall cut through his ranch, one steel panel after another, the Del Rio landowner felt that even if he got the extra money, it wouldn’t be worth it. The impact of wall construction was far beyond what he’d imagined: The crews are using his own soil to level the path for the wall and have reshaped the land in a way that will funnel all the rainwater and runoff from neighboring properties into his property. “They’re pretty much using the rest of my property for their project,” he said. After a recent heavy rain, he said he found a strange white fluid in a pond on his land that he believes is runoff from the construction.

Looking back, this landowner feels like he got burned by the agents who were sent to acquire his land on behalf of the state. “Don’t trust them,” he said. “They already did me wrong.”

A rancher on his property in Del Rio, through which a border wall is being built

BRAVING ‘LA BESTIA’

Asylum-seekers risk life and limb to reach America as President Biden tries to dissuade them.

by JORDAN VONDERHAAR

Forty miles south of Ciudad Juárez, protected from the glaring desert sun by a blanket tied to a ladder, a mother nurses her nine-monthold son as the sun rises on their fifth day aboard the train known as la bestia—the beast. The mom has stuffed cotton balls in her ears for protection from the thunderous sound of the wheels along the track, but the baby won’t tolerate the cotton balls and may suffer permanent hearing damage. Around them cluster a father and four more children—a whole family on the run from poverty and societal dysfunction in Venezuela.

A few cars back, another family, this one from Colombia, steadies themselves atop bundles of rebar. Half-inch metal wires are twisted to bind the rods, forming a line of sharp spikes all around the family. Falling here could mean impalement. A 14-year-old, who’d dropped out of school back home to support his family, asks me what school is like in America. “Schools in America are all different,” I answer vaguely, my mind turning to recent news stories about the rise of child labor in the States.

These families know the risks of their journey: violence, extortion, dismemberment, death. But they feel they had no choice. Marian is a stark example of this risk: Last year she left her home in Honduras, unable to feed her five children and facing threats of violence. She journeyed for six months by foot and train, attempting to enter the United states to claim asylum, as is her right under U.S. and international law. She was beaten, extorted, and raped several times, she said, before finally making it to Eagle Pass—where she lost her right leg and most of her left foot trying to jump off la bestia

As the U.S. government continues to make it more difficult to enter America, urging asylum-seekers to apply from their home countries instead, refugees like these will continue braving ever-deadlier routes. As one traveler put it to me: “If your house is on fire, you don’t wait inside the house for the fire department to come.”

The train arrives in the heart of Ciudad Juárez, and two families from Venezuela gather their few belongings—some apples and mangoes, sunscreen, bottles of water and formula, and blankets—and stuff them into trash bags as they climb off the train. Once on the ground, one of the men dons a baby carrier, and a woman straps her 9-month-old son onto his chest. The two families make their way to a nearby grocery store with the other migrants.

A young girl smiles playfully at her exhausted mother as they are shielded from the midday sun by a blanket tied to a ladder. The resilient exuberance of the toddler is undampened by the gravity of their situation. This is their fifth consecutive day aboard la bestia and the second month of the journey from their home in Venezuela.

A 23-year-old man from Venezuela lies prone on the fiberglass roof of a railcar in the Chihuahuan desert. Cotton balls are stuffed in his ears to protect from the thunderous noise of the train as it rumbles along the tracks. His wife and children are nestled in the space between cars below.

Two young boys grasp a railing above their heads and watch the tracks pass below them as they lean out into the space between railcars. One of the boys sports a bandage on his left hand, which he cut jumping off the train in the dark a few nights prior.

A family from Venezuela rides atop piles of rebar. They say they have been traveling for 45 days and are thirsty, hungry, and tired. Thick metal ties that hold rebar bundles together are twisted into rows of spikes ready to impale anyone who might fall in the wrong place.

Marián left her home and five children in Honduras in 2022 to look for work in the United States. Traveling for nearly three months, she said she suffered beatings, extortion, and rape, finally arriving in Eagle Pass. As she was trying to board a train to San Antonio, she tripped and was caught beneath it. She lost her right leg and most of her left foot and spent months in the hospital. Now she can’t walk and can’t work to support her family.

In Sunland Park, New Mexico, just a few miles west of El Paso, train tracks run alongside the border wall. Many people attempt to cross here and quickly board a moving train to evade capture by Border Patrol agents. Agents say they see many injuries from people trying to board a train that is moving too fast.

THE HILL COUNTRY’S LOST UTOPIA

Searching for an egalitarian society in this red state

by JOSEPHINE LEE

Photography by CHRISTOPHER LEE

On the south banks of the Llano River, the Castell General Store hosts its bimonthly “Drinking with Jesus” church service. Even with dogged Sunday morning rain, around 70 people recently gathered in the back room, singing “Count Your Blessings” while sipping bloody marys and mimosas.

Repurposed from an old gas station, the Hill Country store’s interior is lined with exposed brick and corrugated metal. Tables are made from slabs of wood bolstered by wooden beer barrels. An eclectic mix of decorative figures—Darth Vader, Snoop Dog drinking Corona, a mounted deer head with beer bottles for antlers—stare as the churchgoers sing. The offerings are as varied as the decor: burgers and tacos, fishing and camping gear, groceries, and a sermon on the parable of the prodigal son.

After the laid-back service, owners Randy Leifeste and his son Marc Leifeste, along with cousin Bobbette Estes, tell me about August and Sophie Leifeste, the first in their family to settle in Castell in 1853. The family still owns land handed down through five generations.

August and Sophie emigrated with their children from the village of Broistedt in the province of Braunshweig, Germany. For the hardworking family of shepherds

and small farmers, the prospect of cheap land motivated them to emigrate after the “the Hungry Forties,” a period of agrarian crisis followed by economic depression. On January 10, 1853, August purchased 12 acres for $100.

Life as self-sufficient farmers and ranchers was rough for pioneers and their descendants. Randy recalls that even in the 1950s, “My father never let me sleep past seven in the morning. We got up early in the morning and went to work in the fields. We would come home, have a big lunch, and take a 20-minute nap. And then we would go back out to work until it was dark. It was like this everyday except for Sunday.”

But they were not the first German settlers to choose this spot.

This tiny crossroads community was founded as a socialist utopia. It used to be called Bettina, after a German author and activist who championed the oppressed underclasses, though few traces of that town remain today outside of history books and a few old letters. Even longtime residents know little of its history.

In September 1847, 40 college fraternity brothers from the German universities in Giessen, Heidelberg, and Darmstadt

arrived at this bucolic spot where Elm Creek runs into the Llano River.

Those original settlers were all men, ages 13 to 27. Armed with ideals from French utopian socialists, die Vierziger, or “the Fortyers,” sought to build a new society on Texas soil—a “communistic society” free of the hierarchies, political oppression, and economic inequality scourging semi-feudal Germanic states. Their community would have “no regular scheme of government” and “would not brook the tyranny of a leader,” wrote Louis Reinhardt, the youngest settler, and be based on the tenets of “friendship, freedom, and equality.”

Instead of spending time drinking, playing football, and hazing, like today’s fraternity brothers, the Fortyers spent time drinking, saber-dueling, and discussing politics and philosophy. According to Brian Vick, professor of 19th-century German history at Emory University, those universities were a hotbed of revolutionary ideas at a time when the educated professional class was calling for an end to absolutist monarchies, prompting the “springtime of revolutions” across central Europe in 1848. This movement included liberal constitutional monarchists,

radical republicans, and socialists. The Fortyers were the furthest left, demanding German unification and sovereignty from the Prussian and Hapsburg empires, along with a constitution and social and economic equality.

A group of German noblemen called the Adelsverein, or the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants to Texas, supplied the Fortyers with transportation and $12,000 in provisions and materials. Each settler received 320 acres from a part of the Fisher-Miller grant, which the society obtained in negotiations with the Comanche tribe.

The Fortyers included two physicians, one engineer, one theologian, one instrument maker, two architects, seven lawyers, four foresters, two mechanics, two carpenters, one butcher, one blacksmith, one artillery lieutenant, one shipwright, one brewer, one miller, one hosteler, one agriculturist, and one botanist.

But without any farmers (and arguably too many lawyers), the utopian commune lasted only a year. By the summer of 1848, young Reinhardt reported that the colony “went to pieces like a bubble.” Provisions had run out and they had produced only 200 bushels of corn.

The Fortyers scattered. Decades later, Reinhardt described the dream’s failure: “It had no real government. Since everybody was to work if he pleased and when he pleased, the result was that less and less work was done as time progressed.” Even Marx and Engels at the time criticized utopian socialists for “drifting off into pure phantasies,” isolating themselves and imposing a social organization from above, instead of engaging in the people’s struggle from below.

Thus in place of that imagined utopia, the Leifeste family and others later settled around where Elm Creek runs into the Llano River. They came for economic rather than political reasons. Still, their descendents valued communal living and self-sufficient independence, though they were perhaps more libertarian than socialist.

The town was renamed Castell after Count Carl Frederick Castell, the Adelsverein’s business manager.

Today Castell remains a tiny unincorporated community of only 12

souls, dependent for survival on longtime residents and urban visitors with far different goals than the Fortyers. But descendants of that second wave of settlers remain.

Generations of the Leifestes have attended the Methodist-Episcopal church and studied at the Castell school, which went to the seventh grade. They manned the store and became town postmasters. The community remained relatively insular, though trouble sometimes arrived.

Randy tells me that his greatgrandfather, as a child, once hid in the hollow of a tree to avoid abduction during raids by members of the Comanche tribe. According to Scott Zesch’s book The Captured, what had started as friendly relations between the tribe and the

German settlers deteriorated when farms grew and more land was fenced. From 1874 to 1877, the Hoodoo Wars or feuds, which pitted German immigrants against other American settlers, escalated from cattle rustling to mob violence to murders.

While German-American communities in Texas generally opposed secession and denounced slavery (or even fought on the side of the Union), it’s not clear where the families of Castell stood during the Civil War.

Later, during WWI and WWII, when state law prohibited German language and literature from being taught in public schools, and when authorities opened letters between German-Americans and their families in the homeland, Randy says that his family stopped speaking German

German settlers built this chapel that still stands in Castell.

in public.

No Fortyers remained in Castell, but some tested out utopian socialist ideals elsewhere. The short-lived Tusculum colony was the start of Boerne, founded by a former Fortyer named Gustav Thiessen. Another, Jacob Kuechler, recruited German Unionists to serve in a militia group. When this attempt at undermining the Confederate cause failed to succeed, he twice led other German Unionists to meet up with the Union Army in Mexico, and later served as an elected member of Lincoln’s Republican Party during Reconstruction. Another Fortyer, Christoph Flach, married Antoine Kapp, the daughter of the abolitionist Ernst Kapp, and his family helped develop Comfort, Texas.

The Leifestes are fiercely proud

BY THE

SUMMER OF 1848, THE COLONY

“WENT TO PIECES LIKE A BUBBLE.”

that Castell remains unincorporated. Locals joke that the closest thing to any government is their group of volunteer firefighters. “There is no law enforcement. There was never any crime and there’s still no crime. Everybody just got along together. Everybody knew everybody and when somebody needed help, we all got together and took care of each other,” Randy said.

Still, Castell has been changing. To survive, it had to. In the 1970s, Randy’s family left and the town population dwindled to 70. When Randy retired and decided to return to Castell in the 2000s, it was a “ghost town.” Four residents remained.

Since then, Randy reopened the Castell General Store with the help of his son

Marc. The store became the town hub. The Leifestes host annual festivals there, including a chili cook-off, and a testicle festival, which served up 750 pounds of calf fries the day before that recent church service. His cousin Bobette runs a campground on her property. And they are now selling or leasing their land, like other longtime German families. Land that used to be $80 an acre 50 years ago is now over $15,000 an acre, said Randy, who doubles as a real estate broker. Since the pandemic, he’s sold 13 pieces of property.

The Leifestes and other townsfolk are opening their arms to outsiders. (I was immediately greeted by hugs.) But they don’t want Castell to turn into another Fredericksburg, a “commercialized version” of small town Germania, Texas, Marc said.

Today, the only vestige of Bettina is a historical marker on the north side of the Llano River. The unremarkable tribute reads: “First communal settlement in Texas. Located where Elm Creek enters the Llano River. Abandoned in less than a year, when supplies ran out.”

Marc and Randy Leifeste (from left to right) are direct descendants of Germans who settled in Castell.

This historical marker on the north side of the Llano River is about all that’s left of the German settlement of Bettina.

REVIEWS

HOW LESS-EDUCATED WHITES FELL BEHIND AND BLAMED RACE

In Clinton, Arkansas, a

examines the effects of a stagnant economy in the place she came from.

By MONICA POTTS

The fortunes of rural towns like Clinton, Arkansas collapsed during my young adulthood, from 2000 to 2010. The period was marked by recessions—the dot-com bust, the economic slump after 9/11, and the Great Recession. But those disasters laid bare a longer-running problem, a contraction of good jobs and an expansion of lowpaying ones in the service sector at places like Walmart, which began in Arkansas. On the East Coast, I entered job markets that were vibrant and growing, however fitfully, but in my hometown and places like it, the manual labor jobs once fueled by the building and infrastructure booms started to disappear.

Blue-collar families in 2018 were essentially making the same amount of money as their counterparts had in 1978, so even in the best circumstances, my childhood best friend Darci Brawner and her partner George Bigelow might have brought in approximately what our parents had made thirty years before. The Great Recession, which began at the end of 2007, finally made the decline obvious. In rural places like Clinton, the bottom fell out of the economy, and people who’d forgone college to work their way up found that there was no up to get to.

In 2008 the chicken-processing plant

next to the middle school, where my grandparents and Darci’s dad had worked, closed. In 2006 a plant that had made electrical cords closed. In 2013 a frozen food company moved into that space, promising to hire hundreds; it hired about a dozen instead. In 2008 a boat factory that employed about eighty was hit by a massive tornado, and it did not survive.

The natural gas boom allowed people in Arkansas and in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and a few other states to stave off full-blown disaster. At first, people made money selling the mineral rights to their land, or from natural-gas production, and local men were hired to build the platforms for gas wells and to work in the industry. A handful of people around the county hit the lottery, earning millions. The boom was short-lived. The price of natural gas plummeted in 2009. There had been too much supply, and with the recession, the companies left for Texas, where the gas was easier and more profitable to extract. Jobs left with them. A few people stayed with the industry, commuting by plane for long workweeks, or traveling by RV to jobs and coming home to Arkansas in the off periods. But even those jobs had become scarce.

The Great Recession widened the gap between the most and least well-off areas

of the United States in what the Brookings Institute called the Great Reshuffling. The places where the economy not only bounced back but thrived, where jobs grew and businesses were created, were concentrated on the coasts, especially the Northeast Corridor and the Pacific Northwest, and in a few places in between: Utah, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Texas. Suburban and urban zip codes did best. The most prosperous zip codes also had higher rates of educational attainment, with 45 percent of the country’s advanced degree holders living in them. These trends persisted through the Covid-19 pandemic. Black Americans, Latinos, and rural whites, on the other hand, are more likely to live in “distressed” zip codes, places losing both jobs and people. A third of Arkansas’s population lives in a distressed zip code. These places, where the least educated white Americans are clustered, are unlikely ever to recover.

The place that less-educated white people occupy in the national fabric has changed as well. Once farmer-settlers, they have now been left behind by progress. As Isabel Wilkerson writes in her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the United States is best understood as a society with a modern caste system, a rigid racial

reporter

The following is an excerpt from Forgotten Girls: A Memoir about Friendship and Lost Promise in America.

hierarchy created before our country’s birth. While Blacks are at the bottom of the hierarchy, the least-educated whites are the lowest ranking among the dominant group. Even when people in this group knew they weren’t the best off, what kept them from feeling that they were at the very bottom was the color of their skin.

Political scientists, Wilkerson writes, call white Americans’ response to recent social changes “dominant group status threat.” Consciously or not, they feel they are entitled to some measure of security and comfort based on their whiteness, to privileges that were afforded previous generations of their families, and they react with cultural fury and depression when that is threatened. They benefited from a system that relied on the oppression of people of color, especially Black Americans, but they resisted that truth. In her 2021 book The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee, a former president of Demos, a think tank that promotes racial and economic equality, writes that these two trends are of a piece: “Racial hierarchy offered white people a reprieve from the class hierarchy and gave white women an escape valve from gender oppression.” Racism was used as a wedge to gain political support for policies, but when those policies ultimately drained public resources, they hurt many of the same white Americans who voted for them.

While the racial caste system hasn’t gone away, an educational caste system has been laid alongside it, and people in areas like my home county feel they are losing status, even as the most highly educated Americans of any race move upward. “In the zero-sum stakes of a

caste system upheld by perceived scarcity, if a lower-caste person goes up a rung, an upper-caste person goes down. The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion,” Wilkerson writes. “... Thus, a caste system makes a captive of everyone within it.” This helps explain why many of those without college educations are so hostile to those who have one. Non-collegeeducated white Americans were the biggest voters for Donald Trump, and part of what they were rejecting was “elitism,” an educational hierarchy that ranks them lowest. When Trump voters revolted, when they stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, part of what they wanted restored was a racial caste system that ranked them nearer the top because they were white: the Confederate battle flags they carried that day gave them away.

What the people of Clinton see all around them is decline and erosion, even as the rest of the country seems to be moving forward and somehow benefiting from what they’ve lost. Everything about the structure and culture of our town was unprepared for the new century. The lack of education, the lack of connections to good jobs, the departure of some young adults to pursue good work elsewhere all doomed those left behind after the recession.

Monica Potts is a senior politics reporter for the website FiveThirtyEight. She lives in Clinton, Arkansas.

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America Hardcover $28.00

Published by Penguin Random House

These places, where the least educated white Americans are clustered, are unlikely ever to recover.

D.E.E.P. BRIDGES

Houston’s Deborah Mouton is building a legacy, a mythology, and connections between cultures and artistic worlds.

By GAYLE REAVES

It’s a Thursday in mid-May, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Houston’s multitalented poet laureate emeritus, is busy. She’s getting ready for an event the following night, a collaboration involving herself, jazz drummer and composer Kendrick Scott, and the Harlem String Quartet. They’re honoring the Sugar Land 95, African-Americans who died as convict laborers and whose remains were found in 2018 during excavation for a construction project in Sugar Land, just west of Houston.

After that, she’s off to New York for rehearsals of a new opera, She Who Dared, about the women, including Rosa Parks, who helped desegregate the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Mouton wrote the libretto and Dallas composer Jasmine Barnes did the music. The rehearsals culminated in a public workshop on May 31 at the American Lyric Theater in New York. Next up for Mouton: a U.S. book tour in support of her new mythologized memoir, Black Chameleon, then a festival, then the European leg of the book tour.

Her schedule and her energy leave Mouton’s friends shaking their heads. “It’s just mind-blowing,” said Robin Davidson, another former Houston poet laureate and an early editor on many of Mouton’s projects.

Kate Martin Williams is the executive director of Bloomsday Literary, the nonprofit independent press in Houston that published Newsworthy, Mouton’s first book of poetry. Williams said she and Mouton sometimes meet for breakfast, and she will ask the writer about the most recent thing she’s working on. When

Mouton stops for breath, Williams said, she tells her friend, “No, you just told me about five things.”

Mouton, 38 and the mom of two young kids, says she couldn’t do it all without her “magical super-supporter” husband Joshua, her mother, and friends—“a great village” helping her. That, plus a huge family calendar that shows her kids who is going to be home when—and an online document.

“I have a Google document with all my ideas,” she said. “So when I do get a breath, I can go back to that” and start working on yet another project.

Growing up in California, she said, someone was always telling her that she wouldn’t be able to make a living by writing, regardless of which kind of writing she did. “I said, ‘OK, but what if I do them all?’”

The dedication in Black Chameleon seems to refer to that idea of adaptability. “For those who have had to shape-shift, code switch, and camouflage just to survive,” it reads. The book is subtitled “Memory, Womanhood, and Myth,” and she describes myth-making—reinterpreting your own story—as an important part of her life, especially as a Black woman in this country.

Mouton said the book began as a collection of the stories of her family. “I’m the griot, the storyteller, I had a need to write them down,” she said. But 150 pages in, “it still wasn’t feeling like a book.” A friend asked her about the mythology she grew up with. “I had no idea,” Mouton said. So she decided to “work backward from what I have become, to reverse engineer” her life

and her family to delve into that mythology. And so the book includes segments about things like “how Black women learn to have eyes in the backs of their heads,” and treats Love and Death like characters.

Black Chameleon is doing “fairly well,” Mouton said. It got a favorable review in the New York Times and was picked as one of the top 30 books by Cosmo this year. But, she said, success in book sales is “very elusive.”

If Mouton’s literary tree is manybranched these days, it remains rooted in poetry, thanks to a teacher who talked her into it. In school, she said, “I was horrified when I tried to do spoken word.” But then her teacher explained there was a contest, and her competitive young self thought: “I’m going to get a trophy for writing? OK!” She went on to become one of the world’s top female spoken-word artists; videos on YouTube attest to her eloquence.

In Black Chameleon, she seems to be channeling that power. “I got it honest, this tongue,” she writes at one point. “This neck roll, this lip pop, this hand clap, this way to make a simple tale a dramatic feat.” The price of such eloquence, when she was growing up, was sometimes having her mouth washed out with a bar of soap. A reminder, perhaps, that talent doesn’t make it all come easy.

After the pandemic, she struggled with anxiety over being in rooms full of people. The stage “is definitely not a place where fear doesn’t live,” she said. “But I can be scared and still do it.”

Her skills at performance poetry opened

many doors. And Mouton, in turn, has opened doors for others, including by broadening the audience for spoken-word poets and showing that slam poets can get published, even internationally.

Written poetry these days can seem inaccessible. Most poets don’t draw huge audiences or large incomes. On the other hand, performance poetry tends to be much more of a popular artform.

Poetry doesn’t have to be inaccessible, Mouton said. “It’s the ways we have treated it historically” that have made it so. In past centuries, poetry was storytelling—the way everyone heard and enjoyed lovely and meaningful writing. “We’re getting back to letting it be accessible,” she said.

Newsworthy, published in 2019, is a slim volume of poems that, line by line, are very accessible. No fifty-cent words or difficult constructions; nothing scary here. Except, everything. Toward the end, it becomes hard to go on to the next poem. This is Mouton’s way of coming to grips with white supremacy, police brutality, the seemingly unending stream of Black bodies ground under the wheel of those pressures, and the media

coverage that often makes things worse.

“As a Black woman traversing America … it’s about my own experience with authority and the abuse of it,” Mouton said. “The ways the media goes about reporting it.” Watching someone die in a viral video has almost become entertainment these days, she said, and she won’t take part anymore. And she thinks the news media has gotten worse, not better, in its depictions.

Newsworthy is generally chronological, Mouton said, going back to the 1991 beating and tasing of Rodney King by Los Angeles police, which she remembers as a child, to the death of Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old Black woman found hanging in her cell in Waller County, three days after a state trooper followed her while driving, repeatedly speeding up to crowd her bumper, until she pulled over to let him pass and he stopped, wrestled her to the ground, and arrested her on trumped-up charges. The poems relate to other incidents of police violence, malfeasance, or terror of police violence in the years between those two tragedies, often as viewed or experienced by the members

of a Black family. But the poems are also ordered in another way: Each carries, in small type at the top of the page, a notation of mileage—that is, the miles away from Mouton’s home that something happened, the numbers large at first, then dwindling and dwindling, to 38.5 miles (the distance from Sandra Bland’s death site to “outside my back door,” Mouton said) and then to “even closer” and finally to “here.”

“It’s what it means to live in these times,” she said. Her performance of the poem “Open Season,” captured on YouTube video, is powerful. “Gas Station Libretto” (“a conversation between a gun and the people on either side of it”) is equally striking. The book was a finalist for the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award in poetry and a runner-up in the Texas Institute of Letters award for a first book by a poet.

Williams said her publishing house sought out Mouton based on the recommendation of a local bookstore manager. The poet “hadn’t been able to get any traction” with other publishers on Newsworthy , possibly because of her slam poetry connection. But Bloomsday is smaller, with “a little more liberated outlook,” Williams said. “We thought we could translate her performance to the page.”

Mouton’s ability to adapt her poems from performance to print is important, Davidson said. “They work lyrically on the page.” The mileage numbers moving the reader closer and closer to the incidents show that such deaths are “internal to who we are, all of us, as human beings,” she said. Mouton’s work is “very much revered by high-profile literary folks in our state.”

That work was what led the Houston Grand Opera (HGO) officials to reach out to the former laureate with a proposition— could they blend spoken word and opera? Mouton had already done things like touring with a gospel choir and, as laureate after Hurricane Harvey, appearing with organizations from the Houston Ballet to the Houston Rockets to inspire a weary public to hang in there. “Moving into my laureateship in that new way showed me that poetry and my abilities were limitless,” she told Texas Monthly

Now, HGO helped her learn about writing librettos, so she could collaborate with

Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is a multi-talented writer in Houston. Briana Vargas for the Texas Observer

The Pantoum

A seed slowly fractures the soil as it ascends

We are descended on the ground before an angel appears With no trumpets or ember shouting from the ground he whispers Freedom was the only thing we understood for it was once engraved in our bones

We are descended on ground as the angel appears With his lips he sings the emancipation Freedom was the only thing we understood as it became engraved on our bones With his voice he broke the shackles of our descendant

With his lips he sings the emancipation And we dropped our hoe and weaved baskets

With his voice he broke the shackles of our descendant And we start to rise to the kingdoms of heaven

We dropped our hoe and weaved baskets

With the trumpets and embers screaming, he whispers And we start to rise to the kingdoms of heaven Our seed slowly fractures the soil as it ascends

— SAMIYAH GREEN

Samiyah Green is a student at the Texas Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Her poem won first place in “What Juneteenth Means (To Me),” a contest organized by Cyrus Cassells, 2021-22 Texas poet laureate, and made possible by the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. It is aimed at encouraging young writers to explore the significance of Juneteenth in Texas and American history.

To submit a poem, please send an email, with the poem as an attachment, to poetry@texasobserver.org. We are looking for previously unpublished works of no more than 30 lines by Texas poets who have not been published by the Observer in the last two years. Pay is $150 on publication. Poems will be chosen by guest editors.

composer Damien Sneed on a chamber opera about the life of Marian Anderson, the brilliant contralto singer who fought racism in the mid-20th century by, among other things, giving a famously successful concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to sing in Constitution Hall. The result of the collaboration was Marian’s Song, the 2020 premiere of which the Houston Chronicle called “a fiery blend of history and music” with Mouton’s “quietly confrontational” libretto urging listeners to think about their own responsibility to keep up the fight. That opera included a contemporary, fictional character—a young woman who speaks only in rhyme, portrayed at the premiere by a local slam poet. In those sections, the Chronicle reported, the music “took on the

repetitive urgency of a news bulletin.” Or maybe of a Newsworthy poem.

Around that time, Mouton had approached another Black woman named Anderson who also holds a special place in Black history: She asked retired Houston Ballet star Lauren Anderson, the first Black principal ballerina of any major company in the country, if she would collaborate on a memoir. That book is still in progress, but in the meantime, the two, along with Barnes (also Mouton’s partner on She Who Dared) produced another offspring last fall: “Plumshuga: The Rise of Lauren Anderson”—what Mouton calls a “choreopoem,” portraying not only Anderson’s triumphs, but her struggles with addiction and her recovery. Performances featured a full dance company, with a “Poet Lauren” reciting Mouton’s lyrics and

a “Dancer Lauren” bringing Anderson’s memories to life.

Davidson is definitely a fan. “Oh my God, it’s so moving,” she said. “I don’t think there was anyone in the audience who didn’t weep.” She said Anderson and Mouton have great chemistry, and she expects the memoir to be a hit.

In fact, Davidson expects more from Mouton on many fronts. “She’s just at the beginning of things,” she said. When Mouton’s children are a little older, Davidson said, she’ll likely have time for even more. In the meantime, Mouton said, no matter where she is, she sings her kids to sleep every night. They go to local performances together. And following in their parents’ footsteps, son Julius is the storyteller—“he’ll talk your ear off”—while daughter Olivet is the poet and visual artist, like her dad Joshua, a graphic and visual artist.

Mouton, of course, already has other projects in mind. Maybe something “more episodic,” like a TV series, she said. She’s already working on ideas for her next poetry book. The opera She Who Dared is still in its beginning stages, waiting to see if an opera company decides to put it on. And oh yes, she’s also working on a novel.

All these opportunities, and what she’s made of them—does it feel like her world is opening up to larger and larger views? Not quite, she said. “It’s more like leveling up in a video game. I acquire skills so I can fight bigger bosses. By the end, I can do things I never thought I could do.”

Davidson sees Mouton, with her talent and energy and her projects that uplift and memorialize Black Americans, as being one of the forces working to reconstruct the narrative of this country. “She is bridging the gap; what have been disparate cultures are beginning to be [combined].”

Mouton said it’s exciting to watch her works being performed by others, and “at heights I never imagined.” She’s also consciously building a legacy, a body of work. “That’s why working in these grander ways is so good,” she said. “I had a knee replaced last November,” and that made her think about “how to make space in my work to make it last.” With a catalog of work and a unique skill set, she said, despite those warnings she got all those years ago, “I will be able to live on my art.”

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