1/ More states mandate active shooter training for kids in schools than police expected to respond.

@LChurchilll & I published these requirements by state, part of 20 months @propublica @texastribune investigated Uvalde. Here's what else we found: (🧵)

propublica.org/article/state-… 2/ By the end of 2022, it was clear law enforcement at Uvalde had failed.

With @washingtonpost we revealed how the medical response ALSO faltered. Two children & a teacher who later died still had a pulse when they were rescued 77 minutes in.

propublica.org/article/uvalde…

NEW: We obtained the 911 calls & police radio traffic during the #Uvalde school shooting, which police for 5 months refused to disclose. What they reveal is some officers knew students were likely in danger, yet did not immediately act (1/10) propublica.org/article/uvalde… The 911 calls from Robb Elementary and hundreds of police radio transmissions also show that some officers falsely believed no students were trapped inside with the gunman and were surprised to find multiple victims.

texastribune.org/2022/11/01/uva…

'Significant evidence that DPS is engaged in racial profiling, discriminating against Latinx drivers and passengers, in these stops. And, troublingly, the stops turn into deadly vehicle pursuits with alarming frequency," @ACLUTx @TXCivilRights alleges in @TheJusticeDept complaint @ACLUTx @TXCivilRights @TheJusticeDept The allegations come after a state-imposed review of 2021 traffic stops, @jsmccullou writes, flagging DPS as possibly racially profiling Hispanics based on a disproportionate number of stops & searches, despite finding less contraband texastribune.org/2022/07/28/tex…

Everyone has stopped talking, including ⁦@TxDPS⁩ ⁦@GregAbbott_TX⁩ Uvalde ISD and police, ⁦@CBP⁩, and the Uvalde district attorney. All open records requests taken to the AG. Reporters now must rely on make no mistake strategic leaks. texasmonthly.com/news-politics/… The only explanation offered officially so far, by @TxDPS McCraw, was to blame the local ISD police chief. Per McCraw, Arredondo alone held back all the law enforcement—Uvalde city police, the county sheriff’s deputies, Border Patrol officers, and DPS state.

For real?

My mentee @mariaramosp94 asked weeks ago for recommendations on journalism books/long form. Been a hell ride but one of my fave narrative non fiction is Random Family & anything by Kate Boo + The Art of Political Murder by @PacoGoldman. What recs would you give to a young journo? The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm made me think a LOT. @ajcorchado’s Midnight in Mexico was beautiful. Fan of David Grann. Homicide while I covered the crime beat was instrumental. Will add more as I think of it!

One of the many experiences I will specifically remember from @katierosemiller is when she told me the US was not separating kids under 5 and I then came to her with this story of an 18 month old separated during the pilot the US denied : houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

https://twitter.com/katierosemiller/status/1351641886998614017

I circled back later with this story about a mom who had been separated from her breast feeding infant: chron.com/news/houston-t…

This is Blanca. She was one of hundred of parents separated from their children in a secretive 2017 El Paso pilot, in which the government threatened to prosecute parents who tried to fight back for human smuggling (1) I wrote about Blanca’s case in 2017 and she seemed like a textbook case for asylum. After my story, @aldea_pjc
managed to get her reunited with her kid, but the other parents in her case were deported without their children. Now, they can’t be found (2)
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

This is, again, another lie. The story by @jacobsoboroff @JuliaEAinsley says they can’t find those parents, in part because the govnt declined to release that info earlier & the administration’s own non existing tracking systems. This tracks with three years of reporting by many

https://twitter.com/geoffrbennett/status/1318971739175587842

No one even had a contact for this dad, whose 18 month old was taken from him, until his lawyer got involved, knowing he’d be deported back to rural Guatemala without a phone.
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

For months, lawyers searched for thousands of migrant kids expelled under a US order against COVID. They found three dozen. Kids vanish into a secretive system, not issued a main tracking number for migrants. They’re quickly returned-'no one can find them'
propublica.org/article/her-ra… Detaining children in clandestine hotels is an 'integral component' of the expulsions, a lawyer noted. It was first reported by the formidable @NomaanMerchant who found + 169 children had been held, some for weeks, in @HiltonHotels. That has grown to +240
apnews.com/c9b671b206060f…

A great story by @itscaitlinhd about how the government appears to be using the guise of covid to expel not only more than 900 children on their own at the southern border, but also rush through deportations of children already here, often to no one.
nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/… .@itscaitlinhd and @shearm also had a very important story about how the Trump administration has used an obscure law designed to protect the nation from diseases overseas as a way to tighten the borders.
nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/…

What do #Texas drivers licenses & @thebeatles John Lennon have to do with the #DACA case before @Scotus? In 2012 Obama approved the DACA regulation giving 'deferred action' to certain young immigrants who came here illegally as children, so they could work & wouldn't be deported In 2015, Obama tried to extend that to the parents of American children in what it called DAPA, but Texas' then AG @GregAbbott_TX sued to stop. The state argued it incurred damage in the cost of having to give driver's licenses to all these immigrants.
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

It's often not possible to have a close relationship with the photographer reporters work with, but when it is, it yields better work. In April @MarieDennise & I profiled this cross-border El Paso family & little Memo's baseball team in Ciudad Juarez. @MarieDennise The Garcias are bi-national, bi-cultural, bilingual, and they ferry their kids to sports across El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. tinyurl.com/yypg9bah

In April, @MarieDennise & I met a beautiful El Paso family that illustrated the city's cross-border identity. (tinyurl.com/y4zcervf) This week we were back reporting on the #elpasoshooting & were horrified to hear they were among the first victims.
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t… They were raising money outside the Walmart for their 10-year-old daughter Karina’s soccer team, selling the traditional Mexican snacks of chicharrónes and aguas frescas when the gunman started firing.

Reminder on 2 points: yes, most convicted of 1325 get time served in judicial process costing taxpayers what a US District Judge called 'mind-boggling, neither meritorious nor reasonable' & clog up as much as 80 % of TX border courts before landing in ICE
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

https://twitter.com/SchwartzChron/status/1157061405260075010

The government can only prosecute a small % of illegal border-crossers anyway, it simply doesn't have the capacity. But families weren't only separated under zero tolerance because of 1325: houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

With #DemocraticDebates (esp. @JulianCastro) spotlight on abolishing criminal charges for illegal entry, my story from 2017 on the history of the law and how its use exploded under Bush (also story how I uncovered #familyseparations )
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t… via @houstonchron Here is the story that resulted from that one, uncovering the El Paso family separation pilot in 2017, six months before it was announced. Also note difference in @CBP response to separating families between story 1 and 2
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t… via @houstonchron

New: @aclu asks judge overseeing family separations to order govnt halt the ongoing practice, saying +900, incl. babies, have been separated since injunction last summer. Our story in June had +700, often for questionable gang claims or criminal records.
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t… @ACLU

This “accord” says just so much about US Guatemala relations for the past 6 decades, and also about its soon to be ousted President Jimmy Morales (accused of corruption, as nearly every president before him has been)

https://twitter.com/marybsheridan/status/1155240155013427200

Let’s all just pause to remember that Guatemala was on a path to democracy when the US government intervened, declaring the winning candidate too socialist and launching more than three decades of civil war.

Johnny Clegg, who died today, is the opposite of the discussion happening in the USA today. Born in England, he was raised mostly in South Africa and became one of its most celebrated singers, incorporating Zulu street guitar during Apartheid. What an inspiring man and musician.
"I got into trouble with the authorities, I was arrested for trespassing and for breaking the Group Areas Act,." "npr.org/2019/07/16/738…

When White House counsels informed Trump that 212(f) does not give him legal authority to override federal law, he would tell how he put up a giant flagpole at Mar-a-Lago. It violated ordinances, resulting in fines/lawsuit, but he was ultimately allowed
nyti.ms/2GgLyQ9 “His constant instinct all the time was: Just do it, and if we get sued, we get sued. To him, it’s all a negotiation. As if the first step is a lawsuit. I guess he thinks that because that’s how business worked for him in the private sector. But federal law is different."

While attention is focused on horrific conditions in overcrowded CBP facilities, in Mexico the situation is worse and will get even more dire as the US expands its program to make asylum seekers wait in Mexico to Laredo.
texastribune.org/2019/07/03/exp… via @TexasTribune @nachoaguilar By mid-May, @nachoaguilar reports, about 2,800 migrants were waiting in Ciudad Juárez under the Trump administration's program. As of Monday, that number had swelled to more than 7,600,

On Monday, after more than a decade of trying to gain a legal status, having been detained twice by ICE, & spending years as a deportee in El Salvador, Houston father Jose Escobar is finally home -- for good. @MarieDennise and I have followed his journey.
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t… In many ways he has spanned the arc of recent immigration enforcement. Jose came here as a teen & had a protected status he lost in a paperwork error made by his mom. Lawyers gave him bad advice and told him not to show up to his court hearing in 2006. He was ordered deported.