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Good morning,

This is the Texas Minute for Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Shrinking Resources Cast New Doubt on Operation Lone Star Prosecutions

• Texas’ border jurisdictions are scrambling to manage thousands of pending Operation Lone Star cases after key state partners have abruptly pulled out, leaving local officials to coordinate housing and transportation for defendants. Travis Morgan has the details.
      
• According to Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Texas Division of Emergency Management—both of which helped provide housing for illegal crossers arrested under the border security initiative—are no longer handling those responsibilities.
      
• The Del Rio Processing Center is reportedly shutting down, along with Val Verde County’s detention facility. These were originally the epicenter of Operation Lone Star prosecutions.
      
• Meanwhile, the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office has more than 700 outstanding warrants for alleged smugglers and another 1,400 warrants that have not yet been executed because of limited capacity to house and transport defendants.
     
• Earlier this month, sheriffs and prosecutors involved in OLS met to find a solution to these problems. Smith praised the governor’s office for being “very accommodating with the situation these counties are facing” and being “instrumental in forming a solution for us.”

Illegal Aliens Escape ICE Custody, Attack Border Patrol Agent

• Two illegal aliens escaped custody on Monday after one slipped his restraints and allegedly choked a female Border Patrol agent. Michael Wilson reports that the two men were later recaptured near Conroe.
        
• According to ICE, one of the men managed to slip out of his restraints and choke a female Border Patrol agent who was helping with the transfer. The two men had been arrested during a recent multi-agency operation targeting violent illegal aliens and repeat immigration offenders in and around Spring, just north of Houston.
       
• In August, ICE announced that in the first six months of the Trump administration the agency had arrested 356 illegal alien gang members. Collectively, those individuals entered the country illegally 1,434 times and carried 1,685 criminal convictions. Their crimes included murder, theft, arson, and child predation. One gang member alone had entered the U.S. illegally 40 times.

Texas A&M Recruiting ‘Latinx Environmental History’ Professor

• Robert Montoya reports that Texas A&M is actively recruiting a “Latinx Environmental History” professor to contribute to its “critical environmental justice” project. This initiative comes on the heels of President Mark Welsh’s resignation, which followed controversy surrounding a class that promoted transgenderism to minors. 
         
• Beyond classroom instruction, the selected professor will be a key contributor to the LatinTX project and will serve as a Mellon-RESI Scholar, a designation linking the role to the Mellon Foundation and TAMU’s Race & Ethnic Studies Institute. According to its website, the LatinTX project is a training ground and networking initiative for promoting left-wing political objectives.
        
• LatinTX describes itself as seeing “pollution, climate change, energy transitions, land degradation, water and food insecurity, migration, and resource exclusion, for example, as connected with long histories and experiences of social exclusion, marginalization, and oppression (often across intersecting axes of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, etc.).”
       
• The term “Latinx” itself has garnered scrutiny. While used by white liberals, polling shows it is widely rejected by Hispanic Americans.

Tarrant County Cuts Property Taxes for Third Year in a Row

• For the third consecutive year, the Republican-majority Tarrant County Commissioners Court voted to cut property taxes. As Erin Anderson reports, the adopted property tax rate will slightly lower most residents’ tax bills.
      
• Earlier this week, commissioners voted to set the county tax rate below the no-new-revenue rate established under a formula set in state law.
         
• "This is what responsible, efficient government looks like." – County Judge Tim O'Hare

Additional Texas School Districts Sued Over Display of Ten Commandments

• In order to block Texas' new law requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in each public school classroom, the American Civil Liberties Union has been suing individual school districts. As Addie Hovland reports, the number of districts sued by the leftwing organization has risen to 25.
    
• This new lawsuit comes after a federal judge in San Antonio issued a temporary ruling that blocked enforcement of the law in 11 school districts across the state. The ACLU claims a display of the Ten Commandments undermines parental rights concerning their children’s religious education.
      
• There are close to 1,200 school districts in Texas serving 5.6 million students.

MORE EDUCATION NEWS

• State records show Giustino has been certified to teach science since 2011. In 2022, Giustino was named Belton ISD’s Career and Technical Education Teacher of the Year.

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