Most Recent in Texas Politics:

1After Sarah Davis’ Election Defeat, Texas Reproductive Health Advocates Worry About Losing a Powerful Republican Ally

2Rural Voters Stepped on the Gas for Trump Across the Texas Oil Patch

3Local Organizers Explain the Republican Surge in South Texas

4A House Divided

5As Democrats Divebomb, the Texas Legislature Remains as White and Male as Ever

6Texas Democrats Thought 2020 Would Be a Banner Year. Instead, It Was a Catastrophe.

Most Recent in Environment:

1Texas Has Elected A Climate Change Denier to the Railroad Commission

2Illegal Air Pollution is Skyrocketing in Texas, But State Regulators are Ignoring Complaints

3Why is Michael Bloomberg Giving $2.6 Million to Elect a Railroad Commissioner in Texas?

4One Texas-Sized Loophole is Letting Lone Star Polluters Off the Hook

5Houston, Let People Walk

6Claiming Major Superfund ‘Success,’ Trump EPA Focused on Completing Cleanups, Not Climate Planning

Most Recent in Border:

1Local Organizers Explain the Republican Surge in South Texas

25,000 People Contract COVID-19 While In ICE Custody, Including This Father Of 5

3Mexico Turns To Television And Radio For Remote Learning

4New Engineering Report Finds Privately Built Border Wall Will Fail

5El ducto del coronavirus

6The Coronavirus Pipeline

Most Recent in Criminal Justice:

1Fort Bend County Will Soon Have Its First Black Sheriff Since Reconstruction

2How Texas Jails Avoid Investigations of Inmate Deaths

3I Left My Friends in Prison in a Pandemic. Here’s What It’s Like For Them.

4After the Deaths of Two Soldiers at Fort Hood, the Navajo Nation Wants Answers

5Trump’s Favorite Texas Sheriff Faces Re-Election Amid a Spike in Deaths at His Jail

6Researcher Howard Henderson on Reimagining Policing in the U.S.

Most Recent in Education:

1Efforts to Save What’s Left of Mary Allen Seminary Reveal The Challenges of Preserving Black Placemaking in Texas

2Texas Has the Widest Digital Divide in the Nation. What Does that Mean for the School Year?

3The New Ensemble

4Raise a Glass to the Class of COVID-19

5Tough Decisions Ahead for School Leaders in Rural Texas

6‘Almost Akin to a Political Coup’: Houston Teachers Fight Back Against State Takeover of HISD

Most Recent in Health Care:

1After Sarah Davis’ Election Defeat, Texas Reproductive Health Advocates Worry About Losing a Powerful Republican Ally

2For Families That Lost Loved Ones or Jobs to the Pandemic, Thanksgiving Carries an Extra Weight This Year

3How We Got Here

4A West Texas Nursing Home Sent Its COVID-Positive Residents Elsewhere. Now Two of Them Are Dead.

5The Forgotten Children of Texas

6I Left My Friends in Prison in a Pandemic. Here’s What It’s Like For Them.

Most Recent in The Interview:

1Researcher Howard Henderson on Reimagining Policing in the U.S.

2Texas Observer Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger Reflects on 65 Years of Publication

3How Katharine Hayhoe Stays Hopeful as the Planet Warms

4Author William Lopez on How Immigration Raids Inflict Long-Lasting Trauma

5Why a Texas Gun Control Activist is Optimistic About the Chances for Reform

6American Health Care is Broken, Especially in Texas. What Can We Do About It?

Most Recent in Books:

1Remembering a Jewish Upbringing in Meyerland, Texas

2How Texas Women Delivered the Nineteenth Amendment

3A New Short-Story Collection Imagines a Texas Town’s Secession

4Improbable, Prophetic Houston

5Announcing the 2020 Insider Prize Winners

6‘A Saint From Texas’ Gets the Lone Star State Right

Most Recent in Features:

1How to Die in Texas

2Young Texans Keep Spelling Bees Going From Home

4San Antonio Embraces Mandaean Refugees

5The Ghosts of Jefferson

6Little Arthouse on the Prairie

Most Recent in Essay:

1What the Black Lives Matter Protests Mean for East Texas

2Raise a Glass to the Class of COVID-19

3What’s a Bookstore for?

4Lessons on the Long Game from Goose Island’s Whooping Cranes

5In a Pandemic, Poor Defendants Could Pay With Their Lives

6Loneliness in the Age of Coronavirus

Most Recent in Eye on Texas:

1Eye on Texas: The Essential Women of Austin

2Eye on Texas: The Black Yearbook

3Eye on Texas: Border Tuner

4Eye on Texas: The Broken Wheel Ranch Project

5Eye on Texas: Spike Johnston

6Eye on Texas: Loren Elliott

Most Recent in Poetry:

1Author Saeed Jones on Empathy, the Power of Memoir, and Growing up Gay in North Texas

2Remembering W.S. Merwin, Honorary Texan

3Lost in Limbo in the Hays County Jail

4Houston Poet Analicia Sotelo’s Debut Smashes Latino Stereotypes

5Parallel Planes

G.W. Schulz

G.W. Schulz is a journalist of 15 years covering security and criminal justice issues and a recent graduate of the Master's program in journalism at the University of Texas-Austin.

The Eyes Above Texas

by Melissa del Bosque and G.W. Schulz | Wed, May 23, 2018 at 8:00 am CST

dps

News, News, The Issue

Tracking DPS Across the Sky: How We Did It

Wed, May 23, 2018 |

Tracking DPS Across the Sky: How We Did It To find out where the Texas Department of Public Safety flies its two surveillance aircraft, the Texas Observer and the Investigative Fund teamed up to analyze commercially available flight data that … Read More

Border

The Surge

Wed, May 23, 2018 |

How Texas’ decade-long border security operation has turned South Texas into one of the most heavily policed and surveilled places in the nation. Read More

Border

After Observer Story, Congressman Questions DEA’s Secretive Surveillance Partnership with Texas National Guard

“I want to know why a federal law enforcement agency is working with a military unit,” Congressman Joaquin Castro said in an interview.

Tue, Dec 5, 2017 |

Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro is asking the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to explain its role in the use of controversial cellphone spying devices on surveillance aircraft owned by the Texas National Guard, after the Observer first reported on the partnership … Read More

Border

Documents: Texas National Guard Installed Cellphone Spying Devices on Surveillance Planes

“There are really big privacy and constitutional due-process concerns with the use of this technology,” a state lawmaker said.

Mon, Nov 6, 2017 |

The Texas National Guard last year spent more than $373,000 to install controversial cellphone eavesdropping devices in secretive surveillance aircraft. Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc., or DRT, installed two of its DRT 1301C “portable receiver systems” in National Guard … Read More

Ridehailing, Austin

Culture, Featured Stories, Investigative Projects, The Issue

Fare Game

Lessons I learned from hustling for a living in the brave new ‘gig economy’.

Tue, Jan 17, 2017 |

What one ridehailing driver learned after Austin voters gave Uber and Lyft the boot. Tips are still lousy and passengers are still, well... Read More