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After more than six hours of fervent debate, the Texas Senate late last night passed an omnibus anti-abortion bill on a 20-10 vote.

Senate Bill 5 requires all abortion clinics to refit their facilities in line with ambulatory surgical center standards, a move that health advocates say will be so costly that all but five clinics in the state will close. The bill also prevents clinicians from prescribing the abortion pill remotely, as they do currently, for rural women in early stages of pregnancy. And it requires abortion doctors to have admitting privileges to a hospital no more than 30 miles from the abortion clinic, effectively excluding out-of-state abortion doctors.

But Republican Sen. Glenn Hegar, a rice farmer from Katy and the sponsor of the bill, dropped one major provision, the clause banning abortion after 20 weeks. He did express hope that it might make a comeback in the House.

Democratic senators spent hours pushing back. They grilled Hegar about the empirical evidence to suggest that ambulatory care centers are safer than stand-alone clinics; about the intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship; about the requirement to have physicians prescribe three times the clinically accepted pharmaceutical dose for medical abortions; about the absence of measures like contraception and sex education to prevent abortions; about the increased cost of abortion care; about the number of clinics that would close; and about women’s reduced access to their constitutionally protected right.

To each criticism, Hegar’s only response was that his bill improved patient safety. In fact, he said it so many times that Sen. Sylvia Garcia quipped, “If I had a dollar for every time you said ‘raising the standard of care,’ you’d probably be able to buy me a good steak dinner.”

Democrats gamely proposed 19 amendments that would link bill adoption to moonshot goals like having Planned Parenthood back in the Women’s Health Program or Texas accept Medicaid expansion. But Hegar, with a face that was consistently expressionless for most of six hours, swiftly and calmly quashed each Democratic proposal.

Just after an 11 p.m. invocation from Sen. Craig Estes (R-Wichita Falls) to technically bring about a new legislative day (blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the persecuted because of righteousness, etcetera), Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) made a last-ditch effort to stop the bill on third and final reading. He mourned the fact that Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst had suspended the two-third rule—which requires a two-thirds vote to bring bills up for debate—in the 30-day special session called by Gov. Rick Perry, allowing senators to “ram through any partisan meat that fail[ed] in the regular session.” After outlining the damage to women’s health following recent legislative decisions like cuts to the state’s family-planning budget and the eviction of Planned Parenthood from state-funded care, Watson asked: “Are we really reducing abortions, or just the legal ones?”

But Hegar never looked ruffled, perhaps because he’d also received spades of encouragement from fellow Republicans as well from avowedly “pro-life” Democrat Sen. Eddie Lucio, Jr.

Hegar’s work done, the bill is expected to proceed to a House committee on Thursday, where activists for abortion rights as well as anti-abortion activists will gather again for public testimony.

Meanwhile in other news this week, the nonpartisan Texas Women’s Healthcare Coalition honored a group of senators and state representatives for negotiating the return of $200 million for women’s health in the state budget. Among the awardees were Sen. Jane Nelson and Sen. Bob Deuell. Both voted for the omnibus anti-abortion bill last night.

And the name of the award they received this week? Women’s Health Heroes.

Marissa Barnett

Activists and members of families separated by immigration detention left a Father's Day gift outside the Polk County facility on Saturday.

Maria Cecilia Ovalle didn’t expect to take care of her two small children alone. Until May, she lived in Houston with her husband Juan Jose Carranza Alvarado and their children, a four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. But after a scuffle at work, Juan was questioned by police who discovered he didn’t have immigration papers. They arrested him immediately.

Her husband, a steelworker in Texas for more than 10 years, was sent to the Joe Corley Detention Center in Conroe, 40 miles north of Houston. He was the breadwinner of their household and without papers, Ovalle says she’s had a hard time finding a job. She sold things from their home—an Xbox, two TV sets—to pay rent, but she’s not sure how long she can keep it up without work.

Ovalle isn’t sure how long her husband will be locked up. If he’s given an immigration bond to stay in the U.S., she says she’ll find a way to pay it. She doesn’t want to think about what could happen if he is deported.

Being undocumented means that she can’t visit her husband at Joe Corley, so their only communication is an expensive daily phone call. Ovalle’s eyes well up with tears as she tells the Observer that their two children—both U.S. citizens—can’t see their father.

“They’re so young. It really affects them,” she says in Spanish. “They ask me, ‘Where’s daddy? Where’s daddy?’ I tell them he’s working far away.”

Ovalle says that anguish over her family’s separation drew her to the Polk County Adult Detention Center in Livingston on Saturday, joining some 70 other activists for a “Father’s Day Caravan to Close Polk.”

Austin-based nonprofits Grassroots Leadership and Texans United for Families organized the caravan, part of the national Detention Watch Network’s “Expose and Close” campaign, which calls for the immediate closure of 10 U.S. detention centers, including Polk County.

On a bus from Austin Saturday morning, I met more people with stories like Ovalle’s, and other activists, as we rode to Livingston.

Rocio Villalobos sits quietly in a window seat. As a member of Texans United for Families, she coordinates a volunteer visitation program to T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a 512-bed private, for profit detention center in Taylor that imprisoned families until 2009.

Just over 500 women are currently detained in Hutto, which has received scrutiny for violating ICE detention standards. Villalobos says conditions in Polk are similar, if not worse.

She says one thing that differentiates the two is access to contact visits. At Polk, a glass partition separates visitors and detainees. “The act of being detained, the act of being so isolated, and being kept from any kind of social contact or emotional contact with their loved ones, is adding to their distress,” she says.

Her concerns are many: isolation of detainees, lack of access to proper medical and legal services, labor practices within facilities, separating families, and the massively profitable private prison system, which the Observer reported on in May.

A few miles from the facility, some passengers lather themselves in sunscreen and prepare for the next couple hours in the Texas summer heat.

Marissa Barnett

The charter pulls into a driveway where another busload of people from the Houston-based nonprofit LIFT: Liberating Immigrant Families Together are waiting. As I step off the bus, I catch my first look at the large beige structure.

The IAH Secure Adult Detention Facility, as it’s known more officially, is a 1,054-bed prison run by the for-profit Community Education Centers (CEC). U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pays CEC an average of $56 a day for each bed filled, according to a report by Detention Watch Network and Texans United for Families. Now, 822 beds are filled by men waiting—some up to a year—for their immigration hearings.

The report, based on interviews with 60 detainees, the warden, CEC staff members and two ICE officials last July, details some of the conditions in Polk. Among its long list of offenses: inadequate medical care, solitary confinement, no contact during visits, unhealthy meals and labor exploitation.

Sam Vong, who wrote the report, joined the Polk caravan. Last July he toured the facility with other Texans United for Families members.

“These are cinder-block cells where there are eight men in each very small cell with no privacy,” Vong says. “One man even talked about having to drink from a water foundation directly adjacent to the toilet. It’s very dehumanizing.”

Immigrant rights advocates say they’re worried about what’s happening inside Polk’s walls. But on Father’s Day weekend, this event is focused on what’s happening to families separated by detention.

Yajaira Lopez is standing in the shade, listening to speakers at the vigil. Back in January, more than 10 ICE officials entered her family home and arrested her husband Jayron, threatening to deport him to Guatemala. Yajaira says their young daughters watched as ICE agents took their dad away.

Jayron was imprisoned in the Joe Corley Detention Center until May when he received immunity. Yajaira tells me her 11-year-old daughter Jasmine’s attitude started changing, and both of their daughters’ grades slipped. Yajaira has a pacemaker for her congestive heart failure, and was even hospitalized for two days in February, which she attributes to stress from Jayron’s case.

Yajaira says she and her daughters, all U.S. citizens, were able to see Jayron while he was detained. But it’s not uncommon for detainees to have few visitors.

Matt Gossage is a volunteer for Texans United For Families, and director of the documentary “Hutto: America’s Family Prison.” The problem is multifaceted, he says. One is that undocumented family members can’t visit without a passport or visa, and he says even coming to vigils like this one is a risk. Even then, people might be detained in states far from their family. “It’s not always logical why ICE will send detainees to certain facilities. They have their own reasons but it’s not for the welfare or wellbeing of the detainees and their families,” he says.

Saturday’s protesters want President Obama, ICE, CEC and the men locked beyond the tall fence to hear their call and end immigrant detention.

As Ovalle finishes sharing her story, the crowd chants, “No estas sola, no estas sola.” “You’re not alone.” They say this to offer their support, but it also conveys a hard truth.

“We want to remind people at the facility that we’re here, we care about them, and we’re going to continue to push for it to be closed,” Villalobos says.

Before filing onto the uses and heading back home that afternoon, the crowd erupts into one last chant: “We’ll be back!”

PHOTO SOURCE: FACEBOOK.COM/HOUSTONPOLICE

On Monday, a grand jury declined to indict the Houston police officer who in September shot and killed Brian Claunch, a mentally ill, wheelchair-bound double amputee, for refusing to drop a pen.

HPD Officer Matthew Marin and his partner had responded to a disturbance call at Healing Hands, a small residential group home in central Houston for men with mental illness. Claunch, 45, suffered from schizophrenia and was agitated because he wanted a soda and cigarettes. Police say he yelled threats at the officers and backed Marin’s partner into a corner while waving something shiny, which turned out to be a ballpoint pen. When Claunch wouldn’t drop the shiny object, Marin killed him with one shot.

The case sparked international outrage. Why didn’t Marin use a Taser? HPD has a nationally-recognized crisis intervention team for handling suspects with mental illness—why wasn’t it there? How did Marin’s partner get cornered by a man with only one arm to propel his wheelchair?

Most important, if Claunch’s death isn’t considered an unjustified use of lethal force by HPD officers, what is?

Statistically, nothing.

Between 2007 and 2012, HPD officers killed citizens in 109 shootings and injured them in 112. Houston police also killed animals in 225 shootings and injured them in 109. The department’s Internal Affairs Division investigated every one of the 555 shootings and found them all justified.

Officers fare almost as well in the criminal justice system. No law enforcement officer in Harris County has been charged in a shooting since 2010, when Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton was acquitted for shooting an unarmed man, Robbie Tolan, in his own front yard.

HPD says Internal Affairs is still investigating whether Claunch’s death was justified. That’s odd because IAD investigations are required to wrap within six months and Claunch died almost nine months ago. Investigations that exceed the time limit void their results and can’t be grounds for any discipline, which is how one of the officers fired for beating 15-year-old unarmed burglary suspect Chad Holley got his job back.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating six questionable use-of-force cases by HPD officers, including Claunch’s death, Chad Holley’s beating, and the shooting death of Rufino Lara, an unarmed 54-year-old immigrant whom the officer said was ignoring commands in English and Spanish and made a threatening motion. Witnesses say the officer only gave commands in English and that Lara had his hands up and was complying when he was shot.