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.

This March marked one year since veteran Dallas journalist Robert Wilonsky returned to the Dallas Morning News as a city columnist.

He didn’t have to come back. Journalism itself has been taking a pummeling of late. Our current administration regularly vilifies news outlets that drop stories that make our Cheeto-in-Chief look bad, however accurate or factual they may be. Newspapers are generally going the way of the dodo. We live in a time when neocon mouthpiece Bari Weiss is the head of CBS News, torpedoing revealing 60 Minutes pieces, while Olivia Nuzzi writes a barely read tell-all detailing her torrid, highly unprofessional fling with—of all people—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But Wilonsky—whose shiny bald head, hulking physique, and salt-and-pepper goatee make him a dead ringer for pro-wrestling legend (and “fellow bar mitzvah boy,” as Wilonsky noted) Bill Goldberg—is a die-hard newspaperman. His byline has appeared in publications going all the way back to 1986, when he was still in high school. He thought he was done with reporting when he left the Morning News in 2020, eventually getting a sweet gig as communications director of Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, churning out press releases and interviewing celebs about the pop-culture memorabilia they were putting on the auction block. 

But Wilonsky couldn’t stop investigating what was going on in Dallas. “I would drive around the city,” said Wilonsky, 57, during a Zoom call from a Morning News conference room. “I would see things, I would see people, I would read headlines, I would still read council agendas, I would still be very involved and active in discussions about the city, and I realized that as much fun as I had holding Star Trek props, it wasn’t the same or as meaningful to me. … The longer I was away from journalism, the more I missed my city.”

Apart from the brief time in the ’90s when he moved to Los Angeles to oversee a new alt-weekly’s music section, Wilonsky has always stuck with Dallas. The current place of residence he and his wife share is right next to his childhood home, which was built by his grandfather in 1955. “I share a backyard fence with my childhood home,” he said. “So many of my friends still live in the neighborhood we lived in. It’s like the most boring John Updike novel.”

Wilonsky has always found his hometown fascinating, something he picked up from his father, Herschel. “My dad was a great storyteller, and he loved the city, and he would tell great stories about Dallas,” he said. “I think I just inherited from him his interest in telling stories about the city … the things that had disappeared, the things that had taken their place, and the toll that it had taken on the people who had been kind of caught in between.”   

A young Wilonsky read everything from comic books to works from such Dallas-Fort Worth sportswriters/men of letters as Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake, and Blackie Sherrod. While in high school, he won a competition where several young journalism students talked to a kid who did coding for Apple. “I remember very distinctly coming back from that event and just wanting to tell his story, and I did, and it got published,” he said. “I won an Apple computer, and from that moment on, I thought, ‘Well, what an extraordinary way to make a living.’”

During his college years at the University of Texas at Austin, he edited The Daily Texan, publishing comic strips from future graphic novelist Chris Ware and a young, pre-filmmaking Robert Rodriguez. After graduating, he got the music-critic job at the Dallas Times Herald (then the Morning News’ competition), holding that position until the newspaper ceased publication, in 1991.

A year later, Wilonsky moved over to the local alt-weekly, the Dallas Observer, where he spent two decades as a music editor, film/TV critic, sports columnist, and pop-culture reporter. There was also a stint in the 2000s when he interviewed movie stars and filmmakers for Higher Definition, a talk show that aired on Mark Cuban’s HDNet channel. 

As much fun as he had interviewing rock legends like Jagger and Bowie, and giving his two cents on everything from summer blockbusters to comic-book culture, Wilonsky wanted to report more on his city. “Part of me wishes I still did a little bit of that, because I do miss the comfort and the provocation of art,” he said, “but it got to the point where I just wanted to write about Dallas, for better or for worse.” 

His years of editing the Dallas Observer’s Unfair Park news blog led to him getting the digital managing editor position at the Morning News, overseeing the paper’s website. He was also a city columnist and city hall reporter, preferring the former role, which allowed him some distance from the politicians.

He also got to write about battling stage IV kidney cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2017. “I was given a year and a half to live,” he remembered. “I just wanted to see my son graduate.” 

Over at UT Southwestern Medical Center, he joined a clinical immunotherapy trial that shrunk his kidney tumor to an operable size. He’s now cancer-free and has gotten to see his son, Harry, who’s now serving as a bullpen catcher for the Miami Marlins, grow up to be a young man.

But Wilonsky wasn’t just struggling with his own cancer. His father was also diagnosed with kidney cancer, unfortunately losing his battle in 2021. Wilonsky gets a bit teary-eyed talking about his old man, remembering how he and his family discovered a secret the elder Wilonsky left in a kitchen cabinet. “I see in the cabinet that my father had taped my last column inside a cabinet that only he could reach, and he wrote on it ‘Robert’s last column.’ And I just … I just didn’t know he cared about it this much.”

Wilonsky wishes his pops was still around to see him back on the beat. Ever since taking Morning News editor Rudy Bush’s invitation to come back to the newsroom, Wilonsky has been hitting the streets hard for column fodder. He’s hung out with homeless people, even devoting one column to a guy who lived in the storm tunnels underneath Harry Hines Boulevard. He’s written about buildings that have been shuttered, businesses and developments that have riled up neighborhoods, and landmarks that more locals should know about. (Did you know there’s a run-down house in South Dallas that once belonged to Ray Charles?)

“Most of the best pieces I think I’ve come up with in the last year have been a function of me driving around the city and noticing a thing that somebody might not have noticed or didn’t think to write about or didn’t know to write about,” he said.

As long as he and/or newspapers are still around, Wilonsky will continue to be a devoted follower of “the religion of righteousness and truth-telling,” as he put it. He knows his return can’t save journalism or even return his own paper to the glory days of yore—though he speaks highly of the “young, thoughtful, insightful, scrappy, dedicated truth-tellers” he now calls coworkers. Yet, even as his industry suffers, Wilonsky believes that journalism’s North Star shines bright enough to follow. 

“I believe that there are still those who want the truth, need the truth, crave the truth, respect the truth, and want to hear the truth,” he said. “And I’m very honored and do not take for granted my position as being one of those people who still gets to tell them the truth.”

The post The Great Wilonsky Returns to the Newsroom appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In the Trump administration’s war on immigrants—adults and children alike—South Texas is a nexus.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have arrested 33,583 people in the San Antonio and Harlingen areas of responsibility between Trump’s first day in office and March 10 of this year, according to the agency’s data. In Minneapolis, three ICE agents who shot people have a Rio Grande Valley connection. The Department of Homeland Security plans to put hundreds of miles of buoys in the Rio Grande, 17 of those miles being in the Valley, to allegedly stop people from attempting to cross. Texas’ only licensed Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi court interpreter was detained in Harlingen’s airport in March, which also happens to be where ICE flies many of its deportees out of the United States.

And the Dilley detention center, officially the Dilley Immigration Processing Center or previously the South Texas Family Residential Center, which sits about an hour southwest of San Antonio, was reopened by the Trump administration after ICE (during the Biden administration) had closed it in 2024. Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, infamously detained in Minneapolis, were sent to and released from there earlier this year. 

Daniel Hatoum is a San Antonio-based senior supervising attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. The Texas Observer spoke with him in early June about family detention, how habeas corpus cases became de facto immigration law, Senate Bill 4, and what mass deportation does to society. 

TO: Dilley detention center has become a common name right now in the immigration news lexicon, but most people may not know what it is, besides its name and that Liam Ramos and his father were detained there. The Texas Civil Rights Project is part of an effort with the Texas Immigration Law Council called Operation Clear Out Dilley, which is an attempt to help release the 50 or so children in the facility. Can you describe who’s held there, and under what legal authority? What does daily life look like?

It’s a family detention facility, which means it’s a facility where parents and their children are held together. These types of facilities have been used because the detention of children is a very fraught exercise. Children could face additional harms that adults may not be subject to when it comes to detention. During the Bush administration, there was a concerted effort to try to detain families out of a fear that people might be coming over the border with children and using those children as a way to avoid detention. 

The first big family detention center is actually still a detention center today: It’s the Hutto Detention Facility in Taylor. There was a lot of litigation about that. The government did not do well in that litigation, and that facility ultimately had to stop detaining children. 

“When someone comes selling the idea of mass deportations, this is going to be the result.”

During the Obama administration, what ended up happening is that they implemented family detention as well to try to detain folks, and they opened two facilities, the Karnes family detention facility was the first one, they also opened the Berks [County] facility in Pennsylvania, which is very small, then they needed an even bigger facility, and that’s when Dilley was opened. That one holds the most amount of family detention beds that we’ve seen.

It’s a former natural gas camp that has all these trailers, so when you hear [Congressman] Joaquin Castro talk about it, I believe he refers to it as the “Dilley trailer prison.” That’s a pretty accurate description. … So, who’s there? Well, it’s parents and their children, but the age of the children doesn’t exempt them from detention there. So, tender-age children can go to family detention centers. Children who are infants can be in a family detention center. There have been high-profile cases of babies that have gone to family detention centers. Our client in the “Ms. Z” case, which we took on last year, was a six-year-old with a history of leukemia. 

Food is rotten in Dilley. There’s no other way to put it. That’s what’s happening. I guess the only other way to put it is worm-filled, because it’s often filled with worms. It’s not child-appropriate. Remember, when you have children who are as old as 16 months, 18 months, they have very specific food needs, and we’ve heard multiple reports from many folks in the detention facility that those needs were not met. 

The other thing that’s worth pointing out is that the American Academy of Pediatricians has indicated, since 1997, when the first big case about children’s detention came out, that any time in detention for a child is extremely harmful. It causes children to suffer; it creates long-term developmental problems. … Family detention center has this feedback [loop] where parents are put in a position of helplessness because they can’t get what their children need because the administration will not give them what they need, and the children are watching their parents be helpless, the parents are watching their children suffer and they’re only spiraling worse.

The administration has claimed all sorts of new authorities to detain people when it previously wouldn’t have … people who have received parole to be in the country, who received permission to be here, who were released on their own recognizance, who the government said, “You are not a flight risk, you are not a danger. We will not detain you,” and the government takes that back and says, “Actually, who cares? We’re going to detain you.”

So, under what authority? Their whims, and the fact that there are people in charge right now who think they can get away with it.

How did habeas corpus become the legal remedy sought out by people in detention centers? Before last year, there were few of these cases in federal courts. Now there are nearly 40,000 active habeas cases in the United States, 9,000 of which are in Texas. 

It used to be that if you came to the border, the authority that governed your detention was authority related to the border, and courts were really friendly about saying that you didn’t have access to what’s called a bond hearing. So if you came to the border, you asked for asylum, and they wanted to detain you, they could; that’s all there was to it. And we sort of accepted that lay of the land largely for reasons of national security. 

But let’s say you entered the country, you lived in the country for six or seven years, or you’re released on your own recognizance, which happens a lot. … The Trump administration decided that all those people—those who made it in, who were working, who had built community ties—those people need to be arrested at alarming rates, but they can’t go ask an immigration judge about whether to release them on bond or bail. Our current version of the Immigration Nationality Act, prior to 2025, every person in that situation … they likely would have been bond eligible. That bond hearing would have been a very quick procedure, takes about a week.

Oftentimes, they have no criminal records, and we know the vast majority of people in detention have no criminal records, and the judge would go, ‘Okay, for $1,500, you can go about your life while your immigration case is litigated.”

Now, though, the administration said, “Actually, we have a new interpretation of all this.” … For example, you entered without inspection, you’ve been in the country for 20 years. We arrest you in that instance. We’re going to treat you like you never entered in the first place, like you have no community ties whatsoever. And we’re going to say you’re detained under a statute that has typically and historically been used for border enforcement, and that statute means that you have no right to ask to be out of detention. Since you can’t ask an [immigration judge] anymore for help, there’s only one place left to go, and that’s federal court, and the remedy in federal court when you want to get out of detention is habeas corpus. 

Now, general immigration practice has become habeas corpus. Because for your client to get out of detention, to fight their case out of detention, you have to win a habeas case in most instances. 

During the 2018 family separation crisis, there were several instances of the federal government not being able to track the children or parents, or both. Some families were separated for years, and there are still families that haven’t been reunited. With the Dilly detention center in mind, is there still a risk of that today?

When we have immigration detention and immigration arrests, mass deportation, the result of that is going to be parents without children and children without parents. That’s what’s going to happen. I think just generally, societally, we were told that only criminals will be arrested.

If we believed that at one point, which I really do think a lot of good-meaning folks did believe that, that has completely been dispelled. 

Family separation is happening en masse right now, just not in the zero-tolerance way that we saw happening … people getting lost, getting separated in the deportation system we have right now, which appears to be pure chaos. Folks are being sent to third countries without following the proper procedure, folks are getting dumped somewhere they’ve never lived before. Folks are getting sent to Mexico without permission or without clear oversight. Very easy to lose immigrants that way. It’s really hard to unring the bell, and that means families will be separated for prolonged periods of time, if not permanently.

Inside Dilley in 2019 (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Senate Bill 4, from 2023, is the Texas law that allows police officers to arrest people they suspect illegally crossed into the United States and that effectively creates a state deportation process. It’s now enforceable. Texas Civil Rights Project is one of the groups that sued to block SB 4 from becoming law, calling it unconstitutional for a state to enforce federal immigration law. How does being arrested by a Texas police officer complicate a person’s immigration case? 

It complicates it because it introduces a new law enforcement agency with its own mission and its own ends. When we do immigration law, it’s really administrative. It’s dealing with the Executive Office of Immigration Review—EOIR. It’s immigration courts, very specific rules. It’s dealing with ICE. ICE has very specific rules. There are ways to operate that are well settled and well trodden. 

Now we have a new law enforcement agency that has its own removal orders, has its own mission, has its own guidance that’s separate from the federal government, isn’t bound necessarily by the rules of the federal government, maybe not in the same way. For example, regulations that ICE might be bound to, [Texas] may think it doesn’t need to be bound to those, for whatever reason, and it’s harder to argue that they are. That’s going to create a level of chaos in handling immigration cases, and that chaos is almost always going to make it more difficult to help hardworking folks who are just trying to live and survive. 

Is there something more that folks should know about this current moment regarding immigration law and people in detention? 

I would like to reiterate one point, which is that this should be a lesson for us. When someone comes selling the idea of mass deportations, this is going to be the result: Families in detention cells, children in detention cells, families separated. I think that there’s a fantasy that if we just did immigration detention the “right way,” that families won’t be separated, that people would not suffer. 

The trade-off to accepting what I would call a fantasy is the suffering that we’re seeing right now. So I hope that if people in the future think about mass deportation, and whether they want to support that policy or not, they think back to the present moment, they think about the people who have died, they think about the children who’ve cried, they think about the folks who will never recover and ask themselves whether that is worth it.

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