By ALEX VEIGA, Associated Press Business Writer

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slowed in March, a sluggish start to the spring homebuying season as elevated mortgage rates and rising prices discouraged prospective home shoppers.

Existing home sales fell 5.9% last month from February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.02 million units, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday.

Sales fell 2.4% compared with March last year. The latest home sales fell short of the 4.12 million pace economists were expecting, according to FactSet.

The average cost of a U.S. mortgage, which climbed to its highest level in two months last week, is a significant barrier for would-be homebuyers, said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist.

“Residential housing mobility, currently at historical lows, signals the troublesome possibility of less economic mobility for society,” Yun said.

Home prices increased on an annual basis for the 21st consecutive month, although at a slower rate. The national median sales price rose 2.7% in March from a year earlier to $403,700, an all-time high for March.

There were 1.33 million unsold homes at the end of last month, an 8.1% increase from February, NAR said.

That translates to a 4-month supply at the current sales pace, up from a 3.2-month pace at the end of March last year. Traditionally, a 5- to 6-month supply is considered a balanced market between buyers and sellers.

Even at Texas Woman’s University, whose very name shows its legacy, gender studies programs face potential pushback from lawmakers. 

Just three years ago, Texas Woman’s University (TWU) approved a new bachelor’s degree program in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, who began teaching at the university in 2011, proposed the new major as a way to bring more students into the program amid decreases in enrollment during COVID-19. Phillips-Cunningham said the undergraduate students she taught had a clear desire to major in the field. “The courses really do a good job of demonstrating the links between politics and people’s personal lives,” Phillips-Cunningham said.

Despite having recently downsized their department, she saw the university’s approval of the new degree program as a sign of its commitment to this academic field. At the time, other institutions had begun to cut funding for similar programs as reactionary animus against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) set in. 

“I knew that I would have to craft the proposal in a way that didn’t ring any alarms, but was also true to what could help students,” said Phillips-Cunningham, who is now an associate professor at Rutgers University. If proposed today, she doesn’t think the degree program would have gotten approved. In the years since the program’s inception, wariness or ignorance of DEI has been weaponized by Republicans in Texas and across the country as a political bludgeon to condemn, and often call to eliminate, anything remotely related to race, gender, or sexual orientation on college campuses.

Legislators directed intense scrutiny toward DEI initiatives in higher education last session, with passage of Senate Bill 17, a law prohibiting prohibited DEI offices and practices at Texas’ public universities. Following its implementation, universities shut down multicultural and gender and sexuality centers—and cut over 100 positions. Academia and scholarly research were, however, excepted under the law, leaving degrees and programs like Texas Woman’s University’s safe, at least for the time being. 

But at the outset of the 2025 session, Governor Greg Abbott signaled he wanted to continue pushing against what he considers DEI in higher education. “We must purge it from every corner of our schools and return the focus to merit,” Abbott said during his State of the State address in February. 

Now, legislators have launched attacks on targeting gender and ethnic studies departments, programs, and courses, which some educators say threatens academic freedom and the prestige of Texas universities. 

GOP state Senator Brandon Creighton, who authored SB 17 last session, has returned to the issue this year with a bill that more squarely targets academics and curriculum. Senate Bill 37, which is one of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s priorities, increases oversight of universities, including reviewing core curricula every five years to remove any courses that attempt to “require a student to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to another, or to adopt any other similar ideology.” These reviews would be conducted by the university’s governing board, though the board can appoint a committee of anyone they’d like to help. Abbott appoints all members of the boards of regents at public universities. 

The Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors said the bill represents “undue Big Government intrusion into our public community colleges, universities, and health institutions … and places public higher education in Texas in receivership where faculty are sidelined and Governor appointees make all the decisions on what students can and cannot learn.” 

UT-Austin (Shutterstock)

Some universities have already taken preemptive action in the face of political threats. Last November, Texas A&M University disbanded its LGBTQ+ studies minor, along with 13 other minors and 38 certificates, citing low enrollment. The University of Texas at Austin announced on April 7 it was immediately ending its “Flags” course requirements, making it so students no longer need to take classes labeled as covering “cultural diversity,” “global cultures,” or “independent inquiry,” among others, to graduate.

Karma Chávez, chair of the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department at University of Texas, said targeting flags or core curricula would be “deeply damaging” because courses that fulfill degree requirements attract more students. “That would gut our classes,” Chávez said.

The university founded the Center for Mexican American Studies in 1970 in response to Chicano student activists calls to include more Mexican-American curriculum. The program was departmentalized in 2014, which Chávez said gave it more “intellectual autonomy.” The move was supported by the president of UT at the time, William Powers Jr., according to Chávez. 

Now, the department could be at risk if SB 37 becomes law. The bill would monitor and potentially disband degree programs based on an analysis of student debt levels per degree program. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board would be empowered to review programs every five years; universities would not be able to use state funds for programs that get unfavorable ratings. “It’s not about all courses,” Creighton said of his bill on the Senate floor. “It’s about degrees of value and how to get there faster and cheaper.” 

SB 37 would also expand control over faculty councils by allowing only the governing board to establish a council. Members may be removed if they’re deemed to have used their university positions for “political advocacy.” The politically appointed board would also be able to overturn any decision made by university administration, including personnel hires or changes to curriculum. 

Just ahead of a floor vote on April 15, Creighton filed a 13-page amendment that substantially altered the bill. Democrats criticized Creighton’s bill for what they saw as a blatant targeting of universities’ academic independence and questioned if professors could still discuss topics involving race, gender, or ethnicity. 

When asked about specifics of what professors can teach, Creighton said those decisions would be deferred to a new curriculum advisory committee that, under SB 37, would be made of three governor appointees, two lieutenant governor appointees, two speaker appointees, and the commissioner of higher education. 

“I’m concerned that we’re not preparing our next generation for a better society and to continue the work of healing our deep racial wounds that we’ve talked about on this Senate floor,” said Houston Democratic Senator Borris Miles during debate.  

Senator Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat, proposed a bipartisan committee to look at the decisions of governing boards. “There’s nothing in the bill to protect against a body that says ‘This is what history is,’” Gutierrez said. Creighton rejected the amendment, saying the boards will rely on “well-rounded and properly vetted advice.” 

The Senate passed the bill 20-11 on party lines. 

The House also has several bills that would expand administrative control of academia and target higher education curriculum—including gender and ethnic studies—though they’ve not yet gotten much traction. GOP state Representative Cody Harris has a bill that would prohibit universities from requiring students to take courses that teach “critical theory” relating to race and gender, along with other supposedly controversial topics. Republican state Representative Brian Harrison’s House Bill 2339 would attempt to eliminate programs wholesale. His bill would prohibit universities from offering courses, programs, or degrees in LGBTQ+ studies or “DEI studies,” defined as courses that “promote differential treatment of individuals on the basis of race, color or ethnicity.” Universities found to be in noncompliance would lose state funding, and professors violating the bill would be placed on a no-hire list. 

“It feels like the inmates are running the asylums in our public universities,” Harrison told the Texas Observer. “Taxpayers are having their tax dollars weaponized against them, their values, and their children by funding things like DEI and liberal transgender ideology.” His bill has not yet received a committee hearing. 

Gender and ethnic studies programs and departments receive about $12 million, which is less than half of a percent of the University of Texas’ total operating budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year, the Observer found. At TWU, the Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies program made up about 0.1 percent of the university’s operating budget in 2024. 

Sonia Hernández, a history professor at Texas A&M University, said this sort of legislation is an “intensification” of SB 17 from last session and warned that limiting opportunity for students and professors to debate certain topics has the potential to “chip away” at the value of American universities.

“There is a rationale behind allowing faculty and scholars the flexibility to ask really important questions that may or may not go with the current thought of the time, but that can help spark meaningful debate and discussion,” Hernández said. 

In the SB 37 hearing, Senator José Menéndez said he worried the bill would “rob students of an opportunity” to take classes that don’t necessarily have a tangible purpose for their career. 

Texas universities, such as Texas Tech University and the University of Texas at Arlington, first began offering coursework or started centers in the women’s and gender studies field in the 1970s and 1980s. TWU began offering a master’s program in 1998, and its doctoral program became active in 2010, said Agatha Beins, who is the current director of the Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Beins hasn’t seen such targeted attacks on academic freedom during her time in academia since she first started teaching at TWU in 2011. Despite the political attacks, the professors said the program has received support from the university itself and from faculty. About a dozen programs regularly cross-list courses, allowing women’s and gender studies to collaborate with other areas of study across the university. 

The beauty of women’s and gender studies classes are the transferable skills they offer, Beins said. “You can start noticing these patterns of justice or injustice and inequity or equity, notice them, better understand why they occur, and then figure out more effectively how to problem solve,” Beins said. “That’s what we lose when we are unable to teach students about the breadth and diversity of human difference.” 

Alix Pierce was one of the first people to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies from TWU. Pierce hopes to go into academia and apply the research skills they’ve learned, but they also apply their degree everyday at their current job working at a group home for queer youth.  

“I have learned how to vocalize things and be able to advocate for things that I need or other people need,” Pierce said. “They have experienced all these things in their lives, but they probably don’t necessarily know how to vocalize it in the same way that I do, because of the education that I received.” 

At TWU, students are required to take a multicultural women’s studies course to graduate. Pierce, who was a teaching assistant for an introductory class, said students were appreciative of the class, even if most did just take it as a requirement. “[Students saw], ‘Oh, every single woman in this class right now has experienced the same things as me,’” Pierce said. “Your experiences are validated.” 

Driven in part by an increasingly conservative political climate that is fueling these attacks on higher education, faculty have begun to consider leaving the state. Over half of Texas professors would not recommend the state to their out-of-state colleagues, according to a survey released by the American Association of University Professors. In 2024, over a quarter of faculty planned to interview in another state, the survey showed. 

Phillips-Cunningham said such attacks on ethnic and cultural studies are leading to a “brain drain” in the South—Black professors in particular have left Texas because of challenges to their work, she said. While the Legislature might be focused on gender and ethnic studies now, she said, she wouldn’t be surprised if it starts going after more traditional majors next.

“It’s just a total gutting out of every single inch of progress this country has made in several different areas,” Phillips-Cunningham said.

The post The Lege’s ‘Big Government Intrusion’ into University Academics  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By PAUL WISEMAN, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the International Monetary Fund urged countries to move “swiftly’’ to resolve trade disputes that threaten global economic growth.

IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said the unpredictability arising from President Donald Trump’s aggressive campaign of taxes on foreign imports is causing companies to delay investments and consumers to hold off on spending.

“Uncertainty is bad for business,’’ she told reporters Thursday in a briefing during the spring meetings of the IMF and its sister agency, the World Bank.

Georgieva’s comments came two days after the IMF downgraded the outlook for world economic growth this year. The 191-country lending organization, which seeks to promote global growth, financial stability and to reduce poverty, also sharply lowered its forecast for the United States. It said the chances that the world’s biggest economy would fall into recession have risen from 25%, to about 40%.

Georgieva warned that the economic fallout from trade conflict would fall most heavily on poor countries, which do not have the money to offset the damage.

Since returning the White House in January, Trump has aggressively imposed tariffs on American trading partners. Among other things, he’s slapped 145% import taxes on China and 10% on almost every country in the world, raising U.S. tariffs to levels not seen in more than a century. But he has repeatedly changed U.S. policy — suddenly suspending or altering the tariffs — and left companies bewildered about what he is trying to accomplish and what his end game might be.

Trump’s tariffs — a sharp reversal of decades of U.S. policy in favor of free trade — and the resulting uncertainty around them have caused a weekslong rout in financial markets. But stocks rallied Wednesday after the Trump administration signaled that it is open to reducing the massive tariffs on China. “There is an opportunity for a big deal here,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday.

Three months into his second presidential term, Donald Trump appears well off pace to hit his promised record numbers of deportations. 

While the new administration’s tallies haven’t yet surpassed those of prior presidents, the Trump regime has indeed ramped up the lawlessness of its immigration enforcement, largely by skirting due process and sending people to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. That country’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, has eagerly declared that the doors of his penitentiary will be open to more immigrants and inmates sent from the United States—at American taxpayers’ expense. Most of those sent to El Salvador’s prison do not have criminal records, and one of the inmates, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was wrongfully deported and is married to a U.S. citizen. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered his return, but both Bukele and Trump have refused.

As much of the country focuses on Trump’s international authoritarian affairs, police across the United States are quietly lining up to help provide the manpower that Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) needs to increase lagging deportation figures. 

To augment its roughly 6,000 ICE deportation agents—pending possibly supercharged Congressional funding—the Trump administration has enlisted the help of other federal agencies including the Drug Enforcement Agency and Internal Revenue Service. But an even more significant expansion may be playing out at the county and municipal levels across the country.

Since late January, nearly 200 county, city, and state law enforcement agencies have signed what are known as 287(g) task force model agreements with ICE. These agencies operate in 23 states, with a whopping 137 in Florida.

So far, 14 agencies have signed on to the task force agreements in Texas, primarily rural county sheriff’s offices as well as Smith County, which is home to Tyler and more than 245,000 people in East Texas. The Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas National Guard have also signed task force agreements with ICE. 

The 287(g) task force program is being revived 13 years after the Obama administration terminated it amid controversies over racial profiling. The program allows local officers who’ve received federal training to “perform certain functions of an immigration officer,” as outlined in the agreement used by the Trump administration, including the power to: “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or remain in the United States”; arrest without a warrant anyone the officer believes “is in the United States in violation of law and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained”; execute warrants for immigration violations; and prepare immigration charging documents.

This form of ICE collaboration with local authorities is “really aggressive,” said Kristin Etter, director of policy and legal services at the Texas Immigration Law Council. “It’s literally officers in the streets stopping, detaining, questioning, interrogating, arresting—the task force model is a force multiplier of federal immigration agencies.”

There are two other kinds of 287(g) programs, which have persisted through the last few presidencies, but those models are limited to ICE-county cooperation within jails and have sparked far less concern.

The new 287(g) task forces have proliferated most rapidly in Florida: With Governor Ron DeSantis backing the program, every one of the 67 county sheriffs in the state has signed a task force agreement, in addition to municipal and state agencies.

Texas ranks second among states in task forces inked, at 14, though that’s a small fraction of the state’s 254 sheriffs and its galaxy of municipal and state police agencies. Among the Texas signatories is the sheriff of Kinney County, whose office has collaborated with paramilitary organizations and bought pepper ball and tear gas launcher rifles last year to potentially use against migrants.

Notably, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), which has around 5,000 commissioned officers and leads the state’s border security efforts, has not signed a task force agreement. The agency did not respond to Observer questions sent via email. The governor’s office also did not respond to a request for comment.

In a March House committee hearing, Texas DPS Deputy Director of Law Enforcement Operations Jason Taylor seemed to caution against at least some aspects of 287(g) agreements: “If we’re taking troopers, special agents, Rangers off the line to process—then I think we’re diminishing some of the public safety aspects of our agency,” Taylor said.

The Texas National Guard (TNG), which has around 23,000 members, signed its 287(g) task force agreement with ICE on April 11. TNG soldiers have been regularly deployed to the border in Texas to deter migrants under Operation Lone Star and other mobilizations. Governor Greg Abbott signed an agreement earlier this year with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) authorizing TNG to enforce immigration law in tandem with the Border Patrol. That agreement is pursuant to a different federal statute than 287(g), which the Trump administration has misleadingly invoked to address a “mass influx” of migrants, and it differs in some ways from the 287(g) task forces.

TNG’s new 287(g) agreement suggests the Guard could enforce immigration law in parts of the state far from the border. In addition to participating in political projects like Operation Lone Star, TNG deploys in response to state emergencies including hurricanes and pandemics. The Texas Military Department did not respond to Observer emails and calls for this story.

Advocates are concerned about local agencies and soldiers getting into the business of immigration enforcement, which has been typically left to ICE and CBP. “There would be no buffers,” said Etter.

But whether Texas sheriffs will join the task force program en masse, like their Florida counterparts, remains to be seen.

Some cash-strapped counties may find the model burdensome, since ICE pays for training but not hours spent enforcing federal law. “If you’re a really small county sheriff’s office, and there’s just maybe two or three of you, it may be impractical to run that program,” said Thomas Kerss, the executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas.

Even midsize counties may find the program impractical. “We are not hesitant to participate,” said Sheriff’s Deputy Scott Giles of Potter County, which is home to Amarillo and does not have a task force agreement. “We do have real-world concerns or considerations about staffing. We don’t have the staff to dedicate to a full-time ICE task force.”

The two largest counties with Republican sheriffs, Tarrant and Collin in fast-growing North Texas, have also not inked agreements. 

But sheriffs’ reluctance may not matter soon. Legislation has passed the Texas Senate and is pending in the House that, in its current form, would compel sheriffs of counties with 100,000 residents to “request, and as offered” sign a 287(g) deal with ICE or “an agreement under a similar federal program.” (More than 80 percent of Texans live in counties with a population of at least 100,000 residents.)

The legislation presently does not specify what kind of 287(g) agreement sheriffs must apply for or accept, nor does it clarify what other similar agreements could substitute for 287(g).

“What is a similar federal program to 287(g)? That’s up to the Trump administration, and that’s up to Stephen Miller—and then our local sheriffs will be bound by that,” Etter said. “It’s really left up to the imagination of the federal government.”

The Texas Civil Rights Project has also raised concerns about the legislation. The organization’s director of policy and advocacy, David Sánchez, called it a “reckless attempt to turn sheriffs into federal agents” in a news release.

“This bill undermines local control, worsens racial profiling, and wastes resources we need to keep our communities safe,” Sánchez said. “It does not make Texas safer—it makes it more fearful.”

ICE did not respond to questions for this story. 

For now, the 287(g) task force agreements that are already signed are largely just paper, since required federal training has not been made widely available. “We’re surprised it hasn’t happened yet,” said Goliad County Sheriff’s Deputy Caleb Breshears, adding that his department—which signed a task force agreement in February—had been asking the feds about it in early April. “We were told that they’re still working on it.”

Breshears said he expected the training to be a 40-hour online program. An ICE fact sheet says the task force training will be “provided virtually,” and local media in Florida have also reported the training would be 40 hours and online.

Governor Abbott has also issued an executive order ordering “all appropriate state agencies to assist federal actors working under the direction of the Trump Administration with carrying out functions under federal immigration laws,” though the extent of the order’s impact remains murky.

If the Legislature passes compulsory ICE cooperation and Abbott marshals the whole state apparatus to back Trump’s deportation agenda, Etter said, “We literally then end up living in a state that is basically just a giant ICE army.”

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