Tampon Dade Sets Legislative Priorities
& Kinney County Busts at Least 100 Smugglers in Single Month
Good morning, friends,
Another week’s past, and it seems as though Texas legislative leadership are wanting to talk about anything but the border.
They haven’t come out and said they couldn’t care less about the border, but their actions sure seem to suggest it.
Texas House speaker Dade Phelan, for example, seems real concerned about tampons.
If Dade Phelan were in the room with us, he’d probably be sputtering something about how new mothers in Texas need help, and we need to expand Medicaid coverage for them, etc, etc. But as we noted above, actions are louder than words. Acta non verba as the Romans used to say.
Some of our readers don’t care much for the Texas Tribune, which we linked above.
Here’s the perspective from the more conservative leaning “Center Square,” where reporter Bethany Blankley points things out a little more explicitly.
Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, announced his legislative priorities for the 2023 legislative session, which notably exclude border security and Republican Party of Texas legislative priorities. They prioritize expanding Medicaid and ensuring feminine hygiene products are exempt from state sales tax.
After Phelan released his priorities, Republican Party of Texas Chairman Matt Rinaldi asked on Twitter if they were “real.”
According to a news release Phelan published on social media, his priorities are real. The speaker also issued a statement saying he was “proud” of them. His legislative priorities, he said, include “improving privacy and security of all Texans as well as supporting mothers and children.”
—Reporter Bethany Blankley, The Center Square
Call him “Tampon Dade.” We wish we could take credit for the name, but someone else beat us to it.
The episode is drawing fresh attention to how Republican leaders in Texas seem to be blowing off what Republican voters selected as party priorities during the last statewide election.
Phelan says he’s all in on four bills this session:
Listed as the top of four priorities is HB 4, the Texas Data and Privacy and Security Act, filed by state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Keller. It would “grant Texans new online rights, including the ability to crack down on how companies collect, and in instances profit from, their personal data.”
HB 12, filed by Rep. Toni Rose, D-Dallas, is listed second. It would expand Medicaid eligibility and coverage to new mothers. HB 18, the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act, filed by Rep. Shelby Slawson, R-Stephenville, is third on the list. It would provide parents with additional tools to prevent companies from collecting data about their children online. HR 300, filed by Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, listed fourth, exempts feminine hygiene products and baby diapers and wipes from state sales taxes.
Phelan said he was “so proud” of the work members put into filing the four bills, “which reflects some of the most pressing issues on the minds of Texans today.” He also said the bills “are great starting points for our chamber as we work to get them over the finish line this legislative session.”
No statewide or Republican Party polls have listed data and online privacy, expanding Medicaid, or exempting feminine products from state sales tax as legislative priorities.
—Bethany Blankley, again, the Center Square.
The voted-on Republican Party priorities, by the way, actually included things like election integrity, border security, and banning the gender modification of children.
Weird, isn’t it?
Maybe Phelan’s got a better read on what’s important to voters than they know themselves.
The news out of Austin kind of speaks to a certain feeling of despair we’ve had, as lawmakers there have reached out recently, asking if we had any fresh “rancher stories,” for them.
“Rancher stories” in this case would refer to tales of illegal aliens and criminals getting up to mischief on area ranches. Victimizing people in the area, basically.
It’s been three years since the border crisis became noticeable in these parts. There’s been nothing but rancher sob stories this whole time, and worse.
Elderly women have been raped in their homes. (That happened in Maverick County/Eagle Pass, by the way.)
Businesses have been repeatedly broken into. (Eagle Pass again— a local barbecue stand that was located near an NGO that was helping migrants.)
Families have been holed up in their homes— isolated on ranches, while illegal foreign nationals pounded on the doors and windows, trying to get inside. (That happened to a Kinney County Rancher and his family)
High speed pursuits and bailouts have become a daily occurrence in just about every community in the area, running between the border and Uvalde, TX which is still reeling from the school shooting at Robb Elementary.
One imagines it won’t be long before smuggling related activity begins more visibly impacting towns further East, closer to San Antonio.
Point being— aren’t we past the point of needing *more* rancher sob stories? There’s been nothing but sob stories around here for the last 3 years. The fact that some lawmakers are naively inquiring after such, suggests to us that once again, leaders in Austin seem hopelessly unaware of what’s been happening. How in pluperfect hell can anyone count on individuals wallowing in such ignorance to be able to fix or aid anything?
But the truth is— state lawmakers have been informed— repeatedly.
No wonder Dade Phelan and others like him feel confident in being able to disregard the expressed will of their own party’s voters. They literally don’t care— like some pack of gangsters whose only concern is doing whatever they want.
Let’s get away from the polemicist territory we’ve been dwelling in so far this morning, and focus on some hard facts and figures— fresh from the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office:
Bear in mind— Kinney County is one of the largest Counties in Texas, and also one of the most sparsely populated, with a relatively miniscule tax-base that is almost entirely supported by people coming to the area to hunt white-tail deer and other exotic species that are housed on area ranches.
So far, the month of February is on pace for 100+ smuggling loads busted. As of Monday, the total stood at 92 loads intercepted between the Sheriff’s Office and DPS combined.
Tuesday, yesterday, saw at least 5 different high-speed pursuits, all before 9:00 AM. Absolute bonkers. We haven’t inquired, but it’s a sure bet that deputies were busy throughout the rest of the afternoon and night with more smuggling cases, putting 100+ for the month well within reach.
While gathering information at the Sheriff's Office yesterday morning, one could hear frantic radio traffic as dispatchers and deputies co-ordinated 3 of those pursuits that were all happening at once.
Two different loads were caught on Highway 90, coming up from Spofford and Eagle Pass and trying to cut over to Uvalde. And a suspected "Scout" or "Decoy" was also being pursued. Cartel traffickers will use such scouts or decoys to pull law-enforcement away from more valuable loads.
Meanwhile, at least one of the lessons being digested after the debut of the Southern Border Task Force's efforts in Kinney County last week is that it takes the cartels about 2 days to adjust to a heavier law enforcement presence.
"The Task Force was good," said Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, "Numbers spiked for the first 2-and-a-half days, and then it dropped. After they left, the numbers shot back up again," said the Sheriff.
Recall, 2020 saw about 169 smugglers arrested and charged for the whole year in Kinney County. 2021 saw 181. 2022 saw 741. The numbers so far suggest 2023 will be even worse.
Now for some housekeeping, we’ve seen a spike in the number of new subscribers this week from all over the State and other parts of the Country. Welcome to the newsletter. Obviously, we have our personal bias. Sometime after the newsletter’s inception, we began working as a public information officer on behalf of Kinney County. It’s occasionally an odd feeling— trying to perform some kind of journalism while also working on behalf of local government.
Many would tell you it’s an obvious conflict of interest and that it should engender a certain amount of skepticism toward anything reported here. That’s a fair criticism. But, given the remote nature of the county, and the general lack of any kind of routine reporting from out of the area, we hope folks will bear with us.
We invite skepticism, in fact.
On that note, local critic of Operation Lone Star, Kinney County resident Gage Brown pops up in some reporting by “Spectrum News,” which is the inheritor of the old Time Warner Cable News division that covered local news in Austin and San Antonio and other communities for many years.
By the looks of things, Ms. Brown was attending an event in Austin, protesting Operation Lone Star, echoing her past criticisms, calling the effort wasteful.
Gage Brown, a lifelong resident of Kinney County and the owner of a local art gallery, calls the border effort inefficient and wasteful.
“Since Operation Lone Star was launched in 2021, I have watched, first-hand, our local law enforcement’s transformation into a pseudo-ICE agency,” Brown said, adding that drug use and domestic violence is on the rise in her home county. “Yet there are no efforts on behalf of our local law enforcement to investigate these issues.”
Instead, every resource of law enforcement is being used to hunt migrants like wild game, Brown said. And for what? Brown asked. The vast majority of apprehended migrants are accused of nothing more than stepping foot on private property.
“My question is, ‘By what measure can this response be claimed as effective?’” Brown asked. “We are spending billions on pressing asylum seekers with felony charges, and nothing has changed at all. Plain proof that deterrent strategies do not work and are a huge waste of already limited resources.”
—Reporter Kimberly Reeves, Austin Spectrum News
Ms. Brown doesn’t cite any specific figures to indicate how exactly drug use and domestic violence are on the rise in the County. But we respect that she’s entitled to her opinion, and that sometimes these things must be based on something other than hard stats and sources— when such things are easily manipulated.
Indeed, if one were to accuse local law-enforcement of ignoring certain sorts of crime, one would hardly expect them to have any sort of stats or figures to support your assertion. You would be relying on your own personal knowledge, and whatever else you’ve heard from around town.
Personally— we feel that this is rather more accurate in a small town than most people would like to admit. We’re aware of three recent relatively high-profile cases of alleged domestic violence. In all three cases, matters were complicated by witnesses either refusing to testify, or otherwise making themselves unreliable for prosecutors.
In some cases, authorities don’t need reliable witnesses. But in others, they do. Without having deeper knowledge of these specific cases, however, we cannot do much more than second guess the decisions made by the District Attorney’s office, and we all know what ignorant second guesses are usually worth.
As for the allegations of increasing drug use— that is probably reflective of the highly successful use of an undercover Sheriff’s Deputy, who was able to bust up a ring of traffickers that were selling narcotics out of the guard shack on Fort Clark a while back. The same deputy was also involved in the successful prosecution of an individual who was accused of trying to repeatedly sell narcotics near the local elementary school.
With so much cartel activity in the region, however, it is our opinion that it’s rather much to expect local law enforcement to be able to completely stop and shut down all narcotics trade in the area. Witness the difficulty in curtailing the smuggling of illegal foreign nationals.
Ms. Brown and her criticisms of Operation Lone Star last appeared in the newsletter last August, after she was interviewed by a publication called “Texas Signal,” whose efforts we reluctantly had to label “A Garbage Take.” You can read it below.
One of the things Sheriff Brad Coe and others have been saying repeatedly is how border security is a national problem— that the cartels are operating with impunity right now.
It’s one thing to say it— it’s another to read it, in full, descriptive, living color.
Check out the story of what happened in one small town in Washington State, after the Cartel CJNG moved in.
The article, by the Louisville Courier-Journal does a fine job of tying together the threads of beheaded bodies, clammed-up-witnesses and a ringleader from Mexico who slipped back and forth across the border for years.
This isn’t the Rio Grande Valley— this is the Pacific Northwest, for Pete’s sake.
CJNG is shorthand for the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion— one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico.
And on that note— we’ll call it a morning.
We may be back again before the week is over, depending on events. It’ll be a busy weekend in Kinney County, with many gearing up for “Fort Clark Days,” an annual event that celebrates the history of the local army post which was a linchpin in efforts against the Apache, Comanche, and others, during the frequent Indian wars that dominated westward expansion.
The Fort remained in service through World War II, before being shut down and sold off by the Army. It is now a retirement and leisure community.
Local residents can expect cannon fire, re-enactors, the Lipan Apache band, living historians, arts and crafts, and of course all kinds of festival food.
As always, this newsletter is an independent work product, produced without the input or oversight of Kinney County Officials, and should not be considered any sort of an official communication. Any mistakes, errors, or other misdeeds are entirely our own.
The average critic cannot see well until both eyes are swollen shut from a smack in the head.