Ernesto Gonzales liked to hold court in the morning from a corner booth of El Rancho in Harlingen, a busy local eatery festooned with multicolored papel picado party banners—one of several spots he frequented after rising at dawn and reading the Bible. Between slurps of coffee—he drank it like water—and bites of breakfast taco, he would pause to finger his brushy, ample mustache and call out greetings. No one could predict from his deadpan expression whether the 62-year-old attorney might glance up to deliver a skewering remark, a sly joke, or, more rarely, a compliment.

After decades of trail riding, running a solo law practice, and serving as mayor of the nearby town of Primera, Gonzales seemingly knew secrets about everyone, gleaned from his encyclopedic knowledge of the Rio Grande Valley and his voluminous divorce and criminal case files. He lived perpetually surrounded by friends—and by enemies.

His flamboyant style verged on cantankerous. As a young attorney, a judge noticed the flourishes of aggressive energy he deployed in court, earning him the moniker “El Gallito,” the Little Rooster. But in late middle age, the Rooster had strayed from his flock. He spoke infrequently to his only son, and never to his former wives, though he’d quietly made sure they’d benefit in the event of his death.

In June 2017, he began to fight with two of his seven siblings over their mother’s treatment and medications. He soon filed related formal complaints against the home healthcare business run by his sister, a nurse, accusing her of patient abuse, neglect, and Medicaid fraud. (She denied all allegations.)

A Primera patrolman was summoned to the family home on June 21 over an argument Gonzales began over whether his mother, Francisca, bedridden after suffering small strokes, needed emergency treatment. Over his loud objections, the ambulance was sent away. Gonzales later alleged his mother had been “unduly influenced by my siblings to say she did not want to go to the hospital though I have the power of attorney.” He blamed siblings, nieces, and their husbands when she died days later, executing a posthumous maneuver to exclude some from the list of pallbearers.

More conflicts erupted at the matriarch’s June 28 viewing at Trinity Funeral Home, where Gonzales arranged for his twin brother, Enrique, to be served with papers related to a new lawsuit Gonzales had filed. The suit claimed that Enrique had borrowed $42,000 that was still owed to the family trust. (Enrique claimed the debt had been repaid.) In the chapel lounge, the fight over his mother’s care escalated into a scuffle, and his younger sister, Alice, was scratched and bitten.

El Gallito avoided injury, only because he’d been warned that two younger male relatives had threatened to “kick the living daylights out of me,” he later said in an affidavit.

About two weeks later, on July 13, Gonzales filed that affidavit to seek a protective order against the estranged sister who owned a healthcare business and four younger relatives. The language he used seemed blunt even by El Gallito’s standards: “I have had to carry an unloaded pistol in my truck hidden because I fear for my life,” he wrote.

As an active attorney, he’d received other threats too. He told family and an employee that he’d been jumped, pistol-whipped, and left unconscious by men he said belonged to a drug cartel while camping in his RV on South Padre Island. On his phone, he’d kept a copy of another ominous message he’d received via text: a photo of what looked like a dead man lying beside a rifle with a message that said only “Ernest.”

A framed photo of Ernesto “El Gallito” Gonzales

On July 18, Gonzales planned to meet at 8 a.m. with Alice to discuss her pending divorce. Alice knew her big brother—like his animal totem—rose before dawn and tended to be obsessively punctual. But he didn’t show. Inside the brick house on South F Street that he’d converted into the headquarters of his solo law practice, “Everything was in order,” she recalled in an interview. Inside, she found only his coat hung up neatly beside his desk, where the Bible was still open.

His battered white pickup remained outside, but the unloaded gun he’d carried for protection was missing. Alice immediately called 911.

Harlingen police officers were stumped. There was no sign of a struggle; a few drops of blood they later discovered and tested came from an animal. El Gallito was a hunter. With no body to examine or identify, the case remained that of an unsolved missing person for more than two years. Then, the Texas Rangers were summoned.

To this day, Alice says nobody ever fully investigated her brother’s 2017 disappearance. She knew there was no shortage of people who wanted her brother dead—including some of her siblings. “I wish somebody would really investigate. Because I want to know who took my brother’s life. Who had the nerve to take him,” she told the Texas Observer.

But the person Harlingen police and the Rangers arrested in 2020 was not among the people on Alice’s list; it was her own son, Solomon “Sonny” Campos Jr., a former police officer and a federal contractor for the Border Patrol with no criminal record.

Like others in his storied division of the Department of Public Safety (DPS), Texas Ranger Raul “Roy” Garza had a long list of duties—including assisting local police with crime scene investigations and unsolved murder cases. Garza initially refused to help with the El Gallito case, he said. He was already too busy reviewing another high-profile Harlingen missing person—Noemi Rodriguez, who vanished after finishing her shift around 2 a.m. at a McDonald’s almost exactly a year prior.

Garza worked on only a handful of murder cases during his seven years as a Ranger, a tenure that ended when he retired in 2023. That wasn’t atypical. DPS data obtained by the Observer through a records request shows that Texas Rangers opened 148 murder cases in 2024 and 2025—an average of one every two years per Ranger, based on the number of positions authorized by the Legislature.

Given their myriad assignments, few Rangers specialize in homicides. One exception was retired Ranger James Holland, who famously persuaded serial killers to crack—winning 93 confessions from an aging California inmate named Samuel Little and gleaning admissions from an Oklahoma killer that led to the discovery of two murdered teens’ clandestine graves near Houston.

Garza had neither Holland’s expertise in homicides nor his reputation as a “serial killer whisperer.” On a personal level, he thought Rangers were required to do too much. “If you want to do a good job, you can’t have too many cases on your plate,” Garza told the Observer in a March phone interview.

Alice Gonzales outside the law office of her brother, Ernesto

An Indiana native, Garza began his career as a police officer in San Juan, a town just west of Harlingen. After joining DPS in 1997, he made his way up as a trooper, a K-9 trainer, a drone operator, and a narcotics investigator before becoming a Ranger in 2016—the year before El Gallito disappeared. But his true passion was fishing: Since 2010, he’d been moonlighting as a fishing guide in Port Mansfield.

He considered his last two murder cases to be the most important—and “crazy”—of his career, though neither resulted in a murder conviction. “The Noemi Rodriguez case and the Gallito case will both make movies one day,” Garza said.

In the Rodriguez case, Garza and Harlingen police initially couldn’t locate the 19-year-old victim who disappeared after working at McDonald’s. Nor could they find the suspect, identified as the driver of a light-colored SUV spotted on the restaurant’s drive-through camera shortly before Rodriguez called her mother to say she’d gotten a ride home.

But the Rodriguez investigation heated up after her remains were discovered on the bank of a canal northeast of Harlingen in April 2017—not long before El Gallito vanished. A tipster, Garza said, led him to the suspect: A former co-worker at the restaurant whose family owned property where her body had been found. However, Cameron County prosecutors have never charged the man named as a “person of interest,” Miguel Angel Flores, who’s currently doing time for unrelated aggravated robberies.

Garza was still trying to gather evidence in the Rodriguez investigation when he got roped into helping Harlingen police with the unsolved El Gallito disappearance in July 2018. “I kind of got forced to take the case,” Garza said.

Within two years, Garza helped find the body and arrested a suspect—the nephew named Sonny Campos. But charges against Campos were still pending when Garza took early retirement in August 2023 to pursue his passion and become a full-time fishing guide.

A year later, his most high-profile Valley murder case would spectacularly fall apart.

The Texas Rangers’ cold case website still lists Gonzales’ murder as an example of matters solved through the Rangers’ prowess. But Campos was exonerated.

In a pending civil lawsuit, Campos alleges that Garza helped Harlingen police frame him for the crime and that officers destroyed, hid, or lost crucial evidence that could have proved his innocence.

In the March phone interview, Garza refused to comment on his investigation, given the pending civil suit. But the Ranger’s thick case file on the El Gallito murder—and his trial testimony—show that he began interviewing multiple relatives, including some who allegedly threatened Gonzales. But he quickly decided to focus on Campos.

It was an unusual choice: Other relatives questioned by Garza or by Harlingen police had criminal histories or had been named as posing threats by El Gallito in his request for a protective order. Campos, in contrast, got along well with his tío—and had passed frequent background checks during his career as a police officer in Washington, a rookie Border Patrol agent in Arizona, and, most recently, a federal contractor for immigration authorities in Texas.

Despite the delicate nature of the murder case, Garza used his personal cell phone to text some relatives whom he interviewed as potential witnesses, including some accused of making threats and Gonzales’ only son, according to testimony that Garza and others gave during the murder trial.

Garza told the Observer that he never considered the victim’s son to be a suspect—despite the fact that the son claimed more than $300,000 in assets including his father’s house, horses, and other property and life insurance money (along with his mother and stepmother).  In testimony, Garza said he also ignored threats El Gallito had supposedly received from nonrelatives as irrelevant.

Garza obtained passwords and other valuable clues in 2019 about El Gallito’s last day from Gonzales’ son, who had access to his father’s house and computer. Various versions of El Gallito’s last day were soon leaked to the press and widely shared. Gonzales’ first few stops on the morning of his disappearance were predictable. He’d left his house near dawn, stopped at Whataburger (another favorite breakfast haunt), then went to his office. After leaving his pickup parked there, the data allegedly showed, the attorney—or his phone—pinged at several sites. Its electronic location was tracked near Campos’ home, near property that Campos leased for a goat ranch, and near the home of an older brother.

Based on the location data, Garza and Harlingen police officer Manuel Tovar zeroed in on Campos.

Campos sits at El Rancho in Harlingen, where his uncle used to sit.

Campos and his wife, Erika, worked long hours—she as an elementary school teacher and he ferrying immigrants stopped by Border Patrol to detention centers or to the border for voluntary removal. On the side, Campos leased pastureland from a great-uncle, where he kept both goats and chickens.

Campos denied seeing his uncle on the day of El Gallito’s disappearance, though he’d stopped at the goat ranch and fixed a trailer tire near there before driving 25 miles to work another extra job at Vinson Shooting Range in Los Fresnos.

Campos and his wife cooperated with police searches. In 2018, a team of police with cadaver dogs searched the ranch, finding no evidence. Officers returned other times to visit the property. Later, the couple’s home in town was eventually searched and Campos’ gun collection seized (none were ever used as evidence against him, but he told the Observer not all were returned).

Despite the previous searches, Garza still concluded that the ranch was “the perfect place to hide a body.”

Garza arrived at the acreage, about 10 miles southwest of Harlingen, on June 23, 2020. According to another witness, Garza had received information from an anonymous source, and one of his own reports referred to a  “CI,” a common abbreviation for a confidential informant, though Garza later insisted there was no such informant. He also claimed in court—and in an interview with the Observer—that the reference to a “CI” he made in a government form to request a listening device (a rigged watch) referred to El Gallito’s son, who had at one point offered to secretly record conversations.

This time, Garza and a contingent of state and local officers, carrying ground-penetrating radar, found a skeleton at the ranch near a newly built barn that was later identified as belonging to Gonzales. The bones were buried several feet down, and some were missing. Based on reports and testimony later presented at trial, it was unclear how long the remains had been buried there, or whether they had been moved from elsewhere. But, as a forensic pathologist concluded, the cause of death was evident: Gonzales had been shot in the head execution-style.

The discovery of the grave was the primary evidence linking Campos to his uncle’s murder. But unlike other relatives, Campos lacked a motive.

After his uncle’s disappearance, his aunt’s healthcare business—the same one El Gallito had filed complaints against—had run into trouble with the feds. Yet Campos had steered clear of his uncle’s family feuds, trying to keep peace with both sides.

In fact, Campos claims he had maintained a close relationship with his uncle; they regularly breakfasted together at El Rancho. “I was never angry at my uncle. … It makes no sense,” Campos told the Observer in an interview.

At the time that his uncle accused other relatives of posing a threat, Campos said that El Gallito gave him “a tie that belonged to my grandpa so [Campos could] wear it as a pallbearer for my grandma’s funeral.” Nor did the nephew financially benefit from the crime.

A teetotaler, Campos often gave his uncle rides home after El Gallito had too much to drink—his uncle was on probation for DUI at the time he disappeared; he’d won a plea deal after suing DPS and a state trooper. In interviews, Campos said he, like other relatives, worried about his uncle’s addiction issues, and he once confronted a storekeeper he thought had sold his uncle drugs.

Prosecutors later used statements that other relatives provided about these conversations as evidence that Campos was tracking his uncle. Based on those statements, the cell phone pings, and the body-recovery site, they argued that Campos had kidnapped his uncle, shot him in the head, then buried him wrapped in a belly chain similar to those Campos used in his border job to restrain suspects.

Alice, who was in the process of divorcing Campos’ father, had argued with her eldest son at times. But she thinks Campos is the last person who would have wanted to kill her brother. “My son’s never been in jail. He’s never been in trouble. He is a clean kid. He has been wrongfully accused,” she told the Observer.

Two days after El Gallito’s body was found, Campos was arrested and charged with capital murder.

“We cannot as a society allow this kind of corruption and abuse.”

In an interview, Campos said he believed then, and now, that someone else planted the remains on the ranch—where there were no high fences, security cameras, or watchful residents—to frame him, likely with the help of someone in law enforcement.

As he awaited trial in jail—initially unable to post a more than $1 million bond and insisting on his innocence—Campos scribbled notes about mistakes he’d observed by police. He remained in jail for months, depleting his savings on attorney’s fees and losing his jobs. His wife gave up their car and reluctantly sold off their goats, chickens, and horses. Eventually, she sold the house she’d purchased prior to their marriage to provide collateral to a bondsman to ensure his release in April 2021.

Campos shared his observations with his Brownsville criminal defense attorneys, Ernesto Gamez and his daughter Erin Gamez (who is also a state legislator), who began to examine the evidence that they received through discovery. What they quickly found was that a lot of paperwork, videos, and photos seemed to be missing—and that some statements police had given under oath to obtain search warrants contained irregularities and information they considered false.

In January 2023, while out on bond, Campos filed an internal affairs complaint with Harlingen police alleging that Tovar committed perjury when he testified in district court to secure one of the warrants to search Campos’ property.

He filed a similar complaint with DPS against Garza. DPS did open an internal affairs investigation, but the agency took no action against the Ranger, according to a letter. Garza later said in court and in an interview that his 2023 retirement had nothing to do with the internal probe. After 26 years with DPS, he simply preferred to dedicate his life to catching fish rather than suspects. A records request by the Observer turned up no disciplinary actions.

Before his trial, Campos made a cell phone video of the day Garza arrived at his home to collect his DNA, supposedly to compare it against genetic material found near his uncle’s remains. Campos considered the video evidence of how the Ranger had failed to follow DPS standard procedures to avoid cross contamination. No DNA was used against him.

A dense crowd of journalists, many of whom set up TV cameras for daily updates, gathered at the Cameron County Courthouse when Campos’ trial finally began in October 2024. County prosecutors took more than two weeks to present their case. At every turn, his defense attorneys counterattacked, with points scored by both.

Some stories that aired on Valley TV stations focused on mistakes and missing evidence: Harlingen police admitted to losing early witness statements and multiple videos that they had collected after El Gallito’s disappearance. In his two days of testimony, Garza admitted that he’d never collected the victim’s computer, which the victim’s son allegedly used to access an online account and to help track El Gallito’s final cell phone locations. It had been destroyed, according to testimony.

Ernesto and Erin Gamez pressed Garza about why, even after being required by a court order to turn over all communications, he’d failed to provide texts and emails that he’d sent witnesses—including alternative suspects—during the homicide investigation. Garza conceded these were likely erased when he turned in his computer and cell phone upon his retirement in August 2023.

Garza was proud of his role in the dramatic discovery of remains in 2020; the Ranger claimed that, while other officers and trained canines had missed the grave, he’d been able to see a clear “disturbance” of the ground years later.

However, he and other DPS officials could not explain why body cam video, which should have been collected by various officers who participated in the search for the grave, was missing. They’d turned over only photos.

At one point, Erin Gamez accused the prosecutors of simply looking for ways to distract the jury from “the lack of evidence” against Campos. “There is no motive, no witnesses to testify that he did it,” she said in court.

At trial, the defense zeroed in on references Garza had made to an informant they argued had steered him to the grave site in 2020—after prior searches of the same area had found nothing. Pressed repeatedly for a name, the Ranger insisted on the stand that he didn’t have one.

Given that Garza’s testimony about having no informant appeared to contradict references in his own reports, Erin Gamez declared that she believed that the now-retired Ranger had deliberately committed perjury. During trial, she argued that he and other officers involved in the case should be investigated.

The case concluded after nearly three weeks. The jury reached a verdict in less than three hours: not guilty.

In a posttrial press conference, the younger Gamez declared that an innocent man had just gotten justice. But she told local journalists she feared there might never be any for El Gallito.

Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz did not respond to the Observer’s requests for comment. He is among the officials whom Campos has sued over the mishandled prosecution and alleged civil rights violations, though Saenz and other officials have asked the court to dismiss the suit, in part because police and prosecutors generally enjoy qualified immunity in such cases.

Meanwhile, other records show that Saenz had already criticized flaws in a different murder investigation involving a collaboration between Harlingen police and Garza. In an unusual statement, Saenz had declared that key evidence had been mishandled, forcing him to drop capital murder charges.

In July 2022, the Cameron County DA’s office attempted to try a man who’d been arrested and charged with the stabbing death of 63-year-old Eric Eugene Armstrong. Records show that Garza assisted Harlingen police with the collection of evidence in that probe too.

Armstrong, a welder and pipe fitter described in an obituary as someone who “never met a stranger and was willing to lend a helping hand to friends and neighbors,” was stabbed to death on March 1, 2021, in what police described as a botched robbery inside a home in Harlingen.

The suspect left his cap behind at the bloody murder scene. On March 2, a Harlingen officer asked Garza to assist with processing the hat, which had been sealed in a “brown paper evidence bag,” according to Garza’s report. The Ranger took 36 photographs with his state-issued Nikon camera and gave a DVD with the images to the Harlingen detective.

Next, using latex gloves, he helped collect hairs from the hat that had been taped to “a clean sheet of white paper.” Then Garza used a light and filtered goggles to look inside, concluding there was no other biological material. After that, he terminated his involvement, saying the city police were taking charge. His report does not indicate whether the hat or hairs were sent to a DNA laboratory for further testing.

Within days, Harlingen police arrested Jose Isaias Soto Martinez, who had recently been released from prison after serving part of a 30-year sentence for five prior aggravated robberies in Cameron County. He was later charged with capital murder.  

Then, in a highly unusual move, Saenz halted Soto Martinez’s trial before all witnesses had testified, claiming that investigators had lost evidence and failed to complete necessary lab work. In an unusual diatribe about the poor quality of the investigation, Saenz blamed Harlingen police—never mentioning Garza or the Rangers, whose duties include helping smaller departments collect and analyze evidence.

“It is unfortunate that we were unable to try the case of Jose Isaias Soto Martinez to verdict,” Saenz stated, according to news accounts. “The investigation by the Harlingen police was mishandled. … Relevant videos and photographs that we were not advised existed until in the middle of trial were lost. Supplemental reports were not completed and forensic lab testing was never completed or followed up on.”

Soto Martinez, who faced a potential life sentence, was convicted in 2022 only of evading arrest, sentenced to two years, and had his probation revoked, prison records show.

In an interview, Garza told the Observer he had little to do with the Armstrong investigation, though he recalled the DA’s criticisms.

Saenz’s 2022 statement about officers failing to properly retain and test evidence in the Armstrong murder resembled criticisms that defense attorneys would make during Campos’ trial.

In 2022, the Texas Rangers faced turmoil and turnover that spilled beyond Garza’s border region. Seventeen Rangers were investigated for failing to act to prevent the deaths of schoolchildren in Uvalde—and Assistant Chief Brian Burzynski, one of Garza’s supervisors, retired along with the agency’s chief. In 2023, Garza joined more retirements in the Rangers’ bicentennial year, leaving the agency shorthanded.

Rangers, these days, are overburdened, including with in-custody death investigations and with border security deployments, Garza told the Observer. He said he wished the Rangers had no “additional assignments other than helping out small agencies with technically difficult cases.” He added, “I don’t think we need to be doing border ops helping out with drone operations and all this other crazy stuff.”

He still thinks Campos is guilty. And no one else appears to be investigating El Gallito’s murder—the Rangers’ cold case list still classifies the case as “solved.” DPS did not respond to questions emailed for this article.

But Campos’ lawsuit, pending in federal court, characterizes his prosecution as a massive miscarriage of justice that harmed the life of an innocent man. Campos is seeking compensation for what he has described as a flawed investigation that led to his wrongful arrest, the premature end of his federal career, the loss of his property, and nearly irreparable harm to his reputation and his life—and to his wife’s.

In this, he has an unusual advocate: C.J. Grisham, a veteran and the outspoken founder of the gun rights group Open Carry Texas, who gained a provisional law license in 2023 after attending the Appalachian School of Law. Grisham has promised to fight for Campos—even if those who really carried out the murder try to come after him.

In an interview, Grisham said government officials in this case violated their duty by manipulating, manufacturing, hiding, and destroying evidence. “We cannot as a society allow this kind of corruption and abuse of the justice system that happened in this case,” he said.

The post The Troubling Disappearance of ‘El Gallito’ appeared first on The Texas Observer.

President Donald Trump’s poorly planned war with Iran has paralyzed global shipping routes and spiked the average price of gas by about $1 per gallon nationwide. For three months, Americans have struggled to rationalize both the conflict and the painful prices at the pump, as many work several jobs and side hustles to survive the current affordability crisis. Meanwhile, Trump’s flagrant lack of concern has smashed his purported “America First” promise into bits—and Texas Democrats are scrambling to pick up the pieces.

They’ve started with the cost of gas, one of the most salient barometers for the sitting president’s economic stewardship.

On April 21, Texas’ Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico stood in a rainy gas station parking lot and, in his usual practiced cadence, proposed a suspension of the federal gas tax, which currently amounts to 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on diesel. “Americans in the last election voted for two things: to end the forever wars and to make life more affordable,” Talarico said in his address. “But the people in power have done the exact opposite.”

It’s a rather stark departure from the standard Democratic Party line, one that several other party members–in Texas and in Washington—have also rallied behind, including gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa and agriculture commissioner candidate Clayton Tucker. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have also embraced the idea to satisfy voters on pocketbook issues. Still several other Dems in Congress have lined up in opposition. Longtime critics of the gas tax holiday measure say that the idea amounts to scrounging for quarters in a junk drawer rather than focusing on the root cause of inflationary policies; they warn that a gas tax suspension could drastically defund public roadways and education in the long term.

For years, the standard Democratic position on the federal gas tax has been to maintain (or even increase) the tax rate as a means to both shore up the infrastructure fund and curb car travel—one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. But populist “affordability” politics are in vogue for the out-of-power left as many average Americans face dire financial circumstances. Climate policy, which was all the rage for Democrats just five or six years ago, has now been sidelined as a toxic turnoff.

“Especially here in Texas, they would prefer not to raise the climate issue, because that just opens the door to Republican accusations that Democrats are bad for the oil and natural gas industry,” said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University. “We’re increasingly seeing Democratic politicians fight fire with fire by engaging in populist rhetoric similar to that of Donald Trump, even if from a policy perspective it’s irresponsible.”

(YouTube/James Talarico)

The federal gas tax generates over $20 billion in annual revenue for the Highway Trust Fund, which covers the cost of construction and repair for highways, bridges, and mass transit. (The Texas state gas tax is a flat 20 cents per gallon for regular and diesel, which generates over $3.5 billion annually for the State Highway Fund and the Available School Fund.) A federal suspension for just five months could lead to a $17 billion deficit for the Highway Trust Fund, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

This isn’t the first time that Dems have proposed a gas tax holiday to score points on the campaign trail.

During the 2008 presidential race, Hillary Clinton and John McCain tried to undercut Barack Obama by calling to suspend the gas tax. Obama called it a “gimmick that would save you half a tank of gas over an entire summer.”

When gas prices hit an average of $5 nationwide in 2022, President Joe Biden urged Congress to enact a 90-day gas tax holiday. His attempt at regaining the public’s good faith was repudiated by members of both parties, but some states like Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey enacted their own tax holidays. Studies of the 2022 gas tax holidays say that consumers in those states saw anywhere from 58 to 87 percent of the cut trickle down to the pump—but the projected revenue losses ranged from $90 million for Connecticut up to $585 million for New York.

Some researchers and policy centers think fuel taxes and fees should actually be increased, not lowered, in order to rescue the Highway Trust Fund. The longstanding principle of fuel taxes is a user pay system: drivers should chip in to upkeep the roads they use everyday. Another factor is the climate cost of burning fuel. Talarico counters this argument by folding the issue into his broader working class platform against billionaires and corporations. He believes deficits can be made up by ending the “disastrous war in Iran,” targeting tax loopholes, and making the wealthy pay their fair share.

Texas gubernatorial hopeful Gina Hinojosa was among the first Democrats to back Talarico’s proposal. She dropped her own statement two days later, calling on Governor Greg Abbott to suspend the state gas tax using broad emergency executive authority. Over the past month, she has kept up the pressure and accused Abbott of holding out on working families given that the state has a nearly $24 billion budget surplus and a $32 billion rainy day fund.

“This state is a world economic powerhouse,” Hinojosa said. “There is a lot of money that Greg Abbott leaves on the table.”

Abbott’s camp shot back. “The state gas tax is levied on suppliers, not at the pump. That revenue generates well over $300 million per month, which is constitutionally dedicated to fund roads and public schools,” Abbott’s press secretary Eduardo Leal said in a statement. “Looks like Democrats want to defund Texas public schools, but I guess ignorance is bliss.”

Democratic candidate for Texas Agriculture Commissioner Clayton Tucker also jumped on board. He challenged his opponent, honey mogul Nate Sheets, to “stand with working Texans” instead of waiting on Abbott. Tucker said “the greedy few are squeezing Texans from every direction,” while “politicians keep protecting the same rigged system.” Sheets has yet to comment on the issue.

The gas tax holiday is gaining traction even among its past dissenters. Per usual, this swing among Republicans hinges on the axis of Trump. On May 11, Trump said he would support a suspension or reduction of the federal gas tax. That same day, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill to lift the federal gas tax for 90 days—almost identical to the Biden proposal Hawley once blasted as “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of.” The bill’s only measure to recoup revenue for the Highway Trust Fund is to transfer money from the Treasury General Fund, a routine but shortsighted stopgap.

“You have the president of the United States proposing it, and you have Senate Republicans increasingly worried about retaining control of the U.S. Senate,” Jones said. “They look to reducing the price people pay at the pump as a relatively quick fix.”

Senator John Cornyn also said he could live with a temporary suspension, after previously saying it would “explode the deficit.” Even the current Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller joined the calls to suspend the gas tax after being scorned by his party in the primary, accusing Abbott of “padding” the state treasury coffers while families “struggle to fill their tanks and feed their kids.”

However, President Trump has already rolled back his previous enthusiasm for lifting the tax, appearing confused and unsure about the topic in a late May cabinet meeting. As always, he has proven himself unreliable and unsympathetic, telling reporters on June 10, “I love the inflation.”

At a rally in San Antonio last month, Talarico told the Observer that fuel prices are “the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back,” and that he’s still pushing for the tax holiday. Both longtime Republican and Democratic strategists have said that Talarico’s proposal could help him build the coalition of independent voters he needs to win. While Jones agreed, he also said it’s highly unlikely the policy is ever enacted.

“Then Talarico can have his cake and eat it too,” Jones said. “He’s on record supporting something that’s popular among voters, but then he never has to reckon with the negative policy consequences.”

The post Why Are Texas Dems Pushing a Gas Tax Holiday? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The drought-stricken City of Corpus Christi is withholding how much water a controversial cryptocurrency mine is siphoning away from surrounding residents.

The Texas Observer reported on the facility’s water burden last year in a series examining the cryptomine and artificial intelligence data center boom unfolding across the state. From May to August last year, the Bitcoin mine consumed 11,563,000 gallons, according to water utility records that the Observer previously obtained via a local resident’s public information request.

Together, the records pointed to an average of about 127,500 gallons a day, well over the 100,000-gallons daily rate that the city uses to label a “high-volume user.” Moreover, records obtained last year showed the city already added a new 4-inch water pipe to the site to help the mine cool its computing hardware with a technique known as liquid immersion.

City Council member Roland Barrera, in whose district the mine is located, said city staff told him the mine is still guzzling about 100,000 gallons a day, or about 3 million gallons a month. Other industrial users, like the city’s petrochemical refineries, use as much as 90 million gallons monthly. 

But now, as Corpus Christi faces an ever-deepening water crisis, in response to the Observer’s public information request, the city is refusing to release the latest 2026 records of the mine’s water usage. The city is appealing the Observer’s request for those records to the Texas Office of the Attorney General, citing a section of the Texas Utilities Code that allows nondisclosure of an individual customer’s account. That’s a change from just last year, when the city provided water-usage records.

Downtown Corpus Christi stands above Corpus Christi Bay. (2022 photo by Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News)

In February, the city also refused to provide information on commercial car wash water use in response to a request made by KRIS 6, a local TV station covering the water crisis. The attorney general upheld the city’s decision in that case to withhold the information based on its use of an advanced metering system for the business, something the city didn’t specify was at issue for the cryptomine. 

Instead, the city argued that it needs written consent from the mine’s operators to disclose the information, citing a statute originally designed to protect residents’ privacy that has since been applied to industrial commercial accounts. The attorney general now has 45 business days to affirm or reject the city’s decision to withhold the records.

City Council member Sylvia Campos was outraged to learn the city was withholding water usage records. “Oh my God, that pisses me off,” she told the Observer. “This is public information. This is water.”

The city’s crisis has made state and national headlines amid predictions that its water demand could exceed supply as early as next summer without additional rainfall or some other water source. With drilled wells already dry and a hot-button desalination plant tabled for now, the city is readying itself for a more serious potential Level 1 Water Emergency, which would impose even more restrictions and penalties for exceeding limits. 

Residents already have been living under water restrictions since December 2024, curtailing activities like lawn watering and car washes. The next phase, which might come as early as December, would enforce a mandatory 25-percent reduction for residents, businesses, and large industrial users like petrochemical refineries.

The mine, located on 75 acres just outside the city’s northwest limits, would come under those restrictions, according to Council member Barrera, who helped broker an Industrial District Agreement (IDA) with the project’s original developers beginning in 2022. Barrera told the Observer he now thinks that agreement should be reviewed.

As the Observer previously reported, the city was promised millions of dollars in tax revenue for what was originally a pair of 300-megawatt-capacity Bitcoin mines developed by the Dallas-based Bootstrap Energy. A 2022 presentation by then-Assistant City Secretary Andrea Gardner predicted revenues of $32 to $50 million over a 10-year period in exchange for the city’s de-annexation of the property, a decision that would enable Bootstrap to escape more than $70.5 million in franchise fees and sales tax on its electricity use.

After the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange in 2022, Bootstrap scaled back its project, ultimately developing just one Bitcoin mine on the site, which draws enough energy to power 75,000 homes. The Virginia-based Peak Mining bought Bootstrap’s mine in December 2023. 

The city then renegotiated the project’s IDA in 2024, removing the biggest source of revenue outlined in the original agreement: a personal property tax on the mine’s tens of thousands of computer servers and related hardware. From February 7, 2023, to January 8, 2025, mine operators paid the city just $2,639 in Payments in Lieu of Taxes fees, according to records previously obtained by the Observer via the local resident’s records request. 

Meanwhile, the project ownership continues to shift. Elektron Energy was set to buy Peak Mining in September 2025, but the deal collapsed in November. The company was instead sold to three companies tied to Tether, a firm with a majority stake in Northern Data, Peak Mining’s original parent company. In September 2025, European authorities raided Northern Data’s offices in Germany and Sweden in an ongoing tax fraud investigation.

Representatives from Tether and Northern Data did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. 

The most recent records obtained by the Observer through a public information request and a separate request indicate that the city invoiced mine operators in November 2025 for $1,631.65, and that operators paid $1,647.97 on March 6, well after the due date. Operators paid just $16.48 in April. 

City Director of Communications Elisa Olsen told the Observer in a statement that members of the city’s finance team met with Peak Mining representatives on June 5 “to review property improvements and the amount owed to the City” under a separate IDA that governs a battery-storage operation on the same property. According to emails, the firm owes another $100,000.

Separately, Nueces County tax records obtained by the Observer show mine operators paid the county nearly $1 million in property taxes in January.

Now, as the city stares down a water emergency, Barrera told the Observer he’s considering asking the council to terminate the mine’s 2024 IDA prior to its end date in 2039 because the agreement hasn’t yielded the original revenues promised to the city. “Of course ’24 seems like a lifetime ago, with the year that we’ve been having with regard to water,” Barrera told the Observer. “If they’re using the water, they’re using the water, but my challenge is that we haven’t seen the return on the revenue from the IDA.”

Campos also said the project’s IDA, which was brokered before she joined the city council, should get another look. “We need to just do our due diligence. We know that these types of companies, that they use a lot of water, and we should have been more mindful of that instead of just listening to what they had to say,” she said.

“Oh my God, that pisses me off. This is public information. This is water.”

Campos and other members have been considering ways to impose limits on industrial users, especially if they don’t comply with water restrictions. But Campos said she fears the council’s authority to do so will be preempted by the state. “Being in Texas, we can’t just say no, and that’s the problem. Our Texas laws seem to override our local laws,” she said. “I understand that cities are being strapped. Their rights are being taken away.”

Still, in the face of growing local opposition to cryptomines and artificial intelligence data centers, leaders at the state level are beginning to balk. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott outlined several regulatory proposals to rein in the state’s rapidly proliferating data centers and cryptomines. Among his recommendations for the upcoming legislative session in 2027 are the repeal of sales tax exemptions for data centers and cryptomines and requirements that would force the facilities to use more efficient “closed-loop” water systems and annually report their water and electricity usage.

Eli McKay, a volunteer for the Sierra Club Coastal Bend Group who urged the Corpus Christi City Council to vote against the original IDA for the local cryptomine as early as 2022, wants to see the council move to reannex the mine’s property. 

“It seems like there’s just no accountability whatsoever, and it’s so frustrating to see these things happen, and then [the city] inviting more entities in, be it data centers or chemical plants,” McKay told the Observer. “I would think that they would be putting the citizens first, but it doesn’t feel that way.”

The post Last Year, a Corpus Christi Cryptomine Guzzled over 11 Million Gallons. Now, Its Water Usage Is Being Kept Secret. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

To best trace the thread of Carlyn Ray’s ascent through the Texas glassblowing scene, you must first consider the lowly silkworm. 

At the ripe young age of 10, Ray raised the caterpillars in cardboard boxes in her Dallas home, fattening them up on mulberry leaves until they spun cocoons and began to pupate. It was at this point that the boxes were carted to her neighbor’s home, where the cocoons were boiled and unraveled before the fine silk was sent through a loom and weaved into unique works of art. “I would see the whole process, feeding the worms and watching them become this cocoon, then seeing how that thread becomes a tapestry, an everlasting piece of art.”

Also during her formative years, Ray attended a glassblowing demonstration in a barn outside of town, where tattooed, motorcycle-riding men showed the crowd how to heat soda-lime glass to lava-like temperatures, plucking the molten material from a furnace and transforming it into new forms. As the sizzling glass cooled before her eyes, Ray said, the die was cast for her future ambitions. She would become a professional glassblower, she recalls telling her parents then (they were supportive, the career prospects for starving artists being at least slightly less dim than those for caterpillar farmers), and over the intervening decades the now-44-year-old artisan established her own idiosyncratic take on what’s known as “weaving” glass.   

In May, Ray’s lifelong preoccupation culminated in what could fairly be considered the most striking public artwork to ever grace Abilene, a West Texas city of 133,000 that’s lately experiencing something of an identity crisis. 

Ray installs her blown-glass sculpture composed of 400 individual ribbons, clamshells, and clouds. (Courtesy/Turk Studio)

Abilene is a railroad town, like many other communities in the state’s sprawling western reaches, replete with rodeos and three private Christian universities and an air force base. Today, OpenAI’s “Stargate,” which has been billed as the world’s largest artificial intelligence training hub, is online and bringing a crush of newcomers to town, for better or worse. Abilene is also home to a growing collection of public art installations, including a rooftop brontosaurus that cranes its neck toward a Volkswagen bug, a 27-ton windchime in the shape of a tornado, and a full moon with a mildly menacing smile that’s set on a 20-foot pole, to name a few. 

Outshining the rest, Ray’s newest and grandest public work to date, called Gathered Radiance, is a jawdropping feat of engineering and artistry that rises well above the level of roadside oddity. Six years in the making, the three-story art installation comprises 400 individual blown-glass ribbons, clamshells and clouds suspended from a ceiling by sturdy cables. The piece was unveiled in May during the grand opening of Abilene’s newest public library, a modern, airy space that replaced the tumble-down main branch just across the railroad tracks that bisect the city. The new facility is housed on an eight-acre campus called Abilene Heritage Square, which wisely positions Gathered Radiance as its centerpiece. 

Ray’s pièce de résistance, along with the library that contains it, is more than just a public spectacle—it’s an endorsement of Abilene’s longstanding identity as a literary safe space in a state where conservative crusaders seek to censor and control the books their fellow Texans can access. According to statistics published by Abilene city officials after the unveiling event last month, the new library counted approximately 25,000 visitors during its first week of business. For comparison, that’s 30 percent of the total visitation recorded at its dilapidated predecessor for an entire fiscal year. The library was funded by a unanimous city council vote to the tune of $21.5 million for a 40-year lease, and Heritage Square got an architectural facelift courtesy of private donations from benefactors in 23 different states.   

“You can’t force this sort of energy and involvement in your community. This is organic,” said Julee Hammer, Abilene’s director of library services. “Very generous people want the community to be as wonderful as possible; they want to give it to the next generation. It’s an Abilene phenomenon.” 

This philanthropic and forward-thinking facet of the city’s identity may come as a surprise to folks elsewhere in the state, especially urbanites who write the place off as a backwater of cowboy cosplayers and religious zealots. (Though this bad rap is somewhat understandable: Taylor County, which includes most of the city, went 74 percent for Donald Trump in the 2024 general election, and 72 percent four years before that.) 

But the city simultaneously has a reputation as a bastion of books and literacy advocacy. State lawmakers have dubbed Abilene “The Storybook Capital of Texas,” and the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival held here each summer is the largest event of its kind in the country. The city has mostly been spared the militant moral activism that has plagued other Texas towns, such as Midland, Leander, and Granbury, where fights over public reading materials have been conspicuous and nasty. 

“In a lot of cities, there are anti-establishment flashes, but the establishment here consists of very conservative Republicans and very liberal Democrats working together,” said Glenn Dromgoole, a former editor of the Abilene Reporter-News and owner of Texas Star Trading, a local bookstore and gift shop. “We haven’t had the problem where the extreme right took over the city council, the school board, that kind of thing.”

Even still, the threat of change is riding on the city’s (ceaseless) wind. Among the horde of visitors who swarmed the new library on opening day was Tammy Fogle, a local gadfly who has for years sought to push Abilene further to the right. In 2022, she campaigned to classify Abilene and other regional towns as “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” Two years later, she raised hell over a statue for the city’s Storybook Garden that depicted characters from the KittyCorn book series. (One book in the series features a kitten who wants to be a unicorn; Fogle claimed the story was “grooming” children to adopt pro-transgender values.)

Fogle’s most recent right-wing blitz has been against school library books she deems immoral or inappropriate for children. She is the leader of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a group that bills itself as “fighting for the survival of America” by promoting “parental rights” across the country. Though Fogle has no children attending schools in the Abilene Independent School District, she nonetheless has raised at least 27 challenges regarding books collected in the district’s library system. When an advisory council reviewed Fogle’s challenges and voted to keep most of the books on the shelves, she attempted an end-run around local officials, filing a petition with the Texas Education Agency to reverse the decision.

Fogle may be granted increased purview over the city’s library materials before the end of this month. She’s a candidate for an open city council seat, having survived the May general election with 27 percent of the vote. In the June 13 runoff contest, Fogle faces off against Ben Bailey, a business owner and a veteran of the U.S. Navy, who won 32 percent of the vote. Fogle declined to be interviewed for this story.

Ray’s Gathered Radiance is suspended from the ceiling of Abilene’s newest public library during its grand opening on May 16. (Courtesy/Turk Studio)

Now, as Abilene finds itself at an inflection point, Ray’s blown-glass spectacle gives residents a prime opportunity for self-reflection—literally. “I feel the energy really culminating in Abilene,” Ray says, “this blossoming effect, like it’s just starting to open up.” Her Gathered Radiance, along with works displayed at Ray’s solo exhibition inside the Grace Museum a few blocks from the library, casts a glimmer across the city’s centerline, a beacon of imagination and creative exploration in a divisive world. “Colors and light, there’s something about that that naturally ties books and art and learning together. It opens minds to possibilities.”

The artist has a book recommendation, as it so happens: Elena’s Serenade, an illustrated children’s book about—what else—a girl who wants to be a glassblower. In the story, set in Mexico, Elena is discouraged from pursuing her artistic dreams. “Who ever heard of a girl glassblower?” her father says dismissively. In a flash of defiance, Elena sets out for Monterrey to learn the trade. Spoiler alert: Upon reflection, Elena’s doubters reverse course; it turns out that the girl is a splendid glassblower after all. What she really needed was a show of confidence from her supporting cast. In other words, whether you’re in Mexico or West Texas, it takes a village to advance the arts. 

Interested members of Abilene’s reading public can find the 40-page picture book among the manifold titles in the city’s permanent collection—for now, at least. To anyone who’d rather see the book scoured from the shelves, might I suggest a long look in the mirror?

The post Abilene, Through the Looking Glass appeared first on The Texas Observer.