Demographics

Houston Mayor Bill White met with the press late Monday to respond to Tom Schieffer and other's calls for him to run for Governor.

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The Dallas church community has vowed to forge 25 partnerships with high-poverty public schools and push for 700 units of housing for the homeless — a down payment on a larger effort to heal wounds left by racism and injustice.

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Multi-part stories from Ramshaw and Grissom and Stiles on mental health services for detained immigrants and on payday lenders who provide exorbitantly priced credit to people with nowhere else to turn... Twitter, word clouds and the race for governor — a Stiles joint... Farouk Shami is in and Hu was there to watch... Philpott went to Bastrop for a gather of Republican governors... Rapoport finds a State Board of Education that's trying to control itself... and we have the skinny on legislative races that are likely to be competitive (only about 5 percent of the races on the ballot). It's the best of The Texas Tribune from November 14 to 20, 2009.

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Andre Osborne was so over-medicated in the Willacy Immigration Detention Center that he fell off of the top bunk of his bed, badly injuring his face and eyes.

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The day after DPS warns parents that Mexican cartels are trying to recruit their kids to sell drugs, the agency issues a press release that says DPS efforts are pushing back drugs and preventing them from getting here.

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That warning comes as law enforcement officials report an increase in the number of youth from Mexico and the United States becoming involved in human and drug trafficking.

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"Barely adequate." "Haphazard at best." That's how investigators describe the quality of care at immigrant detention centers all over Texas.

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The physically disabled and suicidal detainee was put in an isolated cell without her crutches. She was strip-searched and denied feminine products. For days, she slid around on the floor, covering herself and the cell in menstrual blood. When inspectors came out to investigate, they found a facility poorly equipped to provide mental health treatment to its 1,500 detainees.

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KBH resigns herself to staying in the Senate, Grissom investigates the broken border, Ramshaw outs IT contractors who make gigabucks from state agencies, Hu gives Hutchison and Perry the Stump Interrupted treatment, the new head of the Foresenic Science Commission faces his critics, Stiles posts a searchable database of fines levied by the state ethics commission, and Hamilton discovers the consequences of party switching (none): The best of the best from November 9 to 13, 2009.

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For many who call the border home, all the guns, all the money, all the technology, and all the police badges have done little to address the problems that make their lives insecure.

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One little speech and everybody’s all atwitter.

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In some places, the governor's border security efforts have led to a reduction in crime — in rural counties, for instance, where there aren't many people and there wasn't much crime to begin with. But in large urban counties like El Paso and Webb, it's a different story.

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The Texas Public Information Act allows agencies to redact information for security and privacy reasons. The Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition decided redact just about everything they possibly could on the invoices they sent me.

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The Web site where you can view border cameras isn't getting the predicted traffic, calling into question the program's law enforcement impact.

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Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Sharp and state Reps. Ryan Guillen and Veronica Gonzales fired off a letter today to the two Republican Texas senators asking them to find money to boost health care funding for Rio Grande Valley veterans.

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The mildly pleasant woman who answered the phone explained to me that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Freedom of Information Act office does not accept requests electronically.

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Experts from around the U.S. and Mexico are debating the War on Drugs and its affect on violence south of the border. Some of them wonder whether decriminalization is the answer.

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What concerns me as a Republican is that the race for governor may be focusing too much on the personalities of the candidates and the highly charged nature of the race rather than the long-term vision and consequences. I worry that either candidate could win the race but lose the future — too much focus on the politics of the next year, rather than the policies of the next decade.

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Texas’ chain of inland checkpoints has created a border within a border, separating abused and sometimes undocumented children in counties adjacent to Mexico from services north of the invisible line.

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Drugs are abundant in border communities. Poverty is rampant. Substance abuse treatment is scarce. What's a 16 year old to do?

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