Many Rio Grande Valley residents have farmed land along the border fence for decades. On hot summer days, they mow their lawns and repair trucks, take care of ailing relatives and sip coffee at local convenience stores. What they don’t do, they say, is worry about a crisis at the border.
David Yaffe-Bellany
David Yaffe-Bellany was a 2018 reporting fellow at the Tribune. He graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in English and served as managing editor of the Yale Daily News. He previously reported for the New Haven Independent and the Toledo Blade, covering city politics, crime and the occasional cornhole tournament. His bylines have also appeared in the soccer magazine Howler, the sports website Deadspin and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Posted in
Families Divided
More than 1,000 rally in Brownsville to protest family separations
Demonstrators from across Texas gathered in front of the federal courthouse in Brownsville on Thursday to protest the separation of undocumented children from their parents at the border.
Posted in
Immigration
A viral Facebook fundraiser has generated more than $20 million for immigration nonprofit RAICES
Over the last week and a half, a Facebook fundraising page has generated more than $20 million for RAICES — three times the nonprofit’s annual budget and more than 40 times what it raised in all of 2017.
Posted in
Health care
Five years after Wendy Davis filibuster, Texas abortion providers struggle to reopen clinics
For all Wendy Davis’ determination, getting an abortion in Texas is much harder today than it was in 2013. Abortion rights advocates believe it will take at least another decade for the state’s health care providers to re-establish the network of abortion clinics that existed before HB 2 became law.
Posted in
Public Education
STAAR glitches affected more than 100,000 Texas students, education commissioner says
Education Commissioner Mike Morath said Wednesday that 41,702 students were affected by slow connectivity during testing in April, while another 58,743 experienced slowdowns or had trouble logging into computerized tests in May.
Posted in
Demographics
Texas education board votes to call long-sought Texas course “Ethnic Studies: Mexican American Studies”
During a hearing on Tuesday, dozens of Mexican-American educators and activists implored the board to change the name of the course from “Ethnic Studies: An Overview of Americans of Mexican Descent” to “Mexican-American Studies.”
Posted in
Demographics
Scores of Texas women are running for office. Many of them are new to politics.
With lots of female candidates in Texas trying to win spots in the state’s male-dominated congressional and legislative delegations, a series of workshops on Sunday helped Democratic women navigate the challenges of running their first political campaigns.
Posted in
Texas Elections 2018
Texas has 254 counties. Beto O’Rourke has campaigned against Ted Cruz in each of them.
Beto O’Rourke’s grassroots campaign in 254 counties represents a major deviation from the political playbook employed by the majority of Texas Democrats over the last 20 years. Most campaigns concentrate on the state’s major population centers.
Posted inState Government
Lawsuit claims Texas senator interfered in liquor agency investigation
State Sen. Joan Huffman denies that she tried to influence an investigation into a bar in which she had a financial interest. A fired agent said he was told a state senator tried to kill the probe, but he doesn’t have evidence that Huffman “told anybody to falsify records or delete records.”
Posted in
Economy
Texas just opened the nation’s first state-run gold depository. Here’s what that means.
Texas lawmakers signed off on building the country’s first state-backed gold depository in 2015 after the project was reworked to ensure a private firm would absorb all the costs. Gov. Greg Abbott said at the time that the project would allow Texas to “repatriate” gold from New York.