17 Mar 2026

A Wall That’s Worth Defending

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When our nation’s Founders took the revolutionary step of creating a republic with no state religion, they likely never envisioned how religiously diverse the nation would become. Drive around my hometown of Fort Worth, or any populous Texas city, and you’ll see Muslim mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples, Sikh gurdwaras, and Jewish synagogues, as well as Christian churches of all sizes and varieties.

Once-predominant Christians now account for less than two-thirds of Americans, and their faith has fragmented into hundreds of denominations that differ over theology, morality, and politics. One out of 15 Americans now belongs to a religion other than Christianity. Almost a third of Americans don’t identify with any particular religion, yet belief still flourishes. Over half of Americans consider religion very important in daily life; that share struggles to reach 20 percent in other economically advanced nations.

As America grows more religiously diverse, the Founders’ decision to separate church and state looks increasingly wise. Though it’s easy to spot flaws in the Founders themselves and the Constitution they crafted (the Electoral College, for instance, or the three-fifths clause), what Thomas Jefferson called the “wall of separation” was one thing they definitely got right.

Two centuries on, it’s easy to overlook just how novel that wall was in its day. Whereas both America’s adversary (Britain) and main ally (France) in the Revolutionary War officially endorsed one religion (the Church of England and the Catholic Church, respectively), the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibited the “establishment” of such an official religion, instead guaranteeing individuals’ right to freely practice their own beliefs. The Founders also went against the grain in prohibiting any religious tests for holding public office, a requirement both in Britain and in many of the states at the time (North Carolina and Georgia, for instance, restricted public office to Protestant Christians).

As historian Steven K. Green notes, leading clergy of the day attacked the Constitution’s “irreligious” character—particularly the fact that, unlike most public documents of the time, including the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, it neither invokes nor mentions a deity.

Scholars and jurists have long debated how church-state separation should be interpreted and applied, but it remains a cornerstone of our democracy. And it’s one worth keeping, according to most Americans. Fifty-four percent want the federal government to enforce church-state separation; 69 percent believe the United States should never declare an official religion—and with good reason: Just imagine the mess if the government tried to foist one religious group’s beliefs on so varied a people.

Yet that’s effectively what Christian nationalists are attempting to do today. This largely white evangelical movement, which holds sway in GOP politics, especially here in Texas, seeks conservative Christian domination over law and public policy.

Despite contrary evidence offered by mainstream historians, many leading Texas lawmakers and politicos apparently agree with Aledo-based David Barton that church-state separation is a “myth” liberals and secularists concocted to conceal the Founders’ alleged intent to create an explicitly Christian nation. The Texas GOP has pledged to work “toward dispelling” this purported myth. Both Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and state Senator Mayes Middleton, a Galveston Republican, have declared there is “no such thing” as church-state separation.

At the Capitol, Texas lawmakers have sought to weaken Jefferson’s wall, especially in public education. In 2021, they required “In God We Trust” be posted in public schools. In 2023, lawmakers authorized school districts to hire chaplains as counselors, with no prohibition on proselytizing. In 2024, the State Board of Education gave its blessing to a “Bible-infused” K-5 curriculum featuring instructional materials more appropriate for Sunday s chool than public schools. And last year, lawmakers mandated that all public schools display one religious tradition’s sacred text—the Ten Commandments—and provide a daily period for prayer and Scripture reading.

These measures arguably promote one religion over others, and religion over non-religion, threatening to turn students, families, and teachers who don’t subscribe to Christian-nationalist religiosity into outsiders in their own public schools and communities.

As a recent book, Randall Balmer’s America’s Best Idea: Separation of Church and State, makes clear, what the author calls our “best idea” was no deus ex machina; it emerged from a particular history and particular coalitional forces. America’s “grand experiment of constructing a government without … an established religion,” Balmer writes, grew from an alliance of “two unlikely camps,” secular rationalists and—ironically—evangelicals.

The latter group had their own history of persecution under state religion. In colonial Virginia, where the Church of England was the established religion, “a sheriff brutally horsewhipped a Baptist minister,” Balmer recounts as an example. Quaker William Penn, persecuted in Britain by the Church of England, and Baptist Roger Williams, who suffered at the hands of Puritan colonial officials, worked to free people from the yoke of official religion; they established colonies (Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, respectively) that offered religious freedom, setting a precedent for the later First Amendment.

Secular, Enlightenment-minded Founders like James Madison had their own reasons for rejecting state religion. They needed to accommodate the religious diversity already present in the new nation, where religious groups “rang[ed] from Catholics and Moravians to Jews, Quakers, and Dutch Reformed—and perhaps hundreds more.” Moreover, Madison linked religious establishment with political tyranny and violence; he wrote that “torrents of blood” had been spilled in official religion’s “vain attempt” to proscribe religious differences.

In rejecting official religion, the Founders created what Balmer calls a “free marketplace of religion”: Since no religious group holds a state-sanctioned monopoly over religious life, “religious groups … compete for adherents on an equal footing.”

Pushback to the Founders’ free-market approach, though, does have a long history. In the 19th century, for instance, the elaborately named National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution pushed for explicit acknowledgment of Christ’s will as the law of the land. Though this group’s efforts failed, it foreshadowed today’s Christian nationalism.

Then and now, Christian nationalists threaten a system that has actually benefited both government and religion. Though Americans haven’t always lived up to the promise of religious tolerance, we have been spared widespread sectarian bloodshed. Meanwhile, “religion has flourished in America,” Balmer writes, “precisely because the government (for the most part, at least) has stayed out of the religion business.”

Separation has perhaps benefited no group more than evangelicals themselves. They have proved far more adept than other groups at adjusting to social and technological changes (think of their adroit use of digital media or their move to megachurches featuring multisensory worship experiences). And, of course, there’s the unprecedented political power evangelicals wield, especially here in Texas.

So why the eagerness of many evangelicals to kill the golden goose of separation? Balmer blames evangelical leaders’ (and President Donald Trump’s) “rhetoric of victimization.” However, he leaves unanswered the question of why they find such rhetoric so compelling. Other scholars offer possible answers. For instance, Glenn Bracey and my Baker Institute colleague Michael Emerson contend that Christian nationalists are defending a “religion of whiteness” against religious and racial diversity. Alternatively, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry argue that Christian nationalism is less about religion than the pursuit of power.

Like other bedrock principles of our democracy—say, the separation of powers or freedom of the press, both also under threat today—church-state separation was born of mixed motives, has not always lived up to its own promise, and remains subject to shifting interpretations. At times, it has functioned more as a hedge than an impermeable wall (as when a Cold War Congress made “In God We Trust” the national motto). Yet, it’s no myth. It has prevented any one religion from gaining a state-sanctioned monopoly in the religious marketplace, and that has served us well, fostering a pluralism that makes us stronger and freer. As Jefferson’s wall faces perhaps its most severe tests to date, it is up to all of us, religious and nonreligious alike, to speak out in its defense.

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16 Mar 2026

In Texas Senate Primary, the Influencer Class Was (and Is) the Problem

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The Democratic U.S. Senate primary between state Representative James Talarico and Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett was marked by subtle, if unremarkable, policy differences and questions around whose fighting style better reflected the desires of Texans.

Then, on February 2, former U.S. Senate candidate Colin Allred posted a video amplifying the claims of Morgan Thompson, a popular political content creator on TikTok, who alleged in a viral video that in a private conversation with Talarico on January 12, the state legislator referred to Allred as a “mediocre Black man.”

As a Black man in Texas, I am required to know how white men, particularly white men like Talarico, talk about Black men. That particular combination of words seemed off, particularly for a politician who is as circumspect as Talarico. Arguably, Talarico’s greatest strength is that he is an effective communicator, in particular when he flips the arguments of the religious right on its head by reminding them that the Christian dogma they desire to use as a weight is actually a liberating force. So, for someone who is so effective as a communicator to label Allred, himself, as mediocre, did not pass the smell test.

Soon after, Talarico’s campaign issued a statement denying the claim, saying that he was referring to Allred’s 2024 Senate campaign as mediocre—not the man himself. The allegation, however, had by that point turned the somewhat quiet primary into a firestorm—with influencers, from within Texas and outside, on both sides and on neither side, fanning the flames.

By the end, the race became almost entirely consumed by the political influencer wars. But in the early days of the primary, Talarico and Crockett had mostly elected to keep their focus squarely on the issues facing Texans, largely because in many material aspects of their platforms they were nearly identical. Even their public polling numbers against potential GOP opponents were nearly identical.

In this new age of online politics, it’s become undeniable that political influencers and content creators have a significant place in the ecosystem. But it becomes a problem when their arguing, infighting, and, yes, mudslinging, obscures a compelling, close race between two quality candidates.

Take, for instance, Keith Edwards, a self-described “Democratic strategist, digital creator, and political commentator” with more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube, who was among the countless political influencers commenting on the race. Appearing on a January 23 episode of The Ringer’s popular Higher Learning podcast, Edwards earned himself an education in the racial dynamics of American politics from the podcast’s hosts, Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay. In the episode, Lathan took umbrage at Edwards’ repeated use of the term “polarizing” during the course of their conversation for how Crockett could come across to some voters. Lathan chided Edwards, a white man, for his air of nonchalance as it relates to critiques of the way he discusses politics—in particular, political discussions he partakes in that involve and are about Black women. “Do you get why we want you to be nice and civil and partly protective of Black women? Do you understand where that comes from?” Lathan asked Edwards.

To his credit, Edwards admitted that he hadn’t fully thought out why Black people would be reflexively defensive of Crockett, but he still noted that “I do think it’s just the partisan quality of her brand that is challenging in Texas.”

This particular dynamic-—one wherein white leftists do not adequately reckon with the effects of their so-called colorblindness—is not one unique to Edwards. It is reflective of the current ideological row capturing the political left about how class and race intersect to render Black folks as invisible members of the working-class voting bloc. The specific concerns and problems affecting Black voters are simply lumped in with the economic anxieties of white voters and are never seriously addressed by candidates running on economic populism.

On this point, Talarico too—whose central message is that it’s about not left versus right, but top versus bottom—is going to have to meaningfully engage with and accept the critiques of Black voters and politicos and give those voters substantive policy that renders them as seen, full humans with separate, unique concerns that white voters do not have.

Black voters in Texas have, for decades, been asking for the political system to deliver a candidate that speaks with them in mind and showcases that the Black communities of Texas are not afterthoughts. As one 19-year-old college student, Natalie Greene, told American Community Media, it is important to her that Talarico speak to the concerns of her daily life. “As a young Black woman, I want to hear how he plans to advocate for us,” Greene told the outlet. “That means education, reproductive rights and the issues college students are facing right now. I want to see him looking young women in the eye and explaining what he’s willing to fight for on our behalf.”

Similarly, other older Black women voters whom the outlet interviewed wanted Talarico to address the economic concerns of Black women, who have been adversely affected by a depressed job market; to show up in the communities where they live and work; and to craft specific policies that benefit those Black communities. It is these concerns, the so-called kitchen table platform, that will ultimately resonate with most rank-and-file Texans, those who are not so chronically online as to assign proof to allegations made by content creators and influencers because they are fans of the person making the allegations.

Perhaps even more than a fighter, what Texans need in a United States senator representing the Lone Star State is the ability to articulate a vision and make it a political reality in the face of fierce opposition. This is a hostile and captive political environment, and the battle that’s now staring Talarico in the face is against that of a state apparatus that is entirely too willing to do the bidding of President Donald Trump and his cabal of white nationalist sympathizers in exchange for continued political power.

For Democrats, these are grave concerns that a viral video or a podcast appearance from a political content creator or influencer will not solve, will not address, and will not fix. What has to happen more broadly, is that, like the new Texas Democratic Party Chair, Kendall Scudder, puts it, the state party recommit itself to being the party of the working class. It needs to become—arguably for the first time—the party of the Black working class, the Latinx working class, and the immigrant working class, and build out real solidarity and a unified message regarding not only the tyranny of the Trump administration, but the tyranny of Governor Greg Abbott and the tyranny of the billionaire class.

With the Democratic primary now behind us, questions of who’s more electable, who can create party unity, and who will be able to marshal both voters and other leaders in the Democratic Party to gather around them, will now be answered in the leadup to the general election. During the primary, questions of electability turned into referendums on race—because let’s be honest, folks know a dogwhistle when they hear it.

That is not to say that there were not things that emerged from Crockett’s campaign that were concerning, like the lack of a campaign manager or the report from Semafor, later corroborated by The Atlantic‘s Elaine Godfrey in her own report, that someone in Crockett’s campaign ejected her from a rally because the campaign was frustrated by Godfrey’s reporting.

While Talarico’s margin of victory over Crockett didn’t exactly deliver a mandate, it did provide a semblance of closure—something that has not been afforded in the much more chaotic, dramatic, and vindictive Republican Senate primary.

Despite this closure, there remain very real rifts that the Democratic Party and Talarico himself must repair. As Vox noted, Talarico did not fare well with Black voters, only gathering a scant 10 percent of the voters in that bloc, according to crosstab polling. He was, however, able to offset those losses by winning white and Hispanic voters, including in the major border counties that saw a shift toward Trump in 2024.

For her part, Crockett vowed to support Talarico in much the same way he vowed to support her if she had won. Given the racial dynamics of the votes during the primary contest, Crockett’s support will be vital to ensuring that a significant number of Black Texans will vote for Talarico.

Now that Texans have chosen their fighter in Talarico, the question naturally turns to whether or not he can galvanize the support that may have been eroded by the behavior of some of his loudest online supporters, who, like Edwards, have knowingly or unknowingly trafficked in misogynoir and anti-Blackness to make their case for why Talarico is the right fighter for the moment.

The wounds of Black Texans are many, amplified by the nature of our internet lives and the tendency of white leftists to dismiss our concerns and our chosen candidates in the interest of unity. If we are to move forward and leave the messy, sometimes divisive conversations of the Texas Democratic Party primary behind us, it is going to require Talarico to do the work of meaningfully, substantially, and materially engaging Black voters; otherwise the fever dream of turning Texas blue will have to be deferred at least one more cycle.

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16 Mar 2026

Man v. Nature

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As a small fishing boat bounced across the surface of Corpus Christi Bay, Clara “Cari” Villarreal Varner admired a stretch of wooded coast last June.

For the first time, Varner, a member of the Karankawa Tribe of Texas, was viewing the shoreline of a 3-square-mile area near Ingleside on the Bay, where archaeologists had discovered thousands of Karankawa artifacts in recent decades, including pottery shards, stone tools, and other pieces of evidence that this was once a frequently inhabited settlement.

“We see this beauty,” Varner said. “We can imagine that our ancestors were all … living their lives. And then, fast-forward.”

In the 1800s, many of the Karankawa, a tribe that inhabited much of the Texas coast before the arrival of the Spaniards, were massacred by militiamen and settlers. The survivors, including Varner’s own ancestors, scattered—leaving modern tribal members without a homeland or even any formal state or federal recognition. Now they fear artifacts in their ancestral settlement will be destroyed.

In Varner’s field of view, huge tanker ships were filling up with U.S. crude oil at the Enbridge Ingleside Energy Center, North America’s largest crude oil export terminal. She and other Karankawa people had teamed up with the Coastal Watch Association, a local environmental group, to file a lawsuit to prevent Enbridge Inc.—a Canadian oil and natural gas export giant—from enlarging its terminal to include parts of the ancestral settlement. They lost. In March 2025, the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the group’s lawsuit and greenlit Enbridge’s expansion in Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend v. United States Army Corps of Engineers.

“I feel saddened, I feel angry,” Varner said. “I feel not beaten down, though. I will not—we will not—give up.”

The anti-environment ruling, handed down by two judges appointed by President Donald Trump and a third Republican-appointed judge, was not unusual in federal cases in which Trump appointees participated, according to an analysis of 309 circuit court decisions issued between January 2018 and September 30, 2025. The analysis, by students at Northwestern University for the Texas Observer, focused on decisions by panels that included at least one Trump appointee and that included the words “environment,” “pollution,” or “climate” in all circuits except the 1st, which has no Trump appointees.

“This case reeks of environmental racism.”

More than half—167 of those rulings—were clearly anti-environment. The rulings generally benefited industry or other polluters, diminished environmental protections, or narrowed agencies’ ability to safeguard people and nature. Only a third favored environmental groups or causes; the results in the rest were mixed or unclear.

In his first term, Trump appointed a record-setting 54 federal appellate judges. Circuit judges are nominated by presidents and, if confirmed by the Senate, serve lifetime appointments. This analysis provides an early look at how those appointments will likely reverberate nationwide in terms of dismantling or failing to uphold environmental laws and policy, legal scholars said.

“Long term, it’s going to set a lot of precedent that pushes the law away from environmental protection, which will either lead to more-harmful outcomes for the environment, broadly speaking, or will necessitate the development of new legal and policy approaches,” said Ted Lamm, Associate Director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

In the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the Karankawa lost their case, 71 percent of those rulings were anti-environment, the highest percentage among courts in the analysis. During that period, the 5th Circuit—which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi—decided 31 cases.

“All of us that practiced before the 5th Circuit know that with an environmental case, we’re gonna have a hard time, whether it’s during the Biden administration or going all the way back to the Clinton administration,” said Jim Blackburn, a longtime environmental lawyer in Texas who serves as co-director of the Severe Storm Center at Rice University.

Nationwide, many major environmental lawsuits and cases are settled at the circuit level, which handles appeals from district courts, since very few are reviewed by the Supreme Court.

“I think it’s always been true that the circuit courts aren’t doing the big flashy thing as much,” said Justin Pidot, who served as general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality and is now a law professor at the University of Arizona. “But in terms of just the breadth of litigation that occurs, most of it gets resolved at the circuit court. So they’re incredibly influential.”

In Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend, the Native American and environmental groups argued that the project would have major impacts on environmental and cultural resources.

“Among those impacts are the risk of oil spills and accidents, direct and indirect impacts to seagrasses and the marine life that depend on them, impacts to cultural resources, light pollution, noise pollution, erosion, and air emissions,” reads the lawsuit initially filed in federal district court in Corpus Christi in 2021. The groups also argued that when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved the project, it failed to follow requirements of federal laws to sufficiently consider climate change or the negative environmental impact of the export terminal expansion.

Yet Judge Don Willett, a former Texas Supreme Court justice and a Trump appointee, who wrote the 2025 majority opinion, found that the Corps of Engineers had complied with the court’s narrow interpretation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1970 law that governs how agencies assess environmental impacts.

“In our circuit, the Corps’s obligations under NEPA to analyze climate change impacts are limited to ‘discussing relevant factors and explaining its decision,’” Willett wrote. “The Corps’s discussion of climate change here easily meets that standard.”

Enbridge embraced the rulings and underscored the importance of its expansion, which would “add five additional berths for oil tankers and barges, and essentially double its vessel capacity,” according to legal filings.

“The terminal serves as a critical link in serving U.S. and global energy markets,” Enbridge spokesperson Michael Barnes said in an October email response for this story. “The Army Corps’ staff archaeologist confirmed there would be no effect from the dock project on cultural resources. We believe the district and appellate courts’ decisions were thoughtful and thorough.”

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles appeals from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, had the second highest percentage of anti-environment rulings in the analysis—10 of 16 cases or 62.5 percent.

In another case involving Enbridge, two Trump-appointed judges in the 6th Circuit reversed a district court decision in 2020 by ruling in Enbridge’s favor in a case involving its Line 5 pipeline, which carries oil from Wisconsin through Michigan into Ontario, Canada. The plaintiff, the National Wildlife Federation, argued that the company’s plan for responding to potential oil spills did not comply with requirements in the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. An Enbridge spokesman said the 2020 ruling provided “confirmation for all pipeline operators” that the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s review was sufficient.

Varner and her child, who uses the Karankawa name Níktam Kudéch (Illustration by Clay Rodery)

The lone non-Trump appointee on that panel, Gilbert S. Merritt Jr., authored a dissenting opinion, arguing the Trump-appointed judges took an “extremely narrow view” of wildlife and environmental protections. (Merritt, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, died in 2022.)

Trump’s appointees also affected rulings in circuits that traditionally leaned pro-environment, such as the 9th Circuit Court, the nation’s largest appellate court and the busiest for environmental cases.

For decades, the 9th Circuit had been considered liberal. But, with Trump appointing 11 judges, it’s shifted right. By the end of 2025, 45 percent of the 9th Circuit’s judges had been appointed by Republican presidents, compared with only 28 percent before the first Trump administration.

“It’s historically been one of the two or three most liberal-leaning circuits, and then just the recent Trump run of appointees has just been able to shift the balance of who appointed the bulk of the judges there,” Lamm said.

Out of 70 decisions issued by 9th Circuit panels during the period included in the analysis, 35 percent were anti-environment, compared with 30 percent that favored environmental causes or litigants.

The Trump judges on the 9th have repeatedly weighed in against the environment and local communities, the analysis of opinions showed, including in a 2021 case called Center for Community Action & Environmental Justice v. the Federal Aviation Administration.

In this case, local residents and environmental groups sued to block a new 600,000-square-foot Amazon cargo facility at San Bernardino International Airport, arguing that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) failed to fully assess air-quality and socioeconomic impacts, as required by federal law. A 9th Circuit panel rejected the claims, ruling that the agency took a “hard look” at emissions and cumulative effects in its environmental review.

In a dissent, Judge Johnnie Rawlinson—the only Democrat-appointed judge on the panel—described San Bernardino as one of the nation’s most polluted corridors, with some of California’s highest asthma rates. Rawlinson said the federal government failed to adequately consider the disproportionate health burdens on San Bernardino’s largely Latino and Black communities in approving the Amazon air cargo hub. She criticized her Republican colleagues’ ruling.

“This case reeks of environmental racism,” she wrote.

In a response, Trump appointee Patrick Bumatay defended the ruling. “Of course, every judge is entitled to his or her own views, but the dissent’s assertions are unfair to the employees of the FAA and the Department of Justice,” Bumatay wrote.

In Trump’s first presidential term, federal judges often blocked administration efforts to roll back environmental protections. But as Trump has increasingly filled the courts with people who share his views, legal experts said he could have an easier time gutting environmental protections.

“One of the changes now, as compared to in the first Trump administration, is that the courts were quite favorable to environmental plaintiffs in the first Trump administration and are not so favorable to environmental plaintiffs now,” Pidot said.

Legal experts also said shifting the demographics of federal judges tends to stack the deck against environmental plaintiffs. Of the 54 federal appellate judges Trump appointed in his first term, 85 percent were white, and 80 percent were male.

“I think if you look at the types of people that President Trump is appointing to the federal bench, they are not broadening the federal bench’s lived experiences,” said Robert Weinstock, the director of the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

In Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend, two of the judges on the 5th Circuit panel were white male Trump appointees: Willett and Kurt Engelhardt. The third judge was Edith Jones, a white woman and a Ronald Reagan appointee.

In the ruling, the judges didn’t mention the Karankawa’s or other Native Americans’ concerns about the destruction of the land that holds artifacts of their forebears.

Love Sanchez founded the Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend, an intertribal group representing Indigenous people from the Karankawa and other tribes whose traditional lands lie in the Corpus Christi area.

(1st Circuit had no Trump appointees. Credit: Dasha Dubinina)

Sanchez expressed dismay about the prospect of losing that coastline—and artifacts from Indigenous cultures—to an oil export terminal.

“It was so hard,” Sanchez said in an interview in October. “I was very sad. It was a blow, taking the loss because we had been working on stopping Enbridge since 2019 and—I’m sorry. I’m gonna cry talking about it, reliving it.”

Sanchez criticized Enbridge for not reaching out to the Indigenous groups. “They don’t even acknowledge us,” she said.

However, in an email provided for this story, Barnes cited Enbridge’s long record of working with Indigenous groups. “We rely on a collaborative approach in the communities where we operate,” Barnes said. “This includes working with hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America.”

Some community leaders argued that Enbridge’s expansion would be vital for the region’s economic growth, including Mike Culbertson, 68, who has served as president and CEO of the Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corporation since 2009.

Culbertson said he supports the court’s decision to permit the crude oil export terminal expansion because, in his opinion, it would affect Ingleside’s industrial corridor, not residential areas. “We did not believe that [expansion] was encroaching on anybody,” Culbertson said. “It was the same use, essentially, for what they were asking for, and it only increases the economic wealth of the region.”

On a drive down State Highway 361 in May 2025, Culbertson pointed to towering storage tanks and sprawling manufacturing facilities that spanned the road for several miles. Culbertson, at the wheel of his red pickup, rattled off the names of each company, its square footage and number of employees.

To him, the region’s massive expansion of plastic, liquefied natural gas, steel and chemical production, and export facilities illustrates how the area is capitalizing on its geographic location. “They’re here because you can get oil from the Eagle Ford or the Permian, and Enbridge can have it out into the Gulf in 15 minutes,” Culbertson said.

Culbertson grew up in the Coastal Bend and said he has witnessed the benefits of the fossil fuel industry expansion. “When I left here in 1975 to go to college, we were at 254,000 [people]. When I came back 30 years later, we were at, like, 280,000. That’s it. That’s all we’ve grown,” Culbertson said. “As we’ve brought companies here that bring wealth into the region, we have grown, and people have started staying here. Now we’re over 315,000.”

Culbertson dismissed claims made by Indigenous groups. “The Karankawas are actually gone. They don’t exist anymore,” he said.

The Karankawa’s historic presence along the Texas coast is undisputed. Texas A&M-Corpus Christi researchers have recognized four Indigenous tribes who traditionally occupied the Coastal Bend: “the Karankawa (Copanes), the Lipan Apache/Nde, the Comanche/Tonkawa, and the Coahuiltecan (Pamoque).”

Many Texans assumed the Karankawa had been wiped out after members of the tribe were massacred and forced to disperse in the 1800s. In fact, their descendants moved, intermarried, and assimilated into Hispanic and Tejano communities. Then, in recent decades, some started reclaiming their identity as Karankawa and challenging the narrative of extinction.

Increasingly, non-Karankawa people also accept the tribe’s legitimacy and take offense at comments like Culbertson’s.

“Yes, they do exist. How could they not exist?” said Courtney Shane, 50, a politically conservative stay-at-home mom who lives near the terminal site (and whose husband is employed by another big fossil fuel exporter). Shane also opposed Enbridge’s expansion. She shares the Karankawa people’s concerns and also believes her community is being overwhelmed by industrial facilities that drive out smaller businesses and drive up land costs.

“I think we are growing too quickly, too irresponsibly,” Shane said. “And it’s sad because everybody loves Texas, and we are losing our Texas by all these industries.”

She’s trying to slow down that industrial growth by speaking at city council meetings and posting on a Facebook page called “Patriots of the Texas Coastal Bend.” A self-described “Constitutional Republican,” Shane said that more conservatives in Ingleside have started attending meetings and joining the opposition.

Janet Laylor, a retired employee of the National Institute of Health and a resident of Ingleside, can watch dolphins swim through the back windows of her house. This was supposed to be her retirement home, but now she worries that industrial development will push her and others out.

“This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. This is a community issue. And I think I have seen people at our meetings that are die-hard MAGA and people, like myself, that are very progressive, and we come together on this issue,” Laylor said.

A dense row of homes faces the waterfront, with foundations raised on pilings to accommodate the shifting tides. Residents gather on docks that jut out into the water to fish. Increasing numbers of huge tanker ships motor past. Patrick Nye, 71, has lived in his bayfront beach house since 1967 and has long considered Ingleside a peaceful escape, but he said it’s being threatened by Enbridge’s expansion.

“We are already smelling the smells of the loading of the oil into the tankers,” Nye said. “We’re seeing smoke coming up from the tankers themselves as they idle. We see the seagrass being smothered by silt as they dock these vessels. And we’re seeing this whole thing propagate throughout this whole region.”

In 2019, Nye founded the Coastal Watch Association, a nonprofit environmental organization that joined Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend in the legal battle to try to stop Enbridge’s expansion. With more than 200 participants and a seven-member board of directors, the association generally monitors and often opposes pro-industry permits issued by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and works to raise public awareness about environmental destruction.

“This feels like a very colonialistic action.”

Members got involved in the federal lawsuit because they believed Enbridge’s expansion would harm marine ecosystems, encroach on Native American archaeological sites, and move industrial facilities close to residential areas, he said.

“This feels like a very colonialistic action. … Somebody with a lot of money comes into your town, uses up all your resources, does not talk to the people that are there, makes money, and sends it somewhere else,” said Charlie Boone, president of the Coastal Watch Association and a neighbor of Nye’s.

(Illustration by Clay Rodery)

Still bruised from its 5th Circuit loss, the group has turned its focus to another industrial expansion threatening its coastal hamlet: an Enbridge joint venture to build a blue ammonia plant. Blue ammonia is low-carbon ammonia that generates power for electricity and transportation. The Coastal Watch Association has gone door-to-door in Ingleside getting locals to submit forms to TCEQ challenging the plant’s permits.

With the federal courts increasingly in the hands of anti-environment judges, the group sees the court of public opinion as its best option for future fights against polluting facilities. In fact, to some extent, the area’s environment defenders are deciding to strategically avoid the federal judiciary now. With six of nine judges on the U.S. Supreme Court appointed by Republicans, three of them by Trump, the odds seem greater of setting a harmful new precedent than of scoring a win.

Sanchez fears how future legal challenges might go: “[The 5th Circuit is] going to rule the same way, and then we’re going to go to the Supreme Court and we’re going to change the law and mess it up for other people challenging these things.”

Dasha Dubinina, Norah D’Cruze, and Rachel Schlueter are journalism students at Northwestern University. They began working on this story in January 2025 through an undergraduate research program overseen by Associate Professor Elizabeth Shogren and expanded it for the Texas Observer.

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