Death greets visitors to Reynosa these days. On the outskirts of this gritty industrial city across the Rio Grande from McAllen, a shining, white altar to the skeletal specter la Santa Muerte (Saint Death)—a favorite of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the criminal underclass—stands guard at her post, a smiling grim reaper, a fitting saint for these times. My husband and I stop at la Santa Muerte on the edge of town. As my husband snaps photographs, a silver pickup truck careens down the highway at high speed with its hazard lights flashing. It weaves dangerously in and out of… Read more

From Facing South, the online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies. When Glenn Beck decided to hold his "Restoring Honor" rally last week at the very site in Washington, D.C. where Martin Luther King,… Read more

One evening in November 2007, an 18-year-old inmate in Beaumont’s Al Price Juvenile Correctional Facility was stretched out on his bunk when a female guard named Janice Simpson entered his room. The facility was short-staffed… Read more

At a July congressional hearing, Mark Borkowski, an executive director in charge of border security at the Department of Homeland Security, made a startling admission: The U.S. government had no viable plan to secure the… Read more

Soon the state Supreme Court will decide Edwards Aquifer Authority v. Day, a landmark case that could upend the state’s rickety system of groundwater regulation. At issue is whether landowners have an absolute, vested right to the groundwater beneath their property, as the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found. “If this theory were to prevail in this Court, groundwater conservation in Texas would be finished,” warns an amicus brief filed by the Texas Association of Groundwater Conservation Districts. A foreshadow of that scenario can be found in a little-noticed court decision in another case, Bragg v. Edwards Aquifer Authority.… Read more