Police State Texas

And a Brush Country Mystery

(This newsletter is the rebirth of a project I started in 2017. My goal here is to offer information, insight, and maybe even entertainment. There will be personal experience included since I provide a point of view. But my focus is on this confounding state, its myths and realities. I will write about travel, literature, history, movies, politics, and just life its ownself under the Lone Star, and the broader influence of Texas beyond its borders.

It’s free to anyone who wants it, but those modest paid subscriptions, if you are inclined, can help fire the engines. Go ahead and be inclined. I’ll publish at least once a week, depending on interest, yours and mine. I will also post randomly with stories worth sharing and that are not part of the weekly newsletter).

“Van Horn, Texas is so healthy we had to shoot a man to start a cemetery.” 

– Bill Goynes, whose saying was used for the town slogan of Van Horn before he was killed in a gunfight that led to him becoming the first man buried in the Van Horn Cemetery in 1892.

Police State Texas

Nobody really knows how many law enforcement officers are operating south of Interstate 10 in Texas, but the number is about to go up. The governor of Florida has just announced he is sending troopers from his state along with resources from other government institutions like sheriffs’ departments and the department of Fish and Wildlife, (Rio Grande catfish from Mexico apparently have crossed the centerline at the bottom of the river and are now swimming on the U.S. side?) The governor of Texas has unabashedly asked, along with Arizona’s governor, for other states to send manpower to the border.

The once mighty state of Texas, a former nation unto itself, is on bended knee seeking help from Florida? A dangerous crack emerges in the Lone Star brand.

Not much good can come of this, regardless. We appear to be setting up a new struggle over states’ rights that has ambitious politicians trying to usurp the authority of the federal government. It is not now, nor has it ever been, in the purview of states to protect their international borders even if they don’t think Washington is doing an adequate job. Officeholders like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis of Florida, however, simply don’t care about law. The issue gives them an opportunity to attract attention to themselves and animate the xenophobic crazies who turn out in Republican primaries and give away portions of their paychecks to sustain the rhetoric of hate.

What does this mean to Texans living near the border? Well, don’t roll through any stop signs or flashing yellow lights. There is likely to be a cop car sitting somewhere nearby and a bored officer who will probably write you a ticket. The cops as props approach to politicking on the border means more minor traffic tickets, cruisers on damn near every street, and a booming business for hotels and restaurants to house the police. If you have driven anywhere along the border in recent years, you are aware of the unavoidable presence of Texas DPS troopers and the National Guard.

We could always change city names to something like, “Fire Base Pharr,” or, “Encampment Edcouch,” or “Fort San Benito.” The politicians turning the border into a police state seem to not be concerned by the fact they are destroying interest in multi-national businesses contemplating moving to the region, and, until recently, there were many. McAllen Economic Development Corporation and the various other EDCs and Chambers of Commerce are constantly hosting international site selection teams considering maquiladora operations on both sides of the border. Surely, they must be excited about the evolving profile of Gulag Texas.

Beside the booming hotel, restaurant, and ticket-writing enterprises flourishing in the new police state, lawyers are going to be making bank. It will become increasingly clear when Texas or Florida cops arrest immigrants and toss them in jail, that they are without portfolio and the immigrants will have to be released, and if there is no border patrol available to pick them up, they’ll be off to the brush to make their way north. ACLU and the League of United Latin American Citizens and human rights lawyers will paper up every courthouse from the Franklin Mountains in El Paso to Cameron County and Brownsville with an endless stream of lawsuits.

What charges can a state throw at an immigrant? Texas has no binding law against crossing the border, and even if it attempted such a statute, it would be superseded by federal regulations. Undocumented immigration has to be stopped by the US Customs and Border Patrol, not petty little, tinpot wannabe governors who know nothing about the law, and don’t care to understand it, either. If an immigrant breaks into a home, or assaults another person, state and local authorities can arrest and charge them. If they are walking down the street and behaving like a regular citizen, it’s pretty clear Texas and Florida have no authority, much less probable cause to arrest someone for how they look. The most they can probably do is temporarily detain an individual until a Border Patrol unit arrives, but they appear to be pretty busy.

What will this do to the desperate humans approaching from the South? The same thing Trump’s policies did. It will likely be an attempt to criminalize families seeking political asylum from the violence in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, or people who have been threatened by Mexican drug cartels. The other result will be the separation of families, children turned over to the state’s under-funded Child Protective Services or given to the Border Patrol, which has run out of space, in part, because the governor has ordered the shutdown of some processing centers for minors because they were helping President Biden look good by managing some of the influx of immigrants.

A Silly-Assed Solution

Two decades of Texas governors, which is really just the “Oops” guy Rick Perry, and the “Rollin’ with the Rethugs” Governor Abbott, have spent billions taking National Guard troops and DPS highway officers away from their families to have them dawdle down south. Abbott came up with a brilliant idea to solve immigration problem, though, and maybe it will ease the pressure on law officers. Hahahaha. No, it won’t. Because you won’t believe how great this is! He wants to build a wall!

And he wants you to pay for it. First with your tax dollars, and then he wants donations. Go Fund Me Texas! Let’s crowd source the crazy, y’all.

Even though the idea and authority for building a Texas border wall was never discussed or debated or written into a bill during the legislature’s just concluded session, the chief executives of state government have decided to arbitrarily take $250 million of your money out of funding for the Department of Public Safety and put it into an account as “down payment” on a new Tortilla Curtain. The questions this move raises are both hilarious and maddening.

The first one is on whose land will this weinie wall be erected. When Trump’s bulldozers started rolling down the Rio, landowners were fiercely resistant, and they aren’t likely to be any less cooperative with this idea. The state will have to hire a new battery of eminent domain lawyers to manage all the lawsuits. Abbott, though, thinks he can just ask people to donate their land, and they will all jump onboard. Sure, just what everybody wants in their backyard, an ugly barrier that blocks out sunsets and hides their river frontage.

But wait, there’s more! Texas also wants you to donate money, too! Abbott is establishing a fund that he promises will be well managed, if you will just give up some of your hard-earned income to feed his wall fantasy of creating a structure that not even billions of dollars of Defense Department cash and a determined madman could get put in place. Maybe Abbott can get Trump’s guy Steve Bannon to manage the fund-raising, which he did for a segment of the wall in South Texas by raising $25 million. Bannon, you may have heard, was indicted for fraud and money laundering because he apparently had better ideas on how to use that windfall, instead of some stupid wall.   

No big deal, though. The money wouldn’t have accomplished much. A mile of wall in Texas was costing Trump a minimum of $26.5 million to about $45 million, which means Bannon probably thought he might as well have some fun with the cash since a mile of metal fence isn’t going to do much. Abbott’s down payment, too, looks a tad frivolous and, under the most optimistic of economic circumstances, could only get about 9 miles constructed. That leaves a gap of about 1991 miles on either side of his Tortilla Curtain.

And just to keep up the pretense he’s a tough guy, the guv is clearing out space in a state prison to make room for undocumented immigrants that the DPS arrests. (What about Florida’s cops? Do they have legal jurisdiction to arrest violators of Texas laws?) The plan is to make room for what are described as “non-TDCJ detainees,” which means immigrants that have broken a state law. They have to have been arrested and charged with violating a state ordinance. Crossing the border isn’t breaking Texas law, that is a federal statute, but Abbott won’t let that stop him from adding misery to the lives of the desperate. I wonder how many made up charges will be issued just to get immigrants behind bars.

And what will this Abbott version of due process look like? Will witnesses be needed? Any judge going to have time to arraign thousands of specious claims that can’t be substantiated other than by the word of a lawman or woman who is probably a few hundred miles away writing a border traffic ticket? No habeas corpus? No arraignment. Probably not even legal charges. But you will get sent straight to prison, not jail to await trial, if you are considered by Texas to be an undocumented immigrant.

Why don’t we just have a public burning of the constitution? It’s not even useful for wrapping day-old fish anymore.

But back to Abbott’s little boy wall. While he was quick to find a cookie jar for his monument to mendacity, his governorship has done nothing to assist ratepayers of the utilities in Texas that were seriously financially wounded by the epic winter storm that cost lives a few months ago. The utilities were banged by their fuel providers and they passed that cost onto ratepayers, which is Abbott’s solution to the problem, too. The $18 billion dollar debt now being toted around by electricity generating companies will be retired by their ratepayers through the use of bonds. Yep, bonds from the Texas government that will be underwritten and paid off by increased utility bills to consumers is the fanciful solution by the governor and the GOP. Homeowners and businesses need to buck up and pay up. This is Texas! We are rugged and independent.

Unless we are corporations needing government socialism to keep our jets properly fueled.

Texas is a Gun

When a young man from out of state is visiting your capitol city and gets killed in a gunfight between two teenaged boys, you might give some thought to the adjacency of your event posturing with guns. But not Greg Abbott. The governor and his team were probably planning their signing ceremony for the permitless carry law even as 25-year-old Doug Kantor lay dying in an Austin hospital.

Kantor was from upstate New York and was engaged to be married to his high school sweetheart and start their lives together in Michigan, where he had landed his dream job with the Ford Motor Company. He was a graduate of my alma mater, Michigan State University, and had earned his master’s from the University of Michigan.

And now he is dead because a couple of teenagers got guns and decided to settle a middle school grudge while Kantor was waiting in line to get inside of a night club. The seventeen- and fifteen-year-old suspects are being charged with murder, while one of the victims of their shootout remains in critical condition and at least a dozen others are recovering from gunshot wounds, and one victim is permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Nobody has asked yet the question of how in the hell did these two kids so easily get their hands on guns because politically in this state and country the gun remains more important than a life. I doubt we can expect law enforcement to run down the source of the guns and charge the supplier or seller or whoever the hell it was because what kind of a case can you make in court when no permits are needed?

The sheer random absurdity of a couple of teens acquiring weapons and ending up outside a nightclub in Austin at the same time a young man happened to be visiting from Michigan and that young man’s life is stopped because of an errant bullet is almost debilitating to think about.

And so, we don’t.

We let our governor stick out his chest and talk about what a great thing it is that anyone can have and carry and use a gun without the requirement of a permit, a background check, or any training in Texas. And, of course, he constantly referenced the Alamo as an icon of freedom and an inspiration for the law without catching the irony that guns didn’t solve the problem for the defenders of the Mission of San Antonio de Bexar. He wouldn’t care, anyway, and neither would his financial supporters and voters.

Because Texas is a gun. And so is America.

Brush Country

The night we drove through Jim Wells County the route was taking us to a town we had never heard of and a location dramatically different from where we had been raised. The little red-haired farm girl, who had decided to spend her life with me, ought to have been a bit afraid. The brush country rolling by the window in the darkness was endless and flat and intimidating. She had grown up on a dairy farm in Michigan, close to her parents and siblings, and was about to feel their absence.

What I knew about Texas was informed mostly by its living myths. I had read about the state with fascination through my youth, and had crossed it once in an old pickup, another time on a motorcycle, and an epic hitchhiking trip. The history, geography, and cultural mix were intriguing. But I really knew nothing.

A few months previous, there had been an incident not far from where our Opal Kadett station wagon was rolling down the midnight highway. I was, of course, oblivious, to any importance surrounding the suicide of a remote county judge, and even if I were not, my nascent journalism skills were unlikely to ferret out the historic fraud perpetrated by a man known as “The Duke of Duval,” named after the county from which he ran a political machine that controlled South Texas.

The Duke, also known as the “Sly Possum” among Mexicans, was George Parr and his great benefactor, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, had died just two years earlier in 1973. There was no one left to intercede between the Duke and the law, and he was found guilty of tax evasion and sentenced to ten years in prison. And, boy, did he evade taxes. When LBJ left the White House, the Department of Justice began to build its long-delayed case against Parr. He had multiple homes and even a beautiful horse track set out in the brush and was convicted of skimming from almost every state and federal fund that was sent to his county and the other five counties where he pulled the levers of local government.

But he had committed a far greater crime.

The story of Box 13 moves further out across the historical horizon but it ought not be forgotten because it changed, not just Texas, but the world. LBJ, knowing the reach of Parr’s political dynasty, went to the judge to make certain he could deliver the votes necessary for the young congressman to win the Democratic U.S. Senate Primary in 1948. Democrats dominated the Texas landscape during that era and winning the primary was a ticket to Washington, and that seemed to have been LBJ’s only ambition.

Parr delivered, tallying votes from dead people, many of whom, coincidentally, used the same handwriting. Just over 200 votes were added to the Jim Wells County totals a week after the election had been concluded, and every legal challenge to the fraud was a failure. LBJ “defeated” a popular former governor, Coke Stevenson, by 187 fraudulent votes and became known as “Landslide Lyndon.” Returning the favor, the future senator and president kept all federal investigations away from the brush country that was ruled over by Parr, until LBJ left office in 1968. Shortly after the president went back to his ranch on the Pedernales River, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Antonio pulled out some earlier files and reopened its case against the Duke of Duval.

The story, of course, has been told and retold, but pieces of it have gone largely ignored. During the course of writing these dispatches, I intend to pull on some of those strings and see where they lead. One is connected to a newspaper reporter and broadcaster, who was killed by one of Parr’s county sheriffs’ department officers. The journalist’s death was front page news around the country, though the reporting was done at a remove and missed important context and details. He was the first broadcast journalist in American history killed while performing his job.

The killer was a 6’5” illiterate deputy named Sam Smithwick, who worked for the Duke. Either he, or his boss, wanted the former newspaper reporter turned radio talk show host to shut up, and previous intimidations had not worked. Broadcasts in Alice, Texas had been about corruption in Jim Wells and Duval County, and Parr was worried they would attract more feds after the investigation of the stolen election, regardless of LBJ’s protection, which was still only unrealized potential at that time. Smithwick was also believed to be running a beer joint with the judge, a “dime-a-dance” saloon and the radio station reportedly accused him of employing his teenaged daughter for services other than pouring drinks.

Regardless, the reporter, Bill Mason, ended up dead, shot through the heart after being pulled over on an Alice street by Smithwick, which was the unlikely end of a bright journalistic career that had included the San Francisco Chronicle, Minneapolis Tribune, New York Times and the San Antonio Light. Smithwick did not last long, either, subsequent to his conviction and imprisonment. He wrote the former governor, who had been defeated by LBJ, to suggest he knew a lot about the stolen election. Before Coke Stevenson could get to Huntsville to question Smithwick, though, the ex-lawman was found dead hanging by his neck with a bed sheet in his cell, and even the governor of Texas accused LBJ of having the former cop killed to keep him silent about the fraud of Box 13.

LBJ’s presidency, which was impossible without the foundational corruption of Parr, resulted in much good. America was significantly changed by his Great Society reforms, which gave us the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, Basic Educational Opportunity Grants and National Defense Student Loan programs to get underprivileged kids to college, like myself. I have long contemplated the irony that the president was creating legislation and funding opportunities for kids like me to get an education and prepare for a prosperous life but first intended to use the draft to send us off to an idiotic war. The taxpayers’ investment in young, educated people, was at great risk when we got sent to Southeast Asia.

We also got Vietnam from LBJ and more than 56,000 dead American youth and an estimate of more than 2,000,000 civilians and 1,100,000 soldiers from both North and South Vietnam. What happened in Dallas was also a cause of that idiotic war. JFK had prepared National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of all 16,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by the end of 1965. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had suggested the country was “making great progress” and a drawdown of troops and resources was smart. LBJ, apparently, had a different view.

I’ve researched Bill Mason’s fate for many years, and I think it’s an important and largely untold political story. I am not sure why Pulitzer-adorned writer and LBJ historian Robert Caro gave Mason and Smithwick only a few lines in one of his biographical volumes on the president. But it is worth considerably more attention.

Which I will give it in coming weeks.