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Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill that requires law enforcement to enter missing persons case details into a national database. House Bill 1419, also known as “John and Joseph’s Law”, also requires a justice of the peace or a medical examiner to enter details about unidentified bodies into the same database, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Case details can include dental records, fingerprints and clothing descriptions. HB 1419 is named after John Almendarez and Joseph Fritts of Houston — whose respective families had to wait several years before their bodies were identified.

According to Abbott, those arrested in this manner could spend anywhere from six months to a year in jail. “More tax money right,” El Pasoan Daniel Ravas said. “So, I mean you're either putting it on Border Patrol salaries and getting more people on the border trying to take that preventative action, or you're just reacting to people coming over the border and then warehousing them for six months.”

New data from online real estate brokerage Redfin further illustrates how wild the Austin housing market has been in 2021. Redfin says more than 1,500 homes have sold for more than $100,000 above asking price since the beginning of 2021 in Austin, and 72 of them sold for more than $300,000 over the asking price. At this time last year, only 22 homes had winning bids over $100,000 over the asking price. The year-over-year gap is even wider for homes that sold in a range of $25,000-$99,999 over the asking price. Last year, from Jan. 1, 2020 to May 23,...

HIDALGO, Texas (Border Report) — As a way to boost the local economy while border travel restrictions remain, the South Texas border city of Laredo is soliciting Mexican nationals to fly in for COVID-19 vaccinations, and then hoping they’ll stay awhile to shop and explore. During a visit with a congressional delegation to the Rio Grande Valley on Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose hometown is Laredo, announced that the city has been engaged in a tourism campaign to attract Mexicans who need coronavirus shots.

On 24 May, Monday afternoon, the last significant legislative hurdle for restoring Constitutional Carry to Texas was overcome. After years of toil, time and trouble, of betrayal and loyalty, of primaries and resignations, a significant Constitutional Carry bill has passed the Texas Legislature and is expected to be sent to Governor Abbott.HB1927, in its final form, passed the House 82-62, and reported privately to me, passed the Senate on a straight party line vote.Constitutional carry is a reasonable facsimile of the state of law about the carry of weapons when the Second Amendment was ratified, in 1791. At the time,...

A bill expected to soon be signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott will allow police to charge protesters with a felony if they are accused of obstructing emergency vehicles when blocking the street. House Bill 9, which passed in both bodies of the Texas Legislature on Monday, would make blocking an emergency vehicle a state-jail felony punishable by up to two years in jail. It also requires anyone who receives probation for blocking a roadway to serve at least 10 days in jail. ...Abbott tweeted his support for the bill Saturday. "Peaceful protest doesn’t include blocking roadways and preventing...

Following nearly 14 hours of delay tactics by Democrats, the Texas House failed to pass a measure to require transgender student-athletes to participate in sports that match their biological sex rather than their gender identity. Those delay efforts ranged from extensive question and answer periods during bill layouts to introduction of multiple long-winded debates relating to bill amendments. Some liberal lawmakers even recited stanzas of the Texas state song and the national anthem during discussion about a bill to require professional sports teams that have contracts with governmental entities to play the national anthem before games. The delays focused on...

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- Why are Texas Senate Republicans slowing a bill supported by most House Democrats and all House Republicans?In 2017, the Texas legislature passed a sweeping knife reform bill. It removed the criminal penalties for carrying most knives in Texas. Because of a tragic and illegal knife attack on a college campus, at the last minute, amendments were added to the bill to make the possession of knives with a blade over 5.5 inches illegal in a small number of locations.This meant numerous people were kept at risk of arrest for using ordinary implements of the job, such as gardeners...

“We've seen a number of officers that have left in the recent months and that is leaving particularly our patrol ranks short,” he said during a press conference on March 30... Starting June 1st, The DWI unit will be temporarily suspended. On August 1st, The Detective unit will be downsized. The email states current detectives won’t be moved to patrol but 18 officers will have their promotion to detective temporarily put on hold, as well as other who may be promoted in the future... “People are going to find themselves stuck on those roadways behind a Collison scene, much more...

Campaign finance records reveal that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and House Speaker Dade Phelan received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a PAC for a clinic that offers hormone treatment to allegedly transgender children. UT Southwestern Medical Center hosts the Gender Education and Care Interdisciplinary Support (GENECIS) program, which is the “first and largest program in the southwest that provides multidisciplinary care to transgender children and adolescents.” While the program does not offer surgery to children, it does offer a number of so-called “treatments” that may amount to chemical castration, including hormone therapy, menstruation suppression, and...

Texas Second Amendment supporters have been working hard to pass Constitutional Carry in Texas for several years. The leadership of the Texas Republicans has been hostile to the idea, even though Constitutional Carry was one of the top planks in the Texas Republican Party platform. Changes in leadership, by resignation or removal in primaries, made passage plausible in 2021. A new Republican Party Chairman, Allen West, pushed hard for passage. Speaker of the House, Dade Phelan supported it. It passed the house, 84 to 56 in mid-April. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (who controls the Texas Senate) and Governor Greg Abbot...

Transitionary therapy and genital mutilation surgery on children is legal in Texas. This is absurd, and when I am governor we will put an end to all of it. Video...

In a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, respondents who plan to vote in the GOP primary were asked “If the 2024 Republican primary were being held today, for whom would you vote?” Trump more than tripled his nearest competitor with 48 percent to former Vice President Mike Pence’s 13 percent, while Pence nearly doubled third-place finisher Donald Trump Jr.’s 7 percent. Senators Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz were tied with former Amb. Nikki Haley at 4 percent. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who delivered the GOP response to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress last month, drummed...

United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now says that there is a surge in fentanyl coming across the United States border, and the agency has seized more of the incredibly potent narcotic in the first several months of 2021 than it did in all of 2020. “Customs and Border Protection seized more fentanyl so far in 2021 than all of 2020,” ABC News reported Tuesday. “As of April, 6,494 pounds of fentanyl were seized by authorities at the border, compared to 4,776 pounds in all of 2020. In fact, fentanyl seizures have been increasing since 2018.” “Fentanyl is an...

SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio police are searching for a man who fired a gun at a woman outside an abortion clinic on Saturday morning.No one was injured, San Antonio Police Department spokesperson Christopher Ramos said, crediting an armed bystander who returned fire.The shooting happened Saturday around 8:30 a.m. in the 7400 block of John Smith Drive, near the intersection of Wurzbach and Babcock roads on the Northwest Side. A man who arrived with a woman at the facility pulled out a gun and shot at the woman but missed, Ramos said during a morning press conference near the scene.A...

On Wednesday, 12 May 2021, HB1927 came back from the Texas Senate to the House. The House had passed the bill with a good margin. Governor Abbot said he would sign the bill. The Senate just barely passed the bill, but included eight amendments. The question was: Would the House accept the amendments, and send the bill to the Governor’s desk for signature, or would the House send the bill to a conference committee. The conference committee could work out a compromise with the House. If they did, then the bill would have to go back to the Senate and...

Texas Republicans, reportedly at Abbott's direction, successfully killed a bill to end child sex changes and chemical castrations in the state.Multiple activists and a former state legislator tell National File that the Texas House Calendars Committee’s refusal to assign a date for a floor debate on H.B. 1399, which would effectively ban transgender surgeries and chemical castrations for minors in the state, has essentially killed the bill. Despite over 91% of voters in a large Texas district supporting the bill, it was not added to the calendar for a floor vote yesterday. Multiple sources have told National File that it...

Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s efforts resulted in the creation of the Senate Special Committee on Constitutional Issues. The committee hearing started at 9 a.m on 29 April 2021. Lt. Governor Patrick and other Republicans were and are receiving intense pressure to pass Constitutional Carry. It was listed as one of the top eight priorities in the Texas Republican Party Platform and by Republican Chairman Allan West.While Lt. Governor Dan Patrick worked to set up the special committee, he was in negotiations with various Texas law enforcement agencies and associations to see if they could find a way to support Constitutional...

SAN ANTONIO - Police are investigating an 18-wheeler truck on the East Side that was allegedly filled with undocumented immigrants on I-10 at Foster Road at the TA Truck Service. According to police, a quick-thinking driver noticed something suspicious about the truck and called police. An officer pulled over the truck for a traffic stop around 7:00 p.m., and as soon as the officer made contact with the driver, people started bailing out of the back of the truck. Witnesses said there were 80 to 100 people in the truck, both men and women.

During the debate over HB1927, in the Texas Senate Special Committee on Constitutional Issues, Senator Eddie Lucio (D) made a startling assertion. He stated Texans could not have the right to bear arms restored because the right to bear arms has not been infringed. At about 05:01:50, He asked, During the testimony of Andi Turner, Legislative Director for the Texas State Rifle Association: When did we lose them?…Later he said, about 05:04:30 :We never lost the right to bear arms in this state. Then he references Matt Dillon and Dodge as an example of where the right did not exist....