July 28, 2026: All Newsclips

State Stories

Inside the parish-led fight against a $123M ICE facility in Texas

In the 1980s, Maria Estella Padilla went door to door after Mass, organizing house meetings to bring running water and sewerage services to hundreds of thousands of homes along the Texas-Mexico border. Today, at 82, she’s back to organizing her neighbors and fellow parishioners at La Purisima Catholic Church in an effort aimed both at stopping a planned immigration detention center and protecting the access to water that she and others fought so hard to win decades ago. “We did it back then when we didn’t have the internet, when we didn’t have social media, but now they communicate quickly. It would be easier in a way to do it now than it was back then when we had to go door to door and take signups after Mass,” she said of her latest fight.

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Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, then headed by Secretary Kristi Noem, announced a $38 billion plan to buy and retrofit 11 warehouses across the country to convert them into sprawling detention facilities to serve the administration’s mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants. (DHS spent $1 billion on buying the 11 facilities.) That included three warehouses on the edge of Socorro, about 15 miles southeast of the El Paso city limits, which were built to hold nuts harvested from nearby pecan groves. The property, sold to DHS for $123 million by a Kansas City area developer, included three reinforced concrete warehouses of about 296,000 square feet each, with an adjacent plot of land available for expansion. DHS initially said the Socorro facility would hold up to 8,500 immigrants awaiting deportation, which would have made it one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the country.

How a Dallas mom says leaders of a nonprofit tried to take her baby

(Editor’s note: WFAA repeatedly reached out to the leaders of Reflection Ministries, including traveling to Midland to try to talk to them. Both declined to answer questions.) On a recent day inside a Dallas courtroom, there were baby gifts, balloons and a small celebration. For DeAmber Brown, it was a moment she wasn’t sure she’d ever see — holding her baby again after months of separation, court fights and weeks in jail. “I’m just happy to have my baby back,” Brown said. But Brown also said her ordeal is far from over. What started as a search for shelter while she was pregnant turned into a fight for her freedom and her child that stretched from Dallas to Midland. Brown, a human trafficking survivor, says the leaders of a West Texas ministry that promised to help her instead tried to take and keep her baby. “To hear what I have to say is unbelievable,” Brown told WFAA.

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Brown’s story began in November 2025. “I was at the end of my pregnancy,” she said. “I’d just quit both my jobs, too big to work,” she said. Homeless and in need of help, Brown says a Dallas shelter referred her to Reflection Ministries, a Midland-based nonprofit that works with trafficking survivors. On Nov. 21, Brown arrived at the group’s housing complex outside Midland, known as “The Village.” “I really thought it'd be a place where I could start over, bring my other kids, have a life, a new life,” she said. Ten days later, Brown underwent an emergency C-section at Midland Memorial Hospital. “They were like, you're going to have this baby tonight,” Brown said. Brown says while she was in the hospital, Elizabeth Walker, the chief operating officer of Reflection Ministries, began making strange comments. “’She's just having a baby for me. She's just the surrogate,’” Brown recalled Walker saying. “And I really thought she was joking. I was laughing and never in a million years did I think it was real,” Brown said. Reflection Ministries’ founder, Lisa Bownds, would later produce paperwork – which has since been filed in court and obtained by WFAA – claiming Brown signed over temporary guardianship of her newborn to her.

The latest front in the Texas trans wars? The American Revolution

A Texas member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and her supporters are calling on the national nonprofit organization to bar transgender women from its ranks, pitting traditionalists against progressives on yet another culture war battlefield. At the group’s 135th Continental Congress in June, members voted down a resolution to clarify the term “woman,” as used in the organization’s bylaws, to only include “a woman who was born female.” For three years before that, Laura McDonald, a member from Mount Pleasant, had lobbied to keep transgender women out of the group, known as the DAR. McDonald said she discovered in 2023 that the DAR had transgender members. While investigating further, she found a frequently asked questions document that had circulated among state and national officers of the DAR confirming the organization’s stance on allowing transgender women. According to a copy of that document, which McDonald shared, the DAR’s position is that because transgender women live and identify as women, they are permitted to join the DAR as long as they meet other membership requirements.

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The stipulation is that transgender individuals seeking membership must have birth certificates stating they are female. In all but a handful of states, people can change the gender on their birth certificates. Texas, however, is not one of them. The head of the DAR in Texas, Susan Johnston, referred the Star-Telegram to the organization’s national president, Ginnie Storage. Storage did not respond to an email asking for perspective on the DAR’s policy regarding transgender members. None of the Fort Worth DAR chapters responded to requests for comment. The DAR was founded in 1890 by women who were excluded from joining the Sons of the American Revolution, a historical preservation organization founded by men whose forebears helped the United States secure independence from Great Britain in the previous century. The DAR’s bylaws state that membership in the organization is open to women 18 or older who can prove “direct lineal bloodline descent from an ancestor who aided the fight for American independence.” According to the DAR’s website, there are 175,000 members and 3,000 chapters in the U.S. and abroad. When asked how many transgender women were in the DAR, McDonald said she was told there were three or four.

National Stories

Why Trump’s SAVE threats aren’t working

President Donald Trump is upping his pressure campaign on Senate Majority Leader John Thune over the SAVE America Act, backing a push from hardline conservatives to scrap the August recess to try to pass the voter ID and proof-of-citizenship bill. But it’s not as easy as Trump makes it out to be. First of all, Thune doesn’t want to cancel the recess for a bill that has nowhere close to 60 votes. And he’s not alone. There are two potential paths to get the bill moving — blowing up the filibuster or bringing the House-passed budget resolution to the floor. Nuking the filibuster isn’t happening. Trump has pushed for months to eliminate the 60-vote threshold on legislation, and a big chunk of Senate Republicans still won’t budge. More alarming for the White House: Senate Republicans still don’t have the requisite 50 votes to proceed to the House-passed budget resolution.

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And even if they did, the SAVE America Act’s $10 billion blueprint may not pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian. The hangups. Why is the budget resolution so unpopular in the Senate Republican Conference? There are those like Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) who won’t vote for anything that includes SAVE Act provisions. “It doesn’t have the votes,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who backs the measure. “It is an exercise in futility if the votes aren’t there. Period, end of story. Do something productive with your life.” Another big problem: Defense hawks say the House’s $67 billion for the Pentagon isn’t nearly enough amid the war in Iran and Trump’s massive $1.5 trillion FY2027 budget request. Thune told us Monday he’d “prefer doubling” the defense number — and then suggested it may have to be bumped up to get 50 Senate Republicans on board. “I do think that’s an issue,” Thune said in an interview. “Frankly, if we’re going to do this — and what it’s going to take to get this done — you kind of want to make it worthwhile. I think the president asked for $350 billion… We’re at $67 [billion].”

A desert town may run out of water. Others could face the same fate.

Mayor Curtis Stacy starts every morning checking two websites that tell him how much he needs to worry about water. One site tells him about the reservoir that supplies his tiny desert town — it’s effectively empty. The other site tells him if the town gets additional water that other communities with more senior rights aren’t using; right now, the answer is yes. But Stacy tries to remind Kearny’s roughly 2,000 residents that they could easily tip back into crisis mode, just like this spring. In newsletters, he underscores that fragility with no less than 20 exclamation points. If other communities call for more water, they will have to cut back again. “!!!!!!!!!!THIS SITUATION IS ALMOST CERTAINLY TEMPORARY!!!!!!!!!!” he wrote in one bulletin posted on the Kearny Facebook page and taped up and down the glass doors of the town office.

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Kearny is an extreme example of the water crunch facing communities across the West as states and cities stare down a future of “megadrought” and fight over scarce resources. An unusually dry winter this year left the Southwest parched, with not enough water for everyone laying claim to it. In the complex web of water rights that govern how that short supply is distributed, the tiny town of Kearny comes last. Other cities around the West could face similar challenges and cutbacks. The federal government is set to release a plan for the shrinking supply of Colorado River water this summer that could force dramatic cuts. Kearny is not directly affected by the Colorado River negotiations, officials say, but its dilemma shows how dwindling resources — and water-rights rules that can feel arbitrary to those most affected — can upend daily life. Kearny usually uses about 280 acre-feet of water a year; this year, it was allocated 77 acre-feet (one acre-foot supplies about three homes annually). Town officials realized they were on track to run out of water in July. The crisis forced steep reductions in water use and now hangs over the town’s future, testing residents’ ability to adapt to shortage. It has also consumed much of Stacy’s final year in charge, giving him new gray hairs and new worries about his hometown, a community where everyone knows everyone and where you can get ahold of the mayor by walking into his office.

Copyright July 28, 2026, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved