The agency is so understaffed that teens have reported spending up to 23 hours locked in their cells, using water bottles to go to the bathroom. A staggering number have hurt themselves or been placed on suicide watch.
Investigations
The Texas Tribune’s investigative journalism dives deep into the policy and political decisions that matter most to Texans. Read the latest — and most ambitious — work from our newsroom and the investigative team we share with ProPublica.
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Uvalde school shooting
Texas’ law on gun background checks plagued by critical omissions of minors’ mental health records
Lawmakers tried in 2009 to require that the state report all court-ordered mental health hospitalizations to a federal gun background check system. Juveniles have been left out.
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Investigations
New Texas plan for federal Hurricane Harvey aid yields same old result: Funds diverted away from Gulf Coast
Despite an admonition from federal authorities, Land Commissioner George P. Bush’s plan still steers aid disproportionately to whiter, inland counties at less risk of natural disasters.
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The Texas Tribune-ProPublica Investigative Unit
Problems remain for We Build the Wall group after founder’s guilty plea
Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage faces more than five years in prison after pleading guilty to defrauding donors to the private wall effort.
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Operation Lone Star
Texas soldier who drowned trying to help migrants wasn’t equipped with flotation device
Spc. Bishop Evans died after jumping into the Rio Grande to save migrants. He and other members of Operation Lone Star were not provided safety equipment. Texas Military Department said an order for buoys and ropes was made but has not been fulfilled.
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The Texas Tribune-ProPublica Investigative Unit
Texas has spent billions of dollars on border security. But what taxpayers got in return is a mystery.
Since 2005, Texas Govs. Rick Perry and Greg Abbott have launched a multitude of widely publicized and costly border initiatives, which usually kicked off during their reelection campaigns or while they were considering bids for higher office.
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Operation Lone Star
Texas’ border operation is meant to stop cartels and smugglers. More often, it arrests migrants for misdemeanor trespassing.
The largest share of Operation Lone Star arrests were of people accused only of trespassing on private property. Many spend months in prison, but the strategy does not appear to have slowed immigration.
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The Texas Tribune-ProPublica Investigative Unit
North Texas superintendent orders books removed from schools, targeting titles about transgender people
The Granbury superintendent’s comments, made on a leaked recording, raise constitutional concerns, legal experts said.
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Operation Lone Star
Gov. Greg Abbott brags about his border initiative. The evidence doesn’t back him up.
Arrests of U.S. citizens hundreds of miles from the border. Claiming drug busts from across the state. Changing statistics. The data that Texas leaders use to boast about Operation Lone Star raise more questions than answers.
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Operation Lone Star
National Guard troops were dispatched to famous Texas ranches with private security as part of border mission
The dispatching of troops to the sprawling private ranches, far from the border, raises questions about the use of National Guard troops, who have widely decried the mission as aimless, political and oversized, as the cost of the effort has already ballooned to $2 billion a year.