Jamaal Howard and I are close. Wednesday, Jamaal and I will be in the execution chamber together in Huntsville. More than likely, only I will walk out alive. Jamaal’s execution will likely be the first one in the United States since the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee. As his spiritual advisor, I felt the need to tell him about the horror that transpired.

Prison walls have a way of making silence feel solid. I have learned about different silences: the silence after a door closes, the silence between a prayer and its answer, the silence that gathers when a man doesn’t know what to say. 

Jamaal’s silence after I talked about Pike felt like an eternity. I wondered whether I should have even brought it up. Jamaal has so many mental health problems and intellectual disabilities. I didn’t know if he understood what I’d said.

Then, it became clear how unclear everything was for him. Not only had Jamaal not heard about Pike, but he also didn’t understand how executions were carried out. When I told him that the drugs didn’t work in her case, he didn’t understand what drugs I was talking about. To him, nothing made sense.

Suddenly both of us fell silent. 

Finally Jamaal said: “I guess if the drugs don’t work, they’ll just shoot me in the head.”

I knew Jamaal well enough that I would have known if I was hearing a joke or an attempt to be tough. Instead, this was a man who literally had no understanding of the protocol by which he was going to be executed or what would happen if something went wrong. His voice wandered. I realized he was a man reaching his hand into the dark to see what he could grab. He understood nothing.

I tried to explain that Texas authorities can’t just pull out a gun and shoot him. (Texas does not permit execution by firing squad.) But my words wouldn’t take hold in his mind. I feel like I failed him. I worry that he is lying in his cell thinking about being shot in the head.

I have spent years witnessing the machinery of death. On thirteen different occasions in five different states, I have stood with the condemned as the state took the life right in front of me. The death chambers are more than familiar. I repeatedly see them in my nightmares. The dingy glass looks the same. I know the clocks that keep moving when everything inside those rooms seems to stop. I have seen humans quickly disappear beneath the language of protocol and procedure. A sentence becomes a date. A date becomes a warrant. A warrant becomes a room. Then there is a body beneath a sheet and a clock on the wall, its hands moving as if time itself is the killer.

But Jamaal was not talking about any of that. He was talking about his body. He has no idea what is about to happen to him.

He was 20 when he killed Vickie Swartout during a robbery in Hardin County. Vickie should be alive. Her family has carried a loss that no execution can repair. I will not ask them to make room for my grief about what is happening now. A woman is dead who should still be here. A man I deeply care about is waiting for the state to kill him. Both things are true.

Those truths do not cancel out each other. They sit beside each other, like two people left alone in a room after everyone else has gone.

After thirteen different executions, I thought I knew what an execution was.

Then, Jamaal took the language of the courts and viscerally translated it into his body. He made me hear the distance between being told you will die and having to imagine what dying will feel like if the first attempt does not work. 

All that doesn’t stop anything. Wednesday is coming.

Until then, Jamaal and I will try to talk about spiritual and extraordinary things. Meanwhile, the near inevitability of another botched execution here or somewhere else haunts each second, quiet as the prison cinder block.

The post The Distance Between Dying and Death appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Ten years after Donald Trump was first elected President, the Republican Party has placed its chips on a region that would have made little sense at any other time in the last century: South Texas. Yet, if current polling holds, the GOP may have already overplayed its hand.

Congressional districts from San Antonio down to Brownsville, aggressively (and perhaps foolishly) redrawn at Trump’s orders, are at the crux of any Republican midterm hopes to hold the U.S. House, and state legislative races are similarly key to the party keeping its comfortable supermajority in Texas’ lower chamber. Up to the top of the ballot, where South Texas voters were key to James Talarico’s primary victory and where Brownsville-raised Gina Hinojosa sits one rung down, the region may hold the car keys. All as Republicans run without the man who seemed to break Democrats’ hold in the area on the ticket.

With weeks left to go, proclamations of another “red wave” coming to the region—after Trump flipped the majority-Latino South Texas border in 2024 and the GOP seized a state Senate seat while holding onto a congressional and state House district snagged two years before—are no more. Instead, national GOP leadership, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, is anxiously coming to stump for South Texas’ GOP candidates, working to convince voters that the stakes are high for the Republican Party this year.

Supporters of Texas Democratic candidate for Governor Gina Hinojosa during a campaign rally in Brownsville on September 15 (Gaige Davila)

“[Democrats] want to remove the president, okay. They want one, unicameral body, the House, to run everything. You have to ask yourself why,” Johnson told a couple dozen people in Sinton in August at The Butter Churn, where he was campaigning for Monica De La Cruz, who since 2022 has represented Congressional District 15, which sprawls from near San Antonio down to the Rio Grande. “Because they have calculated that, over the next couple of cycles, they can elect enough Marxist communists to take over the whole thing.”

The national GOP has opened a “battle station” in Harlingen, near Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley, much like they did in McAllen years prior, hoping to hold the electoral gains it made in the four-county, 1.4-million-person southern tip of the region. That hold looks increasingly tenuous as the popular Tejano singer Bobby Pulido has turned De La Cruz’s CD-15 into a toss-up, per the Cook Political Report, and incumbents Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar look increasingly likely to keep their districts, the 34th and 28th, that were re-gerrymandered for GOP pickup.

The prognosis is perhaps unsurprising in retrospect, since there were always signs the 2024 South Texas swing could have been peculiar to that specific presidential context. Downballot Democrats largely survived the Trump wave. And all that was before, of course, South Texas became ground zero for the harsh realities of Trump’s mass deportation project.

South Texas GOP candidates are appearing to now distance themselves from Trump and his policies—after ICE has arrested tens of thousands of people in the agency’s Harlingen and San Antonio sectors, where most of these races are located; after the cost of living has continued to increase in these metro areas; and after sometimes-trillionaire Elon Musk’s company town and its proliferation outside of Brownsville has drawn more ire from surrounding communities with each rocket launch. Democrats are capitalizing on the frustration, with the party’s confidence resurging.

Dems are coalescing around messaging that also seems to be resonating statewide, such as the platform of Austin state Representative Gina Hinojosa, the gubernatorial hopeful whose roots are in the Valley. This includes lowering the cost of living, holding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accountable after repeated violence, and getting billionaires out of politics.

Red scare efforts aside, South Texas’ GOP candidates for Congress and the state Legislature are actually running on similar platforms to Democrats on some issues, vying for the same kind of support that has kept the region—up until recently—a stronghold for moderate Democrats. Republican legislator Janie Lopez, who won her San Benito-based state House seat in 2022, is campaigning on fixing roads and flood infrastructure. One of De La Cruz’s TV ads talks about lowering costs for people working in restaurants. Eric Flores, a former federal prosecutor under the Biden administration who’s challenging Gonzalez, has made water one of his campaign focuses. Nary a “mass deportations” sign in sight.

Two years prior, it seemed everyone running in South Texas races had a border security ad, even Michelle Vallejo, a progressive who was then running in a losing bid against De La Cruz.

Now, De La Cruz herself has advocated for and helped release some people from ICE detention. But it may be too late to create distance from ICE, Trump, and the cost of living, experts told the Texas Observer.

“We’ve seen a sea change, in just two years: a sea change in Latino voting from what we saw in ’24, where we saw a substantial number of Latinos vote for Trump, vote for Republicans,” Jon Taylor, the University of Texas San Antonio’s political science department chair, told the Observer. “And now, if you look at polling, consistently now you’re seeing a complete flip in the other direction toward Democrats.”

This loss of support isn’t limited to Latino voters in South Texas, but—as both the site of 2024’s perhaps most surprising pro-Trump swing and many of the president’s most harmful policies in practice—South Texas may serve as the definitive referendum on the White House occupant this November.

“I have to say, it doesn’t feel like 2018 quite for me,” Vicente Gonzalez, the incumbent Democratic congressman for CD-34, which runs from Brownsville to Corpus Christi, told the Observer in a September phone call. “I wasn’t working near as hard as I am right now in 2018, I’ll tell you that.”

Having been redrawn last summer into a district that went for Trump in 2024 by 10 points, Gonzalez says Democrats can’t take another election for granted in South Texas. But Democratic turnout during the primaries this March has Gonzalez hopeful.

That’s partly because Gonzalez has already managed to survive a decade’s worth of election cycles, in the 34th and in the neighboring 15th, which he vacated voluntarily and is now held by De La Cruz.

Back in 2022, the self-described “triple threat” of De La Cruz plus Mayra Flores and Cassy Garcia all of whom were Rio Grande Valley-based, right-wing Latinas vying for seats with districts that stretched as far as San Antonio and its suburbs, garnered much media attention. South Texas’ Latino voters were simultaneously being invested in by the Republican party and disinvested in by Democrats, or so the narrative went. But the Blue Dog Dem congressmen, Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar—whose Laredo-based 28th stretches down into the Valley—held Flores and Garcia at bay. Cuellar then rebuffed (criminal pardon-related) speculation that he might change parties late last year, setting up the two men, often derided by liberals within their own party in the past, as the resilient paragons of the South Texas Democrat style.

Vicente Gonzalez in November 2022 (Denise Cathey/The Brownsville Herald via AP)

Eric Flores, Gonzalez’s opponent, prevailed in the March GOP primary thanks to Trump’s backing and recently got a stump speech from Vice President JD Vance in Harlingen. Earlier this year, Trump visited a Corpus Christi Whataburger with Flores in tow. The president has twice posted a video on his social media channels calling for people to vote for Flores. He’s done similar for De La Cruz.

But, following the primaries, Flores’ campaign signs don’t say he’s endorsed by Trump anymore. He also recoiled when a local Democratic Party made campaign signs that looked like Flores’ older signs, saying the National Guard Army veteran was “Trump Endorsed” and supported ICE. In a statement on social media, Flores used the term “dirty tricks” to describe the signs that tied him to the president who likely secured his congressional nomination for him and to the federal agency that’s carrying out the same president’s signature policy promise.

A survey from Texas Southern University’s policy research arm says the race is now in Gonzalez’s favor. Mark P. Jones, one of the authors of the survey report and a professor of political science at Rice University, said the GOP, when they redrew districts in 2025, depended on a voting bloc to turn out that likely won’t this election: young, Latino men who voted for Trump.

“It’s not that many of them have decided to become Democrats, although some will vote Democratic,” Jones told the Observer, describing some of the survey respondents. “They are disillusioned by Trump and are not motivated to turn out to vote for anyone this year.” 

Redistricting is also a factor in De La Cruz’s reelection chances. The new CD-15 map, though shifted just slightly east, removed about 60 percent of De La Cruz’s previous constituents, meaning she had to introduce herself to voters while her opponent, Bobby Pulido, is one of the most successful Tejano artists of all time. In South Texas, his name recognition is undeniable, and policy-wise he’s running in the established mold of Gonzalez and Cuellar. Which means De La Cruz, arguably, does not have the incumbent advantage, despite two terms in Congress. 

“You add that with he had a profile of someone who you can’t easily portray as left, as a coastal elite, or a coastal liberal, and that he’s from the Valley,” Jones said. “But [he] also has, historically, had a set of positions and has a profile of somebody who’s a traditional South Texas centrist.”

Democrats are largely eschewing progressivism this cycle, after the failed congressional bids in recent cycles of Vallejo and Jessica Cisneros, who nearly ousted Cuellar in two Dem primaries. With one exception: the Bernie Sanders-backed Julio Salinas, who won the Democratic primary for the McAllen-based House District 41 against former city council member and moderate Democrat Seby Haddad.

“South Texas voters are, in their heart of hearts, centrist Democrats. The majority are,” Jones said of the region’s electorate going from blue to red and possibly back to blue. “That’s the dominant political organization in South Texas. … They also are not going to vote for extreme Republican candidates if they’re given a palatable Democratic alternative.” 

Henry Cuellar and Tano Tijerina 2026 campaign signs posted next to each other in Laredo (Justin Miller)

As for whether the Blue Dogs are truly back in town, Gonzalez said it will take some time to know for sure. Trump is omnipresent in the GOP’s South Texas races, having endorsed all the current Republican congressional and legislative candidates and made a handful of appearances in the area, but this remains a midterm race. Time will tell if, one way or another, a 2024-like effect can be achieved in 2028.

“I think it’s going to take another couple of election cycles to really say there is a trend one way or another,” Gonzalez said. “I always said Donald Trump brings a different type of excitement to an election.”

Eric Flores’ campaign did not respond to the Observer’s request for an interview.

In mid-September, at an event center on the southwestern edge of Brownsville, Gina Hinojosa was welcomed by hundreds of people, as Selena’s “Como Me Duele” reverberated from several loudspeakers through a space that hosts many of the city’s quinceañeras. 

It was as “South Texas” of a homecoming as Hinojosa could have. She’s represented central Austin in the Texas Legislature since 2017 but was raised in Brownsville, making the Rio Grande Valley a recurring campaign stop since she announced her candidacy in her hometown eleven months prior. With less than two months left before the election, Hinojosa blamed the state’s healthcare, public school, and electricity woes on Greg Abbott, his donors, and tech billionaires.

“What people have finally figured out is, as we’ve been in our partisan tribes for the last 10 years, fighting each other with the culture wars over Thanksgiving dinner, fighting with our families about culture wars, the only people winning those wars are the billionaires,” Hinojosa said. “Like, 15 billionaire tech dudes who just have massive money and massive power and all of our data, and are about to blow up this planet … if we don’t come together fast to save ourselves—that’s what this election is about. Who does Texas belong to?” 

Though she didn’t mention issues particular to the Valley in her speech, she did tell the Observer afterward that ICE was not the kind of border security she supported. That morning, she had visited homes under construction with the South Texas Builders Association, a group with a president that has become particularly outspoken about ICE detaining people on job sites and about regretting his prior support of Trump. A few days before her visit to Brownsville, two ICE agents pulled a teenager out of a car at an Alamo intersection, punched his face several times, then put him in handcuffs.

“These ICE raids are not making us more safe. They’re making us less safe,” she said. “I support border security here at the border. We want secure communities, right? But that’s making us less safe, not more safe.” 

Nearly everyone who came to the rally lined up to take photos with Hinojosa, as Cameron County’s senior Democratic players talked among themselves, leaning against the stage. Former classmates of Hinojosa brought yearbooks to sign, supporters their campaign signs, and one person an infant child.

Hinojosa signs the shirt of Lisa Peña’s son, Romeo, on September 15 (Gaige Davila)

Zoe Griffith, a first-time voter from Brownsville who has organized with Healthy Futures of Texas, attended the rally with her mother, Christine Ramos, a local high school teacher and Marine veteran. Griffith said that Hinojosa’s positions against data centers and egregious ICE arrests are why she’ll be voting for her.

“Having seen Greg Abbott and how he runs in Texas, I want to see better change from my generation, and especially the generations that come before me,” she told the Observer. “Having people like Gina, especially as a female role model, it brings me more hope.”

The post South Texas Is Moving On from Trump appeared first on The Texas Observer.

I was 7 years old the first time I put on the vestments. White surplice over red cassock, the fabric stiff and foreign against skin that was more accustomed to sweat and South Texas dirt. I had been born on East Hackberry Avenue in the McAllen labor camps. I was delivered at home, not in a hospital. The world I came from smelled of my mother’s handmade flour tortillas and arroz con pollo with little salted shrimp rehydrating in the rice, of honeysuckle and pomegranates growing wild in the back alley, of dust devils spinning in the summer heat. My father drove a GMC truck and hauled oranges for a produce warehouse called Griffin & Brand. We were farmworker people. We were poor. And on Sunday mornings, I carried the cross.

I served at that altar through baptism, catechism, confirmation, and Communion. I believed what I was taught. I rang the bells at the elevation of the host and meant it. But even then, even as a child who did not yet have the language for what he was seeing, I watched my community from that altar and I wondered. The families in those pews—farmworkers, migrants, the working poor of South Texas—came every Sunday carrying burdens the Church preached about but did very little to lift. The suffering around me was concrete. The poverty was concrete. The Church’s response, as best as I could tell, was to pass the collection plate and promise a better world somewhere else.

I always wondered why. Now I know.

The author as a child (Courtesy/Jorge Meave)

I am no longer a believer. After more than 30 years as a bilingual educator, instructional coach, and administrator in the public schools of East Austin serving the children of families not unlike the one I came from, I understand religion as a human social construct. One that’s capable of extraordinary good and profound harm, often at the same time, in the same building, on the same Sunday morning. I hold that view without bitterness. The Church built hospitals. Educated generations. Did genuine good. But I have carried that childhood question with me for nearly seven decades, and I have never received a satisfying answer.

So when Pope Leo XIV released Magnífica Humanitas in May 2026, I read it with the particular attention of someone who learned to read at the feet of this institution and then spent a lifetime watching it fail the people it claimed to serve.

I want to be honest: The  encyclical is serious and it is good. Pope Leo XIV draws an explicit parallel to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the 1891 document that addressed factory workers and industrial exploitation, and applies that same moral framework to the age of artificial intelligence. He sees, clearly and without equivocation, how AI-driven automation threatens workers, concentrates wealth, and compounds the suffering of those already at the margins. He defends human dignity. He defends organized labor. He calls for concrete social criteria to govern technological innovation. This is the Church’s social teaching at its best, and this pope appears to mean it.

But I keep coming back to the loaves.

Whether you read it as miracle or metaphor, the story of the loaves and fishes has always struck me as the Gospel at its most honest. Jesus did not look out at a hungry crowd and deliver a homily about the spiritual virtues of hunger. He did not instruct them to pray for bread and trust in divine providence. He fed them, hand to mouth. Bread in hand. Fish on the ground. That is the standard the Church set for itself 2,000 years ago, and it is the standard by which I am measuring this document today.

In post-Citizens United America, words are not enough. The 2010 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to unlimited dark money in American politics, and the right has used it with devastating efficiency. From the Koch brothers to the Wilks brothers, the Heritage Foundation to the Chamber of Commerce, a network of ideologically aligned donors has  poured billions into dismantling the very protections—labor rights, social safety nets, public education—that this encyclical claims to defend. And they do this not by writing treatises but by writing checks.

The Vatican holds an estimated $73 billion in assets. The Catholic Church commands the loyalty of nearly one in five American adults. That is not a church that needs to pass the plate; that is an institution with the resources to move policy, fund organizing, and match the moral urgency of its own documents with the kind of financial and political commitment that actually changes the conditions of people’s lives. Progressive institutional investment is just as legal as the right’s dark money. The question is whether the will is there.

I think about the families I taught in East Austin. The kids who came to school hungry. The parents working two jobs at wages that hadn’t kept pace with rent since before their children were born. I think about my own family on East Hackberry Avenue, my mother’s tortillas stretching to feed us. These are the people Magnifica Humanitas is written for. These are the people who have been filling Catholic pews for centuries while the institution sat on wealth that could have built a different world.

I know something about waiting.

When I was a boy, after my parents divorced, I decided I wanted to go live with my father. I called him myself, without telling my mother. He said he would come get me. She packed me a suitcase and set it on the sofa and told me to wait.

I waited six or seven days. My father never came.

My mother never said a word against him. She let me find out for myself who he was. That is a particular kind of love, the kind that trusts you with the truth even when the truth is going to hurt.

I have been thinking about that suitcase my whole life without knowing it. The boy on the sofa waiting for someone who promised to come. The community in the pews waiting for an institution that preaches abundance and sits on billions. The workers waiting for the protections the Church endorses in documents and withholds in action.

THE VATICAN HOLDS AN ESTIMATED $73 BILLION IN ASSETS.

Pope Leo XIV is saying the right things. He sees the world clearly. And I give him that credit freely, from a man who no longer prays, who understands religion as a human social construct, and who learned at a very young age that the distance between a promise and a kept promise is where people actually live.

The altar boy from South Texas is still here. He is 68 years old. He has spent his life serving the same communities he watched suffer from behind the Communion rail. He is not asking for a miracle.

He is asking for the concrete thing. He has been asking his whole life.

Holy See, distribute the loaves. 

The post It’s Time for the Catholic Church to Distribute the Loaves appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Austinites who expected overwhelming turnout and chaos on Wednesday for the appearance of the leftist political streamer Hasan Piker at the University of Texas at Austin were met with a lackluster showing: more law enforcement than protesters, and an auditorium only three-quarters full.

Despite efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to spread the message that events would go on as planned, students faced what Piker dubbed essentially a “soft cancelling.” The University Democrats received nearly 2,000 RSVPs to the event, but when the university failed to accommodate them with a larger venue, the group was forced to rescind tickets.

Students who missed out on seeing the commentator—who has built a massive online audience, with over 3 million followers on Twitch—told the Texas Observer that they thought their tickets or the event as a whole had been cancelled, and they were surprised to hear about the empty seats. The Austin Young Republicans also anticipated a contingent of around 150 protesters, but after state troopers surrounded their rally point, only about two dozen protesters arrived. The whole affair encapsulated how the Campus Protection Act, a bill passed in 2025 by the Republican state Legislature to restrict “expressive activities” on college campuses, and a political environment increasingly intolerant of free speech negatively impacts everyone—left and right—on public universities in Texas.

(Eden Shamy)

“I’ve done larger events than this. I’ve never had this much pushback. I’ve never had this much security concerns,” Piker said while streaming in the green room before taking the stage. Beside him sat Nick Escue, a member of the University Democrats who counts himself among Piker’s fans. The student said he was Piker’s driver to and from the event amid the high pressure environment and death threats against the streamer.

“It was super nerve-wracking. Anything could go wrong at any moment,” Escue said. “We were all stressing that if there was a slight incident, they would try to shut it all down.”

In the weeks leading up to the event, everyone from Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton to a number of local pro-Israel groups condemned the University Democrats for hosting the provocative streamer. Piker has been a prominent voice against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and faces rampant accusations of anti-Semitism, among a number of other controversies—although he characterizes himself as a staunch anti-Zionist who views Judaism as separate from Israel. Piker’s recent foray into campaigning with Democratic Socialists and other lefty candidates, such as Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, has swiftly transformed him into the bogeyman of the Republican Party—and of some centrist Democrats.

“He is the future of the left. He’s this collectivist Islamist,” Benjamin Schrader, President of the Austin Young Republicans, told the Observer. “He is not someone to be underestimated. Anyone who would is a fool because he is a serious threat.” (Piker, raised in Turkey, has said he is not religious.)

Students argue about Israel and socialism with members of the Austin Young Republicans protesting the appearance of Hasan Piker at the University of Texas at Austin on September 30. (Eden Shamy)

The day before the event, the university sent out an email to students outlining their free speech restrictions, many of which were established after the passing of the Campus Protection Act. The law passed in 2025, about a year after mass pro-Palestine protests swept across college campuses nationwide, including at UT. It limits free expression on public college campuses by transforming all common outdoor areas into “limited” public forums. That means individuals who are not students, faculty, or staff cannot conduct or even observe expressive activities on campus.

The email reiterated this principle, stating “Any participants who are not affiliated with the University will be asked to leave campus.”

The law also prohibited encampments, certain uses of amplified sound, and expressive activity during the last two weeks of school or between the hours of 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. A federal court placed an injunction on some of these clauses in October 2025 because of their broad interpretations that violate the First Amendment. However, the limited public forum still stands, as does another critical requirement: Student organizations must get advance permission from university administrators in order to host a guest speaker.

Escue said University Democrats were forced to jump through the bureaucratic hoops of a speaker approval process. After they finally confirmed the event with Piker, he said the Office of the Dean of Students continued trying “to poke holes in our event.” The burden of securing the event was placed on the University Democrats, who swiftly and successfully launched a fundraiser to cover the $25,000 in required security fees.

Escue pointed out that right-wingers regularly speak on campus, and he felt disappointed that most Democratic politicians didn’t support students amid the media onslaught.

When Piker finally took the stage Wednesday evening, he strayed from his usual stump speech to thank those in attendance and call out the university. “You can’t have an opinion that is outside of the permission structure, and the permission structure year over year seems to swing wildly in the rightward direction,” Piker said. “We have to fight back because, as I’ve seen in my travels all around the country since Trump came into office, our institutions have failed us—and even the national Democratic Party has failed us—but we have not failed one another.”

He went on to participate in a wide-ranging question and answer session with the president of the University Democrats, Adit Raha. They discussed support for the Democratic Socialists of America, turning Texas blue with James Talarico, and holding elected officials accountable.

Outside the auditorium, the Austin Young Republicans faced some issues of their own. Unlike others, Schrader said he didn’t want to cancel Piker’s event with the University Democrats. Instead, he called for both sides to exercise their freedom of speech. And Schrader said for the first time in its history, the Austin Young Republicans planned a protest. They formed a coalition with Reawaken USA, Texas College Republicans, and Young Americans for Liberty. Schrader said he started to learn about community organizing, even taking a thing or two from the left.

“Hey, they’re dang good at it,” Schrader said. “I was watching videos of how to run a protest from these communist groups, and I said, okay, I’m going to steal that. Let’s collectivize it!”

Aside from safety, one of Schrader’s biggest concerns was that his first ever rally would be put down by the university using the Campus Protection Act, so he was careful not to step on the toes of the administration. The group met with administrators and published a statement urging the university not to invoke the Campus Protection Act against its demonstration.

The Republicans arrived on campus Wednesday afternoon, where Schrader said they quickly encountered problems with the UT Police Department. “The campus did kick off our security and told them that if they escorted me and the Austin Young Republicans, they would be charged with criminal trespassing,” Schrader said. Lacking security, they carried on with their plan to meet at the George Washington statue in front of the UT tower and march down to the Student Activity Center.

When they arrived at the monument, it was surrounded by state troopers. They decided it best to avoid law enforcement altogether and went straight to the student center. Schrader said members of his coalition were already hesitant to attend for fear of being arrested. He believes the presence of law enforcement and the change of meeting point may have led to reduced turnout.

Despite the difficulties and the learning curve of putting on his first political protest, Schrader said it was a positive experience for the group. “People had a good time, and I’m grateful to God no one got arrested,” Schrader said. “We got to do more protests!”

The university has not responded to the Observer’s request for comment.

State troopers stand guard outside the Hasan Piker event. (Eden Shamy)

Both Republicans and Democrats told the Observer that they’d like to see the Campus Protection Act repealed because they believe it violates the First Amendment. There has been no movement on the issue since last year’s injunction, and the university Board of Regents—appointed by Abbott—has continued to expand its influence over nearly all aspects of university life. 

Students said that the only way forward is to continue using and demanding their First Amendment rights to the fullest extent.

“Every imaginable roadblock and barrier was put up to stop this event from happening tonight,” Raha of the University Democrats said at the podium. “We still stand for universal health care, an economy that works for all, an end to the genocide in Gaza, our mission to abolish and prosecute ICE, and protecting one of America’s greatest values, the freedom of speech.”

The post Hasan Piker’s UT Appearance Put Campus Protection Act to the Test appeared first on The Texas Observer.