Demographics

In Texas, they earn 35 percent less than their Anglo counterparts — a disparity that's bigger here than elsewhere. Is it because of education, age, discrimination, or some combination of the above?

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As El Paso begins to wear the new off its hard-fought medical school, another Texas border community is starting on the long road to establishing its own. University of Texas System officials are evaluating how long it will take and how much it could cost to train the next generation of doctors in the Rio Grande Valley.

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Ramshaw's four-parter on the rural health care condundrum and depressing take-out on sexual abuse in youth lock-ups. Ramsey on filing day follies and the untimely death of a Democratic mainstay. Aguilar on the U.S. government's detention center mea culpa. Grissom on alien deportations in the name of making our streets safer. Rapoport on the organization and association endorsement dance. Hamilton on whether coattails exist. Hu and Philpott's multimedia profile of Linda Chavez-Thompson. And Philpott on big gubernatorial campaign bucks and even bigger candidate angst over the ways journalists are using social and new media to cover them. The best of our best from January 4 to January 8, 2010.

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Immigration advocates say the feds are deporting thousands of illegal aliens who are minor offenders and some who've committed no crimes at all. But federal officials and local law enforcement argue that they're simply making Texas streets safer.

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For the last year and a half, Tom Barry visited immigrant detention centers in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Here's what he found.

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The U.S. government is imposing greater restrictions than necessary on most aliens held in custody for immigration violations, according to a charge made by ... the U.S. government.

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She was born into a family of eight children near Lubbock, worked on cotton fields in her teens and later became a Hispanic labor leader. Now she's running for lieutenant governor. We've packaged resources (in various media platforms) on the latest entrant to the race.

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Roll your own political videos ... interactive travel maps of your federal and state legislators ... scary movies, to keep the kids out of the border's scary drug wars ... puttting dropouts back in class ... rates squeezing families out of home health care ... how many lobby and trade associations do teachers in Texas need? ... enjoying the silence before an expected two-month siege of political advertising ... the dean of Texas political writers gets shut out of the gubernatorial debates ... and we have an interactive database of the state's best and worst public schools. The best of our best for a short news week, from December 19 to 26, 2009.

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Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster might have to change his tune about his idyllic border home after this week. Foster was having lunch Tuesday with Mexican officials across the border in Piedras Negras when a gunmen started spraying the place with bullets.

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We added more people this year than any other state — more than Florida, Arizona, California, Nevada and Colorado combined.

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The El Paso Brut Sun Bowl has sold out more quickly than ever in its 76-year history, officials said today. The sellout comes less than a week after the Oklahoma City daily The Oklahoman, ran a story about how the raging violence in Juarez was keeping many Sooner fans from buying tickets

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U.S. Border Patrol agents launched Operation Detour to shock kids away from Mexican drug cartel recruiters. Now they're expanding the program across the entire southwest border.

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Latinos are expected to become the majority demographic group in Texas by 2015, according to some estimates. But they're still not voting in big numbers at the ballot box. Full Story 

Border Patrol agents are combatting cartel recruitment with a graphic film designed to scare high school students straight. But some experts say the program misses the mark.

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