Legal Limbo In Maverick County
And, The Patriot's Transportation Choice
Good morning friends,
A story in the New York Times and the Texas Tribune caught our eye yesterday. Reporter Jolie McCullough is turning a spotlight on Maverick County, after discovering what appear to be some irregularities in the County Jail.
Maverick County is just south of where we live and work in Kinney County, sitting roughly equidistant between the cities of Uvalde and Del Rio. Longtime followers of the border crisis will probably recognize it as home to the City of Eagle Pass which has been the center of Operation Lonestar, with the floating barriers, and the showdown with federal authorities when Governor Greg Abbott ordered them out of a local park.
We’d hate to spoil the whole story for you, but according to McCullough’s reporting there appears to be a rather savage breakdown in justice, where suspects are sitting for months in the local jail without a hearing. In some cases, suspects are ordered to be released and yet remain sitting in jail for more months before finally getting let go.
Officials here openly acknowledge that poor defendants accused of minor crimes are rarely provided lawyers. And people regularly spend months behind bars without charges filed against them, much longer than state law allows. Last year alone, at least a dozen people were held too long uncharged after arrests for minor nonviolent crimes, interviews and records reviewed by The New York Times show.
Some defendants seem to have been forgotten in jail. Two men were released after The Times asked about them, half a year after their sentences had been completed.
“The county is not at the level that it should have been for years,” conceded Maverick County Judge Ramsey English Cantú, who oversees misdemeanor court. He said he had been trying to “revamp” and “rebuild” the local justice system since he was elected in 2022.
“It’s been a challenge for me,” he added. “But at the end of the day it is unjust.”
Under the U.S. Constitution, people facing jail time are entitled to a lawyer — paid for by the government if they cannot afford their own — and a fair and efficient court process. But these protections are tenuous, especially in rural parts of America, studies have shown. In Texas, one of the states that spend the least on indigent defense, The Times found recent examples of people held beyond deadlines without charges or lawyers in six rural counties.
Maverick County stood out. It is in one of the state’s poorest regions, and many defendants cannot afford a lawyer; some spend months in jail because they cannot pay a bail bondsman $500 or less. Yet over the past two decades, state auditors have repeatedly noted the county was failing to adequately provide indigent counsel. In 2023, when more than 240 misdemeanor defendants requested representation, the county judge appointed lawyers in only a handful of cases, records show. Nonetheless, the state has imposed no consequences.
With no one to guide them, defendants enter a disjointed justice system where it can be perplexingly difficult to figure out why someone is in jail, if there even is a reason. Misdemeanor court files are almost always missing key documents. Felony court files are often not available until more than a year after a defendant’s arrest. The jail sometimes reported having no record of people despite recently holding them for months.
Defense lawyers and constitutional law scholars, responding to The Times’s reporting, called the county’s practices “atrocious,” “Kafkaesque” and “not a criminal system at all.”
“The lack of transparency and the lack of public defenders in this jurisdiction has allowed this completely inept system to persist,” said Rachel Kincaid, an associate law professor at Baylor University in Waco and former federal prosecutor. “There’s no pressure on them to do anything differently.”
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The Free State of Maverick
About half of Maverick County’s residents live in the city of Eagle Pass, which is on the Mexican border, about 150 miles southwest of San Antonio. Most residents’ first language is Spanish, and people who live in the neighboring Mexican city, Piedras Negras, cross often to work, shop or visit relatives.
The county has a history of scandals, including a federal investigation into bribery and contract-rigging a decade ago that sent four of five commissioners to prison. A veteran police officer said locals jokingly call it “the Free State of Maverick” because officials tend to do what they want and deal with the ramifications later.
The region is also at the forefront of America’s crackdown on immigration. Since 2021, Texas police officers have arrested thousands of migrants in Maverick County for trespassing, in an effort to deter crossings and boost deportations. After legal challenges, the state created a special criminal system to expedite the process by quickly charging migrants and assigning them lawyers.
The justice system for local residents shows far less urgency. It took on about 350 cases last year, a vast majority of them misdemeanors or felony drug possession. The police and the Sheriff’s Department often take weeks or months to report an arrest to prosecutors. The prosecutors then take months to decide whether to go to court, for charges as simple as resisting arrest or trespassing. During this time, prosecutors are not told, and typically do not check, whether a defendant is in jail.
Neither law enforcement agency answered questions about the delays. Jaime Iracheta, the county attorney, said misdemeanors in Maverick County go through layers of vetting. Some other jurisdictions file such charges within days, if not hours.
Although those leading the justice system are all Democrats — a relic of the party’s historical strength with Hispanic voters — they are divided into rival factions. Iracheta, whose office prosecutes misdemeanors, endorsed English Cantú in his 2022 run for county judge. Sheriff Tom Schmerber, who has overseen the jail since 2013, is an ally of the judge’s predecessor, David Saucedo.
When Judge English Cantú ran against Saucedo, his second cousin, he called Saucedo a “bully” who gave his “cronies” big salaries “not to do anything.” Saucedo called his opponent “self-serving” and accused him of helping spread an “almost comical” rumor that he was a murderer.
—Reporter Jolie McCullough, The New York Times
Let’s take a second here to digest for a minute and offer up a little more background for our readers. It should be noted that local politics in Maverick County can be quite squirrelly. The idea of candidates possibly spreading rumors about an incumbent being a murderer barely gets to the beginning of it. Indeed, it is hard to keep track of all of the accusations and rumored controversies that swirl about the town, even from the next county over.
Maverick County Attorney Jaime Iracheta mostly comes off well in McCullough’s article, but he has had his share of troubles and near-misses as well, with ex-employees accusing him of improper relationships and bad firings. He’s managed to weather the slings and arrows, and fire a few back of his own along the way, but it is all illustrative of how small and nasty local politics can get along the river.
Iracheta said the Sheriff’s Department was the problem. “We have extreme issues over there, but I can’t control who the people elect,” he said.
The sheriff did not respond to interview requests, but the jail’s case manager, Daniella Ramos, criticized the magistrates who set bail. She said she sends them weekly jail rosters so they can order defendants to be released, but they go “into the abyss.”
Kina Mancha, the county’s longest-tenured magistrate, countered that the jail had sometimes failed to follow orders to let people go. “They’re not doing their job,” she said.
—Reporter Jolie McCullough, The New York Times
The Sheriff in Eagle Pass is a man named Tom Schmerber— as mentioned in the New York Times, he’s viewed as an ally of the former County Judge— the one who said his opponent was calling him some kind of a murderer, if you’re having trouble keeping track.
Schmerber is a former Border Patrolman, but that doesn’t seem to be any sort of factor here.
Texas Sheriffs have a great amount of power, and a certain amount of ability to ignore attempts to change their policies. In practice, County Commissioners have the power of the purse, and the ability to threaten their budgets, but otherwise, they pretty much answer to the voter only. Commissioners risk a messy battle when threatening to cut budgets. Actually doing so can backfire, with popular Sheriffs turning it on them, with accusations of being soft on crime or what-have-you.
Iracheta’s quote about not being able to control who gets elected speaks to this sort of frustration. Iracheta endorsed a different candidate the last time the Sheriff was up for re-election, by the way.
Some may feel no pity for those caught in the teeth of this mess, saying things along the lines of, “They (prisoners) wouldn’t have a problem if they weren’t breaking laws,” and other similar sentiments. But this is short sighted. It is an imperfect world. Luck can be bad and accidents can happen. Law Enforcement can make mistakes. One would hate to see a taxpayer subjected to such a mess through no real fault of their own, only to spend months and months lost in Maverick County’s jail with little recourse.
McCullough’s piece only hints at possible solutions or consequences if the situation persists in Maverick County. But one imagines some form of lawsuit against the County, backed with some deep pockets, and an eventual punitive judgement might go some distance toward reform. So far, it seems that most of those who have been lost track of are so destitute and/or ignorant, that this sort of a lawsuit isn’t really an option as a practical matter. It would be better for Maverick County voters and taxpayers if they sent a clear signal of their wishes on the matter come the next election.
We should probably say something about the current state of the border crisis and matters around here in Kinney County. It’s all gone quite quiet. So much so, members of the Galveston Crew will soon be rotating back to Galveston, with no replacements.
Longtime readers will recall, the Galveston Crew is the name that’s been attached to those volunteers from the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office and Deputy Constables who have been rotating in and out of the area to assist local law enforcement, while Border Patrol was hamstrung by the Biden Whitehouse.
We’re told the Galveston Crew can and will return if matters reverse themselves, though one thinks that is unlikely to happen at this point.
No friends, the sad fact is, while the border crisis is pretty much over here on the border, it is still early days for those cities and towns in the interior of the Country that are creaking and groaning under the pressure of servicing so many fraudulent asylum seekers and possibly dangerous gang members.
We are being told by activist attorneys and pro-immigration sources that at least some of those ejected from the country so far are not actually members of Tren de Aragua or other dangerous criminal networks. Mistaken identity, they claim, or false accusations based on bad evidence. But, so far, it seems they’re having some difficulty finding an audience in the general public that cares.
This brings us to our wrap up— which we hinted at in our sub-headline about “The Patriot’s Transportation Choice.”
It’s rather amazing to watch the transformation of the Tesla, from an EV largely viewed as the choice of overpaid, soft city snobs on the West Coast and those who want to be like them, to where it’s now almost becoming something of a way for conservative MAGA Republicans to ‘stick it to the libs’ by going out and buying one.
It’s taken less than a month to accomplish this.
There’s something about the people keying these advanced automobiles, setting them on fire in their paroxysms of impotent fury, and other mischief that is galvanizing Patriots, Conservatives, Elon fans, and enfant terribles alike. The latter seem gripped with notions of using the vehicles as honey traps to pin charges on leftists thanks to the vehicles’ well documented camera systems.
Our advice? If you’re going to do it, go all the way. Get the Cybertruck with a Stars and Stripes wrap. No loony tune with a sharp tool can resist it. Promise.
Or, how about one done up like the General Lee? You can’t go wrong with either, if you want to collect scrapes and scratches, seems like.
That’ll do it for now. Not quite the triumphant return we’ve been feeling pressured to hold out for. But in the end, that’s a fake idea and a cheap excuse to go dark. Better to just lance the boil and get it over with.
We’ll be back again soon, until then have a great morning and keep those toes tapping.
As always, this humble newsletter is produced independently of our day job working for Kinney County. Any errors, opinions, or other misdeeds are entirely our own. It is produced without oversight, and probably not enough editing.
Wait… They reelected the ”Schmerb,” and he’s kept folks over prisoned?
Interesting about the Judge… I thought he was square on things.
Good on you for writing after a long hiatus. Not sure if I had any part in inspiring you to return with my post but if I helped spur you on then I realize I need to push others to do the same as well. A good post, too!