In May, Christian Menefee won the Democratic primary for Texas’ historically Black 18th Congressional District after Governor Greg Abbott and Republican legislators redrew the state’s congressional map, forcing him to compete against Congressman Al Green, who represented Texas’ 9th Congressional District—another historically Black seat that was redrawn into a majority-white conservative seat—for more than 20 years. Before this, he defeated Amanda Edwards in a long-delayed special election to fill the seat following the deaths of longtime Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and then, her successor, former Houston mayor Sylvester Turner.  

From 2021 to 2026, Menefee served as Harris County Attorney, the first Black person and the youngest, at 32 years old, to hold that post. While in county office, Menefee fought President Donald Trump’s mandates, including successfully suing Trump for withholding healthcare funds for refugees. He fended off the state’s challenges to the county election results and has sued companies responsible for creosote and concrete batch contamination in the low-income and predominantly Black communities in Houston.

Now that he’s formally in Congress, the Texas Observer spoke with Menefee about how he plans to continue fighting for his community, the ideological fights within the Democratic Party, and ICE’s killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston’s East End. 

TO: Can you tell our readers more about the district you represent? 

Texas 18 has the largest number of SNAP recipients of any district in the state of Texas. We have a high number who are uninsured. We have communities where kids are walking in the middle of the street to go to a gas station or a Dollar General to get groceries. They’re walking in the middle of the street because there are no sidewalks. And they’re getting groceries at a gas station because there aren’t any grocery stores. We have a beautiful cultural diversity in our district. We have areas that are underserved. 

People want to make enough money to be able to take care of their family. People want to be able to make enough money to have money in the bank if something happens to their health. They can get the treatment that they need. People want to make enough money to send their kids to do better than they did. They want to make enough money to retire with dignity at a reasonable age, and they want to make enough money to have a good time on Friday night. And so, my job in Congress has been to advocate for them. 

You were forced to compete against Congressman Al Green in a primary after Governor Greg Abbott pushed to redraw congressional districts. How do you plan to fight the continued erosion of voting rights?

Having to run against an icon in Texas politics and in the national fight against corruption was something I would not have chosen. Greg Abbott forced that on our communities, and I think it’s a travesty. Both Congressman Green and I should be coming back to Congress next January. But I plan to be very active in holding the Trump administration accountable for how they’re trying to make it so that, in every state it’s politicians picking their voters instead of the other way around. So that means trying to get comprehensive voting rights legislation passed so that we can ban partisan gerrymandering in this country, restore the Voting Rights Act so that we can stop the far right’s attacks on our voting rights. Texas was ground zero for this stealing of districts across the country. But the goal is for us to get back a majority in the House, in the Senate, and to win the White House so that we can pass real reform to our electoral processes in this country.

With incidents like the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by federal immigration agents, more and more Democrats including yourself have called to Abolish ICE. What would abolishing ICE actually look like?

I think you need to rip ICE down to the studs. When you tear a house down to the studs, it’s to the frame and build it back up in an image of immigration enforcement that is humane and reflects the dignity of the immigrant folks in our community. … I think immigration enforcement should focus on folks who have committed violent crimes, and it should focus on ensuring that our laws are upheld at our border. It should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card for agents to wear masks, to terrorize communities, to shoot at vehicles, and to murder people in broad daylight. 

Rethinking the way that we do immigration enforcement in this country means taking it away from this militarized police force, and instead turning it into an enforcement agency that acts with good judgment, that has independent investigations, that wears body cameras, that adheres to warrant requirements, and that treats people with the dignity that they deserve as fellow human beings.

Right now, in Democratic primaries around the country, there’s a battle unfolding between the left and the center. Where do you fall in that spectrum? And is there room in the Democratic Party tent for both a Darializa Avila Chevalier and a Henry Cuellar?

I’m a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. I’m very proud of that. But I’m a person who believes in getting stuff done. If you go talk to the underserved communities in Texas 18, they don’t use words like moderate and progressive—they’re looking for someone who’s going to help them keep the lights on and be able to pay the bills and bring gas prices down. 

So if you are in the Democratic Party, and you’re about making life better for the working class and underserved people in this country, then I’m here to work with you. But the only way that we’re going to continue to be successful as a party is if we accept truly being a big tent. … Being a big tent party means we have our red lines, but we also understand we’re not going to agree on every single thing. And I am perfectly fine with that because I wasn’t sent to Congress to agree with every single person from Seattle, Washington, to Miami, Florida, to upstate New York, but instead I was sent to Congress to advocate for the people of the 18th Congressional District in the Houston area, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. 

Houston has longstanding environmental justice problems, like creosote pollution in the Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens. Under this current Trump administration, what’s your strategy to get federal help in these areas?

Democrats will have to win the House back and then start the hearings on the EPA to hold them accountable. The Trump administration has slashed the EPA’s budget. They have eliminated the Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights, completely zeroed out the budget for that office, and laid off every single staff member. And they are now approaching environmental regulation through the lens of what’s most helpful to industry, as opposed to what’s going to help these communities, like in Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens, where there’s been a legacy of contamination that has gotten people sick. 

Recently, Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico had a tense town hall with Black Houstonians. Is he doing enough to earn their votes, and what do you think of Jasmine Crockett’s posture toward his campaign? 

That is exactly what public servants should be doing: going to communities, asking them about their issues, and hearing from them about their issues. And there are going to be times where those conversations are collegial, and there are going to be times where those conversations are more tense. But there’s only one person in the race for United States Senate in Texas right now who is going to Black communities and asking them about their issues, and that is James Talarico, not his opponent. And in fact, neither Greg Abbott nor none of the folks on the Republican side out in Austin would ever be caught dead doing a town hall in a Black community for Black voters. It will never happen. So I think James is doing a great job. He’s continuing to work to earn the support of Black communities.

You represent a district that has experienced significant political turnover following the deaths of Sheila U.S. Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee and Sylvester Turner, along with the recent redistricting. Al Green, who you beat, also served for more than 20 years in Congress. How do you plan to build your own identity while honoring the legacies of the leaders who came before you? 

I served as Harris County Attorney for five years and transformed that office into a democratic fighting force that stood up for people’s rights, for voting rights to protect communities, and make sure that they have clean air and clean water and clean land. Fighting back against large corporations and pollution. So my approach and brand in this isn’t being built overnight. This is work that I’ve been doing since I first got into politics, and the throughline between all the giants who served in Texas 18 is they were fighters, and they weren’t afraid to say the truth when it needed to be said, and to advocate for the communities and put the communities above themselves. So I plan to continue in that vein and uphold their legacy by just being who I am, which is somebody who is fighting for the least, the last, and the lost, and not for myself. Not for the wealthy, not for the well-connected, but for the average person in Texas 18.

The post In Congress, Christian Menefee Says He’s Fighting for ‘The Least, the Last, and the Lost’ appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The usual worry about Texas’ data center boom is that the state is flying partly blind. It does not yet know how much electricity these projects will actually need, how much water they will take, or whether the tax breaks offered in the name of growth will return enough to justify their cost. 

That sounds, at first, like a paperwork problem: collect better numbers, build a better spreadsheet, close the gap, and the problem is solved. But the longer you sit with the missing information, the less accidental it looks. The uncertainty does not fall evenly. Again and again, it gives developers room to maneuver while leaving the public to plan around promises it cannot fully test.

Start with demand. ERCOT’s queue of large-load requests, meaning any single site asking to draw more than 75 megawatts, now totals roughly 439 gigawatts. Data centers account for almost 90 percent, with crypto mining operations and industrial plants making up most of the rest. For scale, the most electricity Texas has ever drawn at one time is 87,403 megawatts, set on July 21 of this year.. The queue is more than five times that. Separate estimates put the capacity that data centers have actually connected and are drawing today at closer to 7.5 gigawatts.

For years the development queue cost little to join and bound no one to build, but that inflated total did real work by manufacturing a sense of inevitability that pressured the grid to build ahead of it. Texas has only just now begun closing that door, requiring large-load applicants to post real financial security and prove land control before a request counts. It’s a genuine fix, but it only touches one ledger.

Water is the project resource that Texashas always asked about but never tied to a real requirement, and it works the same way demand once did—only more brazenly. Data centers heavily consume water in order to cool servers and to run the plants that power them. When the state asked the industry to report how much they are using, fewer than a third of the companies queried responded. The Texas Water Development Board runs a separate, mandatory survey, yet only 17 percent of data centers answered in 2025 (despite the penalty for ignoring it being a Class C misdemeanor). Required or not, the number never arrives, and a figure the state never receives is one it cannot price, cap, or otherwise meaningfully regulate.That silence is less a gap in the record than a form of leverage. Vagueness here is not a hole in the industry’s case; It is the entire case.

The gas plants are hardest to hide, and yet developers still have a sanctioned way around scrutiny. Rather than wait in line, they increasingly build their own power on site—withsome 38 gigawatts of it in development—and the same reform that now demands firm commitments from the grid queue leaves this exact path open. Those plants still need air permits, so the pollution does get counted. But a permit only measures what comes out of the stack. It never asks whether the data center it serves is real, or who covers the cost of the infrastructure if it never arrives. Those questions belong to the grid connection process, and a company that builds its own power never has to enter it. The smoke gets measured. The gamble does not.

The media coverage of the boom keeps arriving at this pattern and stopping short of naming it. Whatever any one company intends, the pattern is too consistent to pass for accident. The lever is not missing information. Sometimes the industry files far too much, like that padded queue of connection requests, and sometimes it files almost nothing, like the water usage survey. What runs through both is asymmetry: the developer usually knows more than the state and reveals only what suits the project. Call it what it is: a system that rewards whoever controls the information, and never the public. That same imbalance lets Texas grant a sales tax exemption now on pace to become the nation’s costliest, without a clear account of what it was buying. “Gather more data” assumes the data is lying around waiting to be picked up, when really it sits with whoever profits from Texas never getting its hands on it.

Texas has courted this industry, and that exemption is one measure of the welcome. So it was notable when Governor Greg Abbott wrote to state regulators in June about data center costs. Look at what carries a deadline and what does not. The PUC must make data centers fund their own infrastructure; the PUC and ERCOT must file a joint memo; the commission must act on transmission costs by July 31. All electricity, all with dates attached. Then come the water items, and the register shifts. Water reporting, water-efficient cooling, an end to outdated tax incentives, these are things the governor pledged to take up with the Legislature next session. That session convenes in January 2027. The mandatory water survey Texas already has, the one 17 percent of data centers bothered to answer, is already law. (Abbott also recently touted that a controversial East Texas data center project was pulling its plans because it didn’t meet the governor’s requirements, providing him a useful pelt to hold up to anti-data center voters as proof that his recent actions are having an effect. )

None of this means the data demand surge is imaginary. AI computing is growing fast, and some of those filings will become real buildings pulling real power off the grid. The industry brings real investment, and Texas has reason to want it. That was never the question. The question is whether Texas should commit decades of generation and water to requests never guaranteed by the companies making them. Growth does not become a public obligation just because it sounds inevitable. In an interconnection queue, a firm plan and a hedged bet look exactly alike. Only one of them should be enough to break ground.

The useful move is not to plead for numbers. It is to make the absence of them expensive for whoever withholds them. And on energy demand, Texas has finally started doing that by doing whattktk Ohio ran the same test and the result was striking. Data center developers had filed roughly 30 gigawatts of interconnection requests with AEP Ohio. Once regulators required binding contracts backed by real collateral, just 5.6 gigawatts signed. The rest evaporated, which was the point. 

Water deserves the same treatment, and so does the on-site generation path left open alongside it. Tie either hookup to real disclosure so that a company earns it by opening its books. And when a speculative plant winds up half-used, let the company that built it swallow the loss, not the ratepayer who never asked for it. None of that requires predicting the future. None of this is theoretical either. Texas has run into it before. Oil and gas has powered the state for a century, and most of its wells are plugged and retired properly. The trouble was always narrower than the industry: bonds have long been set below what plugging a well actually costs, so when a company fails, the well becomes the state’s. More than 11,000 now sit orphaned on the state’s rolls, and recent watchdog estimates put the state-funded plugging cost above $55,000 per well, with taxpayer dollars covering the difference. The point is not that a data center is an oil well, or that the industry did anything wrong. It is that Texas already knows what happens when a cost is not secured up front, and the current boom is a chance to secure it early instead of late.

Texas does not have to know the future to guard against it. It has to ask for firmer commitments before public systems plan around a company’s word, and make the people selling the boom carry the risk if it fails to arrive. The computing is real and it is not going anywhere. The only open question is who pays when the promise outgrows the thing beneath it.

The post With Texas’ Data Center Boom, Uncertainty Is the Business Plan appeared first on The Texas Observer.