To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section. Find Observer political reporting here.

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On May 26, former Tarrant County GOP Chairman Bo French eked out a 1-point victory over incumbent Jim Wright in the Republican runoff for a seat on the state’s poorly named oil and gas regulatory agency: the Railroad Commission (RRC). As the Texas Observer has reported, French, a 56-year-old oil-industry nepo baby, received over half his primary campaign war chest from a political action committee funded by Christian nationalist oil magnate Tim Dunn and historically by hard-right oil baron Farris Wilks.

French has run perhaps the most far-right campaign of any major Texas GOP candidate in recent memory: He’s called for the denaturalization and deportation of 100 million Americans (about a third of the country), including all Muslims, in violation of constitutional protections safeguarding religious freedom. He’s specifically taken aim at two sitting state legislators, calling for state Representatives Salman Bhojani and Gene Wu to be denaturalized and deported. Moreover, French remains one of the state’s most vocal proponents of the racist “great replacement theory,”  which purports a conspiratorial effort by liberals or a secretive cabal to replace the descendants of white settlers with immigrants. He has also centered his campaign platform on deregulating one of the state’s already most industry-captured agencies and ending whatever might be left of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

French now faces state Representative Jon Rosenthal, a Houston Democrat who, in addition to his eight years in the Texas House, has over two decades of direct operational experience in the oil and gas industry, including working as both a drilling rig equipment engineer and a subsea technology systems engineer. The Observer spoke with Rosenthal in July about his pro-regulatory approach, his opponent’s far-right rhetoric and deregulatory agenda, and the importance of local control.

TO: Bo French has run a far-right campaign that is an outlier in the Texas GOP, which is really saying something. He has run on overtly fascistic rhetoric, calling for the deportation of all Muslims and at least two state representatives. Can you talk about the dangers of empowering this kind of rhetoric?

First, those issues have nothing to do with cleaning up our environment, protecting our communities from higher prices and scarce water, making our electric grid more reliable, or even keeping Texas the energy leader of not just the United States but the energy production leader in the entire world. So I think that’s what the Railroad Commission should be about, making sure that Texas energy continues to lead the planet so we can be both profitable and responsible to our communities. 

So if someone is operating a campaign talking about deporting 100 million people, incidentally more than half of those would be natural-born American citizens. He talked about deporting Native Americans. Where? I’m not sure, but off of their own land that they started on. He talks about the “Islamic invasion of Texas,” which, if it was a problem—and again, it’s not a thing—he’s running for the wrong office. I don’t know how you hold back a so-called “Islamic invasion” by regulating pipelines. I would sum it up by saying that I’m running a campaign to improve the Railroad Commission of Texas and to have it work better for the people that we serve, the people of this state. His campaign seems to be about alarmist rhetoric.

More specifically, he’s pledged more deregulation and also to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at the commission. Could you talk about how those moves would affect the agency’s operations?

I think most of the people I talk to think it’s a sound position to simply enforce the regulations we have. Most people believe the Republican-controlled Legislature over the past 30 years has only implemented sensible regulations for oil and gas in Texas, and so implementing the regulations we already have, most people think is good sense. If you go to Corpus Christi, they’re worried about water. If you go to West Texas, they’re worried about pollution spilling up from under the ground and destroying the First Baptist Church in Grand Falls. Those folks don’t think we have too much regulation. They want to see us address our problems with pollution. 

Now, as far as DEI practices at the Railroad Commission of Texas, again, this commission has been run by Republicans for 30 years, so if someone believes that there’s a problem with that … I don’t know what to tell them.

You’ve made weatherization of oil and gas infrastructure and curbing flaring among the key centerpieces of your campaign. What would you do as commissioner to enact your weatherization priorities and change the way the RRC is rubber-stamping flaring rule exceptions?

In both cases, I think the smart way to go about this is to partner with industry.

So, we want to talk about weatherization. The first thing to do is to work with the industry on the critical infrastructure. … If I’m the government and I say, “I command thou shalt do this, that, and the other thing,” and then the industry does those items, and then you have your next winter freeze and you have the same problem, industry can say, “Well, I did what you told me to do, and your stuff didn’t work.” But if you work together on developing workable solutions that industry could commit to, then not only do you have a better chance of it succeeding, but you also have an accountability piece that you can push.

About flaring, people should understand that we’re flaring, like, $1.9 billion worth of natural gas a year, and just burning that valuable resource into the air. It’s my idea to help the smaller producers with the cost of the infrastructure to capture natural gas and move it to market, and then the proceeds from selling that product pays for the infrastructure. The producer gets a piece and the commission gets a piece, and less energy resources are wasted. That’s the type of solution that you can advocate for if you actually know what you’re doing.

Other key issues for the RRC include plugging orphaned wells and more strongly addressing previously plugged so-called zombie wells. How would you address those issues?

If I’m one of the first Democrats elected [statewide] after a whole generation, and I have experience in government, you better believe I will be the most effective lobbyist for the Railroad Commission in Texas legislative history.

Even appropriating an extra $100 million in the previous cycle didn’t really help to ramp up the well plugging, so … the first piece is to increase the agency’s budget, lobby the Legislature to do that, and hopefully, we can get the other commissioners to advocate for this commission like I will. Then, the second part is, other states have more-effective surety bond programs, so if you’re a new operator or an egregious violator, then you should have to post a bond, which is enough to cover [expenses] if you abandon after producing. Because these corporations will drill a hole in the ground, bring the product up, and after the production starts waning, they just dissolve the corporation to evade responsibility and they disappear, and that leaves an orphaned well. So, for the people that don’t have responsible history, we ought to have higher surety bonds.

Bo French (Courtesy/campaign; illustration by Texas Observer)

One of the biggest issues for Texans who live adjacent to oil and gas operations is the issue of local control. After the city of Denton voted to ban fracking in 2014, the Legislature passed a bill that stripped regulatory control over oil and gas operations from municipalities and handed that power exclusively to the RRC. Even though you wouldn’t be able to reverse that decision as a commissioner, would you support returning local regulatory authority?

I’ve always been an advocate for local control. I think that if folks want to do business in our state and want to be good neighbors, community partners, and stewards of our economy and environment, they should be working with our municipalities. I think this sort of conversation comes up for me when we talk about data centers, too.

Back in the day, local control was a Republican priority, and I agreed with it then, and I agree with it now. So, no matter who is bringing industry into an area—whether that’s oil and gas or data centers or anything else—there should be an element of local control.   

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Inside a cluster of windowless tents, detainees describe losing their sense of time as they spend weeks and even months beneath the flicker of industrial lightbulbs. 

Camp East Montana—the largest immigrant detention facility in the country—has quickly become a symbol of the second Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement. Located on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, the 5,000-bed center began receiving detainees last August. Since then, immigrant detention levels have surged to over 65,000 individuals nationwide, with thousands of people held in Camp East Montana in an environment where frequent beatings and severe neglect have been documented by a leading humanitarian organization. 

At least three people have died while detained at Camp East Montana in the past year, including a 55-year-old father whose death on January 3 was ruled a homicide after security guards beat him, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune. And, in February, an inspection report found dozens of violations of national detention standards, including 22 deficiencies related to “use of force” incidents.

Weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ended a $1.26 billion contract with Camp East Montana’s former lead contractor, Acquisition Logistics, a small, veteran-owned business registered to a single-family home in Virginia. As a replacement, the agency tapped Amentum Services, a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company and a major player in federal contracting, which had begun as a subcontractor at Camp East Montana before assuming management of the facility in April.

In late July, a federal contract notice showed ICE decided to extend Amentum’s contract, potentially placing the contractor at Camp East Montana through September 2027, without the agency having taken bids from other companies and despite allegations of fraud and wage theft that have followed Amentum over its time as a government contractor. The extension for the next 12 months is worth over $776 million. Amentum has faced numerous lawsuits from labor unions and former employees, and it is actively fighting a whistleblower in court over allegations that it inflated the cost of services it provided to an Afghan refugee program in 2021 in order to make a higher profit off a valuable federal contract.

The agency’s extension also comes on the heels of an independent audit in June by the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found that the web of contractors operating the facility spent up to about $19 million on unused services over a 7-month period, including payments for meals before the first detainees arrived.

Camp East Montana in January (Paul Ratje/The New York Times/Redux)

The contract to manage Camp East Montana draws from an unprecedented $45 billion funding package from Congress which was approved last year. In the rush to expand immigrant incarceration nationwide, lawyers and civil rights groups say the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created an environment prone to opportunism. 

The department expanded operations at a dramatic scale without including some of the conditions typically required in prior contracts, such as clear oversight mechanisms and financial penalties for contract violations, according to Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official with knowledge of DHS contracts under prior administrations.  

Under past administrations, tighter budgets forced DHS to prioritize where funds were allocated. But, with an influx of billions of dollars earmarked specifically for immigration enforcement, “money is no longer an object,” Trickler-McNulty said. 

She also pointed to the recent dismantling of two internal DHS offices that were established to inspect civil rights violations, which she said has limited the number of “external people going to the facility and taking an independent look.”  

According to Nayna Gupta, an immigration attorney and the policy director of the American Immigration Council, Congress is essentially writing “blank checks to agencies” with few accountability or oversight mechanisms to evaluate spending—creating a context where “there’s more money available than ever before” to go to private contractors.

“If private contractors want to whittle down on medical services in a facility, want to shortchange sanitation in a facility in order to pocket more of the money that came to them in the contract, there are very few folks at the federal level in Congress really watching how they move because there were never any meaningful requirements for those contracts in the first place,” Gupta said. 

When ICE awarded the original Camp East Montana contract to Acquisition Logistics in July 2025, the contract was written without a Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan (QASP), which allows the government to put monetary sanctions for any violations of the contract. ICE and Army officials told the GAO, which identified the lack of oversight, a QASP was not included in the contract because of the “expedited time frames for opening the facility,” the GAO report said.

Since the 2010s, Amentum—including its corporate predecessors and numerous subsidiaries—has faced numerous lawsuits from labor unions and former employees. The contractor is currently fighting a whistleblower in court over allegations that it inflated the cost of services it provided to an Afghan refugee program in 2021 in order to make a higher profit off a valuable federal contract.

The lawsuit was brought against Amentum in 2023 under the False Claims Act, alleging that Amentum and affiliated subcontractors used a mechanism called “contract stacking” to artificially inflate the costs associated with services they provided for a federal Afghan refugee program at a military base in New Jersey.

“Contract stacking is one of the unfortunate ways that government contractors pump up what the government pays,” said Charles Tiefer, who served on the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In an interview, Tiefer said government contractors often use an opaque chain of subcontracts, hiring contractors performing various services on the same government project. That practice can enable companies to misrepresent the costs they report upward to government officials for reimbursement. (Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that Amentum will remain a defendant as the lawsuit proceeds, though claims against other subcontractors were dismissed.)

In 2025, DynCorp, by then an Amentum subsidiary, paid $21 million to the federal government to settle a separate False Claims Act lawsuit over allegations of inflating costs associated with training Iraqi police officers prior to being acquired by Amentum.

“I don’t think Amentum cleaned up the DynCorp act,” Tiefer said. “The fact that they acquired DynCorp showed that they agreed that they wanted to take as many government contracts as possible, and make as much money off those contracts. That was the DynCorp way, and that was the Amentum way.” 

From the beginning, Amentum was heavily involved in operating Camp East Montana. 

Government records show that Acquisition Logistics entered into a $200 million subcontract with Amentum on July 16, 2025—two days before signing its contract to run Camp Montana with the Department of Defense, which originally set up the contract before it was transferred in October of that year to DHS. When an independent contractor suffered a heart attack early in the facility’s construction process, an Amentum representative—not one from Acquisition Logistics—was present during an investigation conducted by the Occupational and Safety and Health Administration, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer.

Investigators from the GAO found facility contractors spent up to $11.5 million in payments for facility services during a two-week period in early August before the first detainees arrived. Between August 16 and September 30, investigators identified at least $423,000 in wasted meal services and an additional $7.1 million which contractors supposedly spent on unnecessary food services from that October to March 2026. 

Meanwhile, several current and former detainees have said they experienced drastic weight loss due to the poor or inadequate meals inside the facility. One was held at Camp East Montana during the facility’s first 50 days and told the Washington Post that “he was fed cookies, candies and potato chips in lieu of meals.”

His detention at Camp East Montana overlapped with the time period in which the GAO report found the payments for unused meals. 

A class action lawsuit filed in May by the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal advocacy organizations contains harrowing accounts from former and current detainees of the conditions inside the facility. Many of their descriptions point to a pattern of cost-cutting practices which detainees have said amount to circumstances that are “in some respects even more punitive than prison,” even though immigrant detention is civil rather than criminal. 

A plaintiff in the lawsuit described a three-week period in which janitorial staff provided by one of the facility’s subcontractors failed to clean a sewage break, forcing detainees to use their own clothing to clean human feces from eating areas.

“We’re looking at conditions that are violating individuals’ constitutional rights to receive adequate healthcare, to receive food that is sufficient and that does not cause them to become ill,” said Charlotte Weiss, an immigration attorney based in El Paso who regularly visits clients at Camp East Montana. 

Amentum was awarded the contract to manage the detention center without competition in March. Four months later, ICE offered to extend the company’s no-bid contract, claiming the number of detainees and “the proprietary nature of its infrastructure” meant only Amentum was fit to manage the facility—though the company is less experienced in detention management than some private prison companies, which also manage ICE facilities.

“Amentum has been a close partner with ICE in managing Camp East Montana, and was best suited to take over as the prime government contractor for this facility,”a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to the Observer.

The DHS spokesperson stated further that the “new contractor will allow Camp East Montana to continue abiding by the highest detention standards WITH the ability to provide MORE medical care on-site. This contract also allows more on-site staff and a PRECISE quality assurance surveillance plan. ICE will have even more oversight of the contractors at this facility. Far from closing, Camp East Montana is upgrading.”

Acquisition Logistics declined to comment, and Amentum did not respond to requests from the Observer for an interview or statements. During a recent earnings conference call, John Heller, Amentum’s CEO, informed investors that “strong operating performance enabled higher-than-anticipated profitability” and identified contracts related to homeland security as an area of core growth.

According to Weiss, complaints about living conditions and infrastructure issues have persisted at Camp East Montana after Amentum took over the facility. “We have not seen any change that has happened … in fact, it seems like some aspects have been getting worse,” Weiss said. 

As Amentum stands to profit for months to come from its large government deal, detainees remain confined to windowless tents in the desert, breathing in dust while American taxpayers pay billions to oversee their confinement. 

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By the beginning of the 2024 electoral cycle, I’d spent enough time as a progressive-leaning observer of Texas politics to have developed a certain telltale armor. No one was going to convince me that Colin Allred was about to succeed where Beto O’Rourke had failed, or that Texas was prepared to reject Trump. And, while it didn’t help a living soul get healthcare or a decent public education, that protection served me well in the bloodletting to come.

Yet today, dear reader, I must admit I feel cracks in the armor widening.

There are objective reasons for this. Polling from April to July showed James Talarico and Ken Paxton in essentially a dead heat for U.S. Senate (O’Rourke was polling down 7 points at the same time in his comparable bid). Talarico is out-fundraising Paxton three to one, while Trump is now even less popular than he was eight years ago. More Democrats than Republicans voted in the March primaries, and in Tarrant County a special election saw a state Senate seat swing 31 points toward the Dems. 

But belief is about more than falsifiable proof. There is an alchemy to it. My own internal journey may matter little, but on a mass scale the slow accretion of conviction matters greatly, and here the media plays a role. 

Which brings me to a body of work that I seem to see transforming in lockstep with my own shifting perspective—a body of work that is, well, a blog.

I remember “LivingBlueTX,” starting somewhere back in the COVID haze, as a fairly popular Twitter account (today co-opted by a right-wing troll) promoting and engaging in Texas Democratic politics. It was a spin-off of a well-followed Facebook page for suffering Lone Star liberals begun back in the tea party era. 

The account was run by Michelle Davis, who, as she explained in a recent podcast, was an Arlington-based corporate digital marketer and admin of the Facebook page in 2020 when she cashed out her retirement savings to strike out as an independent blogger and poster under the LivingBlue brand.

Two years later, she renamed her project “Lone Star Left” and transitioned to Substack, the newsletter platform home to much of today’s independent media, where she publishes at a near-daily clip under the slogan “Because facts have a left-wing bias.” The project would fit comfortably in the blog era of the earlier 21st century—she’s more writer than influencer. But she does have a sizable TikTok following, and she embraces the weird amalgamation that is Substack today by mixing in both live video and podcasts, getting significant guests including state House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu, state Senator Roland Gutierrez, and a crush of Dem candidates during primary season.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Davis’ audience has grown from around 4,000 subscribers to around 11,000 (which places her, on Substack, below former ag commish Jim Hightower but above that “Texas Paul” guy who does the selfie videos with the coffee mug). 

Beto O’Rourke in November 2018 (Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman via AP)

Until recently, I followed her output inattentively, but last summer a particular political intervention caught my eye.

At the time, Texas Dems seemed in the throes of a quintessential “disarray.” Erstwhile torchbearers O’Rourke and Allred were meeting with would-be successors Joaquin Castro and Talarico to supposedly coordinate a statewide slate for 2026—except they couldn’t agree on anything, a fact that soon got out to the press. Eventually, two of them jumped in the same race, and the other two did nothing.

To me, the whole thing was typical. They’re Texas Democrats; they’re going to lose, and they’re going to do it without much style or strategy. In other breaking news, Texas summers are hot.

But Davis took a tack that struck me as bizarre. First, she did a rally write-up in which she lavishly praised (minus Allred) the whole indecisive pack of men as leaders of an insurgent, progressive-populist, anti-D.C. political party on the verge of being unleashed—an assessment that bore little resemblance to any Texas Democratic Party I knew of. Then she published a letter cosigned by party activists calling on the men to sort themselves out in a specific way. They didn’t listen, but, in what I now know is her usual fashion, Davis kept on undeterred.

Going back to 2022, the Lone Star Left blog is defined by a deranged optimism. For a concrete example: Just six months after the ’22 midterms—which, at best, were a non-disaster for Democrats—Davis predicted that Dems could flip 17 state House seats in 2024. (The GOP actually added two seats.)

From the beginning, Davis, who also self-describes as a millennial mom, mixed such electoral punditry with coverage of the minutiae of the state party organization itself. She was a strident critic of former longtime party chair Gilberto Hinojosa. She explained the work of precinct chairs and called on her readers to fill the party’s numerous vacancies. She championed the Progressive Caucus within the party, and she treated the writing of the official 2024 state party platform as a marquee event.

“The platform that the Party passed was the most Progressive Platform in history,” she wrote in June 2024, noting that Texas Democrats were the first in the country to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Cynics like me felt that, unlike in blue states, pro-Palestine leftists had succeeded here largely because of the low stakes of what this particular party says it believes. But Davis, a self-identified progressive, treats the platform as a barometer of what both the base and the mass of nonvoting Texans want, and she judges Democratic politicians by their divergence from it. (A bit more like what you see on the GOP activist side.)

Lone Star Left also issues endorsements in the manner that Republicans believe Philadelphians vote: early and often. And her track record is, to put it charitably, mixed. She has a soft spot for a type of lefty candidate who comes in roughly fifth in a five-way primary. And time has proved unkind to some of her broader predictions as well, including from August 2024: “Lina Hidalgo is a rising star within the Democratic Party,” and, “In my mind, Jasmine Crockett has already won her 2026 bid against John Cornyn.”

As November 2024 approached—like a movie serial killer behind a protagonist who just won’t stop chatting on the phone—Davis kept caution firmly in the wind. “Election Eve prediction from Lone Star Left: Colin Allred will win,” she wrote.

We all recall how those elections went instead, but I suspect few of us can claim quite the bounce-back of Lone Star Left. Within hours, Davis advised: “In the shadow of defeat, we can find our strength.” Two days later, she assessed that Dems, including Allred, had veered too far right and abandoned the base, which in turn had abandoned them.

As the forces of centrism geared up nationwide to push the opposite narrative, she barreled ahead, cranking back to life her highly specific prediction machine, forecasting that Dems could flip up to 30 state House seats this November and that they would nab multiple statewide offices.

All that probably sounds like a willful refusal to let facts intrude on a chosen narrative, and it probably is. And yet, the winds of reality seem to be shifting her way.

Gina Hinojosa on July 18 in Lubbock (AP Photo/Justin Rex)

Take the latest Texas Democratic Party convention as evidence. For months, a minor brouhaha had been simmering after the recently appointed chair, a self-styled populist and progressive named Kendall Scudder, moved the party headquarters to his hometown of Dallas. Some party staffers were upset by the move, and this bubbled over into a couple of Dems-in-disarray-style articles in the Texas Tribune. Davis threw down, in blog form, for Scudder—saying her fellow North Texan had made the right move in pivoting the party away from Austin and was pursuing the right strategy of filling empty precinct chair positions and fielding a candidate in every legislative district (which the party achieved). Of the malcontents, she said, Scudder “should have cleaned house immediately after taking office.”

When the party convention arrived this June—which Davis covered in more minute detail than anyone else—the conflict came to a head in a race for chair that Scudder won with an overwhelming 75 percent of the vote. At the same time, Bernie Sanders-affiliated candidates are winning primaries around the country, and party mandarins are wringing their hands about rising socialism as Republicans increasingly resign themselves to a wretched midterm. It’s a state of affairs that Davis anticipated much more so than, to name one observer, me.

In my binge-read of Lone Star Left, one post jumped out as unlike the rest. “Lying in a hospital bed with nothing but fluorescent lights and a blood pressure cuff for company will make a person think,” Davis wrote last June, describing a very recent “health hiccup” she was recovering from. “I realized this was the first time in years I’d gone four whole days without sending a newsletter. … I started thinking about why I do this in the first place.”

She reported how readers write to her saying that, because of her work, they became precinct chairs, hosted a forum, or became voter registrars. And that’s her reason. “We’re Texans,” she added in a concluding call to arms. “We don’t wait for miracles. We make them.”

Well, dammit, maybe so. Just because you haven’t seen a thing doesn’t mean it’s not unfolding before your eyes.  

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