Last Sunday at a venue in the Austin suburb of Kyle, Merideth Keller delivered a speech to local attendees that took square aim at a man she once voted for back in 2014: Governor Greg Abbott. Over the course of her 12 years on the school board of Hays Consolidated Independent School District, a position she left in 2022, Keller began to lean more to the left as she watched a crisis unfold in Texas’ public education system. She’s not buying what Abbott’s selling with his latest education initiatives, and she hopes voters of various stripes will follow her lead.

“Greg Abbott set the fire, watched it blaze, and now wants to put it out to get the glory,” said Keller, who now considers herself more of a moderate, helping to elect both Democrats and Republicans down the ballot. She was there to kick off the first stop of the Save Our Schools tour, a statewide effort by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa to turn growing education issues in Texas into an effective electoral cudgel in November.

“I have to say, I voted for Greg Abbott, and I had to learn that that was the wrong choice, so that other people can admit it too,” Keller said.

Public school closures, private school vouchers, and state takeovers have driven a wedge between many lifelong conservatives and the Texas GOP they once trusted. For some, public education is the top issue driving their embrace of a Democrat at the top of the ticket. The Latina legislator from Austin has arisen as a guardian of public education by promising to end state takeovers, eliminate standardized STAAR testing, and to “DOGE” the Texas Education Agency (TEA). 

Her growing anti-incumbent base includes conservative mothers, educators, and school board trustees, which has, at least according to recent polls from Fox News and Texas A&M, helped put her neck and neck with the powerful Republican governor who’s seeking an unprecedented fourth term at the helm of the state government. Abbott has handily won each of his three prior contests for governor by double-digit margins; Texas has not elected a Democrat as governor since Ann Richards won in 1990. 

“I found myself in alliance with conservative MAGA moms who’ve been pushing back on the privatization of our public schools,” Hinojosa said in an interview with the Texas Observer this week. “The whole system is broken and needs to be redone.”

The Hinojosa campaign has gone all in to mobilize voters around public education with an initiative it launched back in June called Team Texas Public Schools, branded with school bus-yellow signs, swirly red pen, and a simple math formula for success: “Commit Today + Vote Early = Day 1 Change.” In weekly Zoom huddles, the team connects with parents, teachers, and school staff on organizing tactics to protect neighborhood schools and elect Hinojosa to office. Now, the Save Our Schools tour is training volunteers to take that message door-to-door throughout the state.

Some are looking at the Democratic special election upset in Texas Senate District 9 in January as a bellwether for what’s to come in November. Taylor Rehmet, a local union leader, handily flipped the deep red legislative district over a right-wing ideologue, after Abbott appointed incumbent state Senator Kelly Hancock to be acting comptroller. Rehmet’s platform emphasized raising teacher pay and repealing school vouchers.

“My theory is what happened in that SD 9 race could happen in rural Texas if you could truly mobilize people around education,” said Suzanne Bellsnyder, a lifelong Republican from Spearman who operates two rural newspapers. Bellsnyder joked that she was part of the “Republican revolution” in the 1990s, when she worked for conservative politicians in the state capitol. “Now, I’m watching it all sort of fall apart,” she laughed. In recent years, she has become a vocal critic of Abbott on social media and on her Substack page, Texas Rural Reporter.

Disillusioned conservatives like Bellsnyder have a shared feeling that the Republican Party and its leaders who run the state have not only betrayed public schools but also its principles of fiscal responsibility and small government. They believe the A-F accountability ratings have created a top-down culture of education that undermines local control, paving the way for school closures, takeovers, and a mass exodus of teachers. The state’s rainy day fund has surpassed $24 billion while 170 public schools have been confirmed to shutter since 2023.

“Why aren’t people going after Greg Abbott for hoarding our tax money and for utilizing it the wrong way?” Ruth Beasley, a grandmother from Arlington who said she’s always voted for Republicans, wondered in an interview with the Observer. 

Beasley first discovered Hinojosa on Facebook, and although she still has policy qualms about the border and abortion, she admired how the state representative stood up for public education and said she plans to vote for her in November. Hinojosa’s advocacy began in 2012 when her son’s school, Pease Elementary, was under threat of closure. She ran for school board on the Austin Independent School District (ISD) and rallied with locals to keep the campus open. She succeeded and went on to become board president. In 2016, Hinojosa ran for Texas House District 49, which covers the heart of Austin, to carry on her battle at the state capitol. 

In the 2023 session, Hinojosa fought alongside a band of rural Republicans in the Texas House to block controversial school voucher bills from passage. That December, Abbott took a $6 million donation from Jeff Yass, a billionaire backer of school choice from Pennsylvania—the largest-ever single campaign contribution to a candidate in Texas history. He received another $6 million from Yass over the next several months, a cash surplus that he used to finance an unrelenting push to enact vouchers. Abbott spent millions of dollars on attack ads targeting several anti-voucher Republican incumbents, most of whom were successfully ousted.

“It was the death of a Republican Party that I knew and loved,” said Bellsnyder.

Since the voucher battle, Bellsnyder continued to watch Hinojosa’s advocacy on the House public education committee and admired her ability to “ask the questions that were on my mind.” In March 2025, she was riding a tractor in her hometown of Spearman near the border of Oklahoma when Hinojosa reached out on social media. Hinojosa was introducing a bill to audit the TEA and requested the support of outspoken Republicans like Bellsnyder, who had grown to see the state agency as the epitome of Abbott’s wrongheaded education policy. 

“Hell yeah!” said Bellsnyder. “I drove down to Austin that week, and then we stood with her in support of that bill that she was filing—which should have been a Republican bill, in my opinion because we were DOGE-ing everything else,” Bellsnyder recalled, referring to the acronym for Elon Musk’s short-lived and disastrous federal auditing effort called the Department of Government Efficiency. 

The bill proposed to eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies and cut off costly vendor contracts to prioritize direct funding to public schools. Although it didn’t pass, Hinojosa has integrated these proposals into her campaign. On August 19, a newly released audit of the TEA found that the budget for management salaries rose nearly 64 percent from 2021 to 2025, with 1 manager for every 3.5 employees—a ratio that runs afoul of state budgeting requirements.

“It revealed what we already knew,” Hinojosa, who was born and raised in Brownsville, told the Observer. “More and more dollars are taken from the classroom and used to feed this bureaucracy in Austin.”

Attendees at Hinojosa’s Save Our Public Schools tour event in Kyle in August. (Photo by Eden Shamy)

Abbott has yet to mention his opponent by name on the campaign trail, but in recent months, the three-term incumbent has increased his efforts to shape the narrative around public education. On August 17, Abbott hosted a press conference with his new Texas Classroom Commission to announce the “Better Classrooms. Brighter Futures” initiative, which includes limiting screen time and prioritizing reading and math. The following day, he held a press conference to propose cracking down on foreign influence and predators in schools.

Hinojosa believes it’s nothing but a distraction motivated by fear.

“He has had commission after commission on teacher pay and public schools, but he refuses to do the right thing,” said Hinojosa. “It is really an insult just to convene another commission when parents, teachers, and myself included have been yelling at him to do the right thing for years.”

Abbott also called on the newly installed state comptroller Don Huffines to initiate an audit of school districts, pointing to Austin ISD and El Paso ISD for high administrative spending.

On the stage of The Railhouse venue in Kyle, Keller called out what she says is his blatant hypocrisy. She told the audience that Abbott’s “endless” list of unfunded mandates have required more administrators and higher costs. “But don’t worry,” she quipped, “Greg Abbott is about to swoop in!”

Abbott also proposed a ban on H-1B visa holders from working in public schools. Some school districts have come out and said that H-1B visa holders only make up 1 percent of all Texas teachers, yet they have been critical to fill shortages and avoid increasing class sizes. Dallas ISD employs the most visa holders as educators of any school district, at 171, according to the Texas Tribune, and said in a statement that it only does so when necessary to fill teaching shortages. 

“If the governor’s new expectation is to eliminate these teachers, then we’re going to need more Texans in the teaching pipeline,” the statement said, per the Tribune.

Hinojosa said her own son lost one of his elementary school teachers when their visa fell through, and his class was ultimately divided up and combined with others—causing a yearlong struggle for teachers and students. 

“Greg Abbott is again scapegoating and punishing school districts because of their desperate efforts to try to have teachers in the classroom,” Hinojosa said. 

Several conservative moms said they see themselves in Hinojosa; they feel like they’re all in the same fight for their kids’ future. Despite Abbott’s latest efforts, they don’t think he can be trusted with another four years in power.

“He’s deceptive and he lies,” said Beasley. “Gina has won me over on education, and he has so turned my stomach that I can’t vote for him. I just can’t do it.”

The post Will a Coalition of ‘MAGA Moms’ Rally Behind Gina Hinojosa’s Bid for Texas Governor? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Texas Observer reader,

As I write this, Texas families are getting ready to send kids back to school in districts where campuses have been vanishing. As Josephine Lee recently reported, in the first half of this year alone, boards of trustees voted to shutter more than 50 schools around the state. The reasons for this are numerous (and to learn more, just turn to the next page to read Justin Miller’s column on the subject), but what’s impossible to miss is the growing presence of shamelessly excessive wealth alongside this austerity. 

Elon Musk (albeit briefly) becomes a trillionaire while your kid’s school closes. That’s a fair summation of Texas today. 

(Illustration by Raúl Arias)

It’s not that everything is bad. There’s lots of economic opportunity in our state; that’s why people keep moving here. And the barbecue… blah blah blah, I’ll leave that part to Texas Monthly.

It’s that the inequality is sharpening. We are destabilizing the institutions that bring at least the poor and the middle class under one roof, ratcheting up the pressure on everyone to find the best lifeboat they can afford and jump ship. Of course, there will never be enough boats for everyone—but, hey, that’s why we have our sprawling prison system, which we’re no longer even trying to shrink or reform. That’s why we have our police forces, legislatively defund-proofed, expanding into every school, and our newly fused state-immigration police, which can use all the tools of the criminal code to terrorize our unauthorized working class. It’s not, after all, that we aren’t willing to invest in a certain genre of “solution.” 

These trends are percolating beneath this year’s growing (projected) blue wave, but all of this is bigger and longer-standing than Trump, and flipping one U.S. Senate seat would do very little to address any of it. At best, this year’s election can be the first step of a long hard march. 

Now, I swear I’m not directing this depressing screed at you for no reason. What I want to say, Observer reader, is that it’s within this rather overwhelming context that we’re working hard to offer you a properly calibrated journalistic product. Some hyper-specific investigative journalism that points to small-bore harm reduction; a lookback into history that reminds us that not only change but massive change is possible; even poetry to, perhaps, gift that quick upswell of feeling when your attention alights on something timeless.

Ah well, you get the idea; it’s a magazine. It won’t reopen the doors of your neighborhood school (unless you get very creative and use quite a few issues), but I hope some part of it does fuel you for the fights ahead.

Solidarity,

Note: To be the first to get all the stories in our bimonthly issues, become a Texas Observer member here.

The post Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our September/October 2026 Issue appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Deep in the Rio Grande Valley, Brenda Dumas and her family are adjusting to a new normal. 

One family member, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from the federal government, has a work permit. He has to leave from his home in Olmito, a tiny town off Highway 69 between Harlingen and Brownsville, early in the morning to head east to South Padre Island, where he works. He shows up almost two hours before his shift starts. But to go any later is to risk being pulled over by the unmarked SUVs that drive around the Laguna Madre area—the 15-square-mile coastal mini-region surrounding the eponymous salty lagoon—starting around 7 a.m., pulling over, seemingly at random, other people heading to work. 

Dumas’ husband, who is close to achieving permanent residency in the United States, starts landscaping for clients once it gets dark, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are less likely to be driving around looking for work trucks. Another family member, who also has a work permit and similarly requested anonymity, was detained by ICE in the nearby town of Port Isabel. ICE released him last week with an ankle monitor, one of more than 50,000 people the agency is tracking through the devices. Dumas now uses an app on her phone to track where family members are, and communication among them is constant. 

“It’s like we live in the shadows, when we just come out when the sun sets.”

Since early July, ICE has arrested people daily in traffic stops throughout the Laguna Madre area—which includes Port Isabel, South Padre Island, Laguna Vista, and Laguna Heights—based on Texas Observer analysis of posts, photos and videos on social media. Like much of the Rio Grande Valley, these communities have a high population of people who were born outside of the United States. Twenty-one percent of those who live there were born in other countries, and more than half of those residents are not U.S. citizens, according to Census data. 

ICE arrested more than 46,000 people nationwide in July, which is around 3,000 more people than the agency did in June, according to internal data CBS News obtained. On July 14, the agency announced that on just one day in June it had arrested 238 people in the Rio Grande Valley, an apparent record for the Harlingen field office, which oversees the Laguna Madre area. ICE quietly took its statistics dashboard offline in July, after not updating its detention data for months. On July 20, ICE published its most recent data, showing that the agency has deported over 80 percent of the people it’s arrested since September last year. 

These arrests appear to usually occur in the early mornings or late afternoons, as people are heading to and leaving work. Dumas, who has lived in Port Isabel for most of her life, is one of several residents who are speaking out on social media against ICE arresting people in the community who do not have violent criminal histories. 

“It’s gotten that bad: People don’t want to register their children to school. They don’t want to do groceries. They don’t even want to stop by the store for their morning coffee,” Dumas told the Observer. These arrests are usually documented by a loose group of residents like Dumas who see ICE detaining people or their abandoned cars, sharing the videos and photos on social media and in group chats to warn others of the vehicles ICE agents are driving. 

In August, photos and videos showed ICE arresting a man who owns a snack shop in Laguna Heights while he and another person were painting a home. His wife was deported earlier this year. That arrest happened just hours before a protest at the Port Isabel Lighthouse, the first of four in the area since July.

The protests have had low turnout—but not necessarily for lack of support. People are afraid of leaving their homes, opting to go grocery shopping at night or asking people with U.S. citizenship, like Dumas, to drive them around. Residents have filmed ICE agents arresting people outside of restaurants and convenience stores in the area or stopping vehicles on Highway 100, which cuts through all of the Laguna Madre area. A video from August 7 acquired by the Observer shows an ICE agent knocking on the door of a home in Laguna Heights for around two minutes before leaving with other agents.

ICE agents arresting a person on July 15 outside of a Stripes convenience store on Musina Street in Port Isabel (Source: Facebook)

At least one restaurant in town became a drive-thru-only business for a period of time, closing its dining room to the public. A convenience store in Laguna Heights locked its doors, only unlocking them for customers.

Dumas and other Port Isabel and Laguna Heights residents the Observer spoke to describe the area as being like a “ghost town” since ICE ramped up arrests. “It’s like we live in the shadows, when we just come out when the sun sets,” Dumas said. “I feel like we’re living like vampires now.”

Port Isabel’s mayor, Martin Cantu Jr., said in a statement that he has been speaking with the area’s Democratic congressman, Vicente Gonzalez, about ICE’s arrests and wants residents to do the same. 

“I will say I personally am troubled by the potential of immigration operations to violate the civil liberties of US citizens, as well as the apparent lack of accountability shown by some immigration officers,” Cantu wrote. “It is deeply concerning to me that US citizens have reportedly been detained or roughly treated by immigration officers wearing masks, in unmarked cars. No one flashing the authority of the government should be able to do so anonymously, behind a mask.”

About Cantu’s statement, Dumas said: “It doesn’t answer our questions. It doesn’t answer our concerns.”

At least one U.S. citizen has been detained, then released, by ICE in the area. Residents report that a majority of those being arrested are people of mixed legal status that have lived in the community for years and do not have criminal records. At least one of those residents is considering leaving the area, after ICE agents were seen near one of Port Isabel’s elementary schools, according to reporting by ValleyCentral.

In Texas, thanks to the state’s 2017 “sanctuary cities” ban, local governments cannot prohibit police from cooperating with ICE. Still, Cantu said that “it is not the role of the [Port Isabel police] department to actively participate with any federal agency on the enforcement of federal laws, and this also applies to the enforcement of immigration law.” And the city does not take money from the Operation Stone Garden grant program. Under this grant, the federal government gives money or equipment to cities in exchange for help with border security. Port Isabel stopped applying for the Operation Stonegarden grant last year, according to City Manager Jared Hockema. South Padre Island and Laguna Vista still receive Operation Stonegarden grants. Cameron County, where the Laguna Madre region is, has taken money from the program in the past, spending it on off-road vehicles. 

Under the same 2017 law, Texas also requires county jails to honor ICE requests to hold inmates so the federal agency may pick them up. In 2025, Texas also passed Senate Bill 8, requiring counties that operate jails to enter into so-called 287(g) partnerships with ICE. These agreements come in three forms, and Cameron County has opted for the least extensive of these state-required partnerships, wherein sheriff’s department officers may serve immigration warrants on individuals already in jail and transport arrested individuals to ICE facilities.

Primera, a small town just northwest of Harlingen, is the only municipality in Cameron County that has a “task force” agreement with ICE—the most extensive of the three 287(g) models, which effectively deputizes trained local police officers as ICE agents. Other Rio Grande Valley towns with such agreements include Port Mansfield, Escobares, and Roma.   

All of the Valley’s four counties—Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy—also fall in either the 25-mile or 100-mile immigration enforcement zones, meaning ICE or Border Patrol agents can go on private land or board any kind of vehicle without a warrant, respectively. These agencies also employ thousands of people in Texas border communities, the Rio Grande Valley included, with high salaries and, lately, bonuses. This year and last, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, $240 billion through 2029, the most money the agency has ever had. Seventy billion of those dollars went to ICE. 

The agencies have significant economic and political power in the Valley, which partially explains why few of the Valley’s elected officials have spoken out about ICE detaining people in their communities, compared to places like Minneapolis and Chicago. Texas state government is also supportive of Trump’s deportation agenda and has spent years attacking localities who try to protect undocumented immigrants.

“The political climate at the state house in St. Paul[, Minnesota] and Austin actually does affect the starting point for political responses by local elected officials; that also sets the limits of the legal options that are available,” César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a Professor of Law at Ohio State University who studies the criminalization of migration, told the Observer. “The Texas Legislature has been extremely proactive in the last 10 years or so in flexing the economic might of Texas, to help make the state as unwelcoming for migrants as possible.”

In 2023, Texas also passed a law that allowed state police to arrest people for illegally crossing into the state from Mexico and permitted judges to issue deportation orders, even if they aren’t trained in immigration law. After several lawsuits, the law, which the ACLU calls “unconstitutional,” took effect in May. 

Still, in some parts of the state, resistance to ICE overreach may be growing: Prosecutors around the country are organizing to support each other in case they bring formal charges against ICE, including the Travis and Dallas County district attorneys. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare is investigating ICE shooting and killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo last month in Houston. 

In Austin, Congressman Greg Casar and local elected officials spoke against ICE raids on the north side of town, two days after ICE arrested a person going to a food bank at a church. Casar said he submitted a formal inquiry to the Department of Homeland Security about ICE’s activity in the area and how much it’s costing taxpayers, and he told the agency on social media to “get the hell out of Austin.”

At least one local police officer, in Laguna Vista, created a report in response to a resident calling 911 because of ICE potentially breaking the law, as the Observer reported in July. The Observer filed a records request for the police report and has not received a response from the town. Emails, calls, and texts requesting an update after the state-mandated 10-day deadline went unanswered. 

In the Valley, business owners have arguably been more vocal than local elected officials. The South Texas Builders Association has drawn significant attention to a critical shortage of labor to build homes in the region. At least one social media post shows ICE detaining people near homes under construction in Laguna Heights, but most of the people the agency is taking appear to be from vehicle stops or are targeted once already in jail. When asked for more information about how ICE was determining the people it was arresting, a spokesperson sent the Observer a list of four people ICE said were in the country illegally and had committed serious crimes in Texas. The agency did not answer any of the Observer’s questions. 

The Laguna Madre area, where thousands of tourists gather year-round to stay in hotels and eat at restaurants, would not function without the labor provided by people who were not born in the United States, who make up large portions of the population in Port Isabel and Laguna Heights. Some of those people include Dumas’ family, who no longer feel safe in the community they’ve called home for years.

“I’m tired of him having to hide like he’s a criminal,” Dumas said of her husband. “It feels like he’s being kept hostage for something that he didn’t do.”

The region was likely the first to experience ICE killing someone during the second Trump administration. A Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) agent, which is a part of ICE, shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a 21-year-old man from San Antonio, on South Padre Island last March. The agency alleged Martinez ran over the agent and that the agent shot him in response, but body camera footage and subsequent reporting by the Texas Tribune contradicts this.

Congressman Gonzalez was the lone elected official from the Rio Grande Valley that the Observer could find publicly commenting on the shooting. In a statement to the Observer, Gonzalez said he was “soon” filing legislation that would “allow small businesses to sponsor undocumented workers who have been in the country for at least five years and have no criminal record.” Congress has to do its part to “rein ICE in,” he also wrote.

“The reality is that America relies on undocumented workers to do many important and difficult jobs that most Americans will not do themselves, like building homes, harvesting crops, and commercial shrimping,” Gonzalez’s statement continues. “Without this workforce, everyday costs for American families and businesses continue to surge.”

García Hernández, the Ohio professor, who is from the Rio Grande Valley, said that while federal immigration enforcement has an outsized presence now, economic and political conditions change, and elected officials need to keep this in mind as communities call on them for help. 

“I would hope that elected officials in the Valley view their positions as being something that they believe in, rather than something that they have inherited and is a foregone conclusion,” he said. “That would be the opposite of leadership, and I would hope that residents of the Valley would expect more of their elected officials.”

ICE appears to continue arresting people in the area daily. On local Facebook groups, people dismiss residents like Dumas who are worried that ICE is stopping and arresting people regardless of their legal status in the United States.

“People do not believe us. They’re just like, ‘If you’re here legally, you don’t have to be scared.’ And it’s like, ‘Yes, you do.’” Dumas said. “They really think that the ICE agents and the administration in general, [that] they’re doing things correctly, and they’re really not.” 

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