I recently switched jobs from an in-office position to a fully remote position due to it being a better fit for my life. When I resigned, my work made it extremely hard for me to leave. They offered me fully remote (when previously they would not allow me to even work from home when my kids were sick) and a $20,000 salary bump. I was exasperated with the whole situation and decided to stay the course with my new gig.
Fast forward a month and they are contacting me weekly asking me if I’m ready to come back yet — everybody from the billing manager to the practice manager. I mentioned to my practice manager that while I missed and enjoyed the work at their office, I enjoyed my new hours, remote work, and pay equally. She asked me what it would take for me to come back and told me to make my terms, which I did. I then received an email from the practice owner saying he was delighted at the prospect of my return and would be agreeable to fully remote, but wanted to know if I could come down on my salary ask. I asked for $41.35 an hour. I’m currently at $36.50 + overtime and bonuses and my current employer pays 100% on health/dental/vision for myself and my children, a four-month fully paid maternity leave, and a ridiculous amount of other perks that I have never seen employers in the U.S. offer. It is a unicorn job. However, if the money was right at my old position, I would consider going back.
Am I in the wrong for expecting them to do more than just match my current compensation package when I feel like I would be making sacrifices to go back? They are not set up for fully remote. Fully remote with them would mean I can work from home but I still have to drive into the office every day to do pickups and drop offs. It would mean I still couldn’t take a laptop with me and work from wherever I wanted. It would also mean I couldn’t move out of the state, which is something I have been wanting to do for a long time. For all these reasons, I think they should exceed my current compensation by a fair amount. When he asked me to go lower, I went down to $40 but said that was my firm stop. I haven’t heard back from him since and this was three days ago. Did I offend him or do you think he’s trying to see a way to budget that hourly into the mix?
I doubt you offended him, although maybe he realizes it’s a lost cause. (And if you did offend him by plainly stating what you would need to consider the offer, then it’s good that his quest is a lost cause.) But more importantly, it doesn’t sound like you should be considering going back at all, even if they do meet your terms.
You’re not obligated to work for them again just because they really, really want you to. You have a set-up right now that sounds superior in multiple ways and even if your old job matches your salary request — in fact, even if they matched all the other benefits of the new job, which they’re not going to — it still would be an inferior situation for all the reasons you listed. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t decide a few months after you returned that having you be fully remote wasn’t working after all and pressure you to work from the office again.
You left because this job made it clear they weren’t enthusiastic about offering what you wanted. You found a job that was. Unless there’s something really problematic at the new job that you haven’t mentioned, it’s not in your interests to try to negotiate this! You left; don’t go backwards.
(Also, for what it’s worth, having all those people contact you to ask if you’re “ready” to go back is pretty weird! If it was that important to them to keep you, they had plenty of chances to do it before you decided to leave. They chose not to.)
2. Should I report inappropriate teacher behavior several years later?
I recently went through a child protection training that is pretty standard for teachers. Part of that training described appropriate communication, and it sparked a memory from a few years ago when I first began teaching. A student told me that he and a teacher would stay up all night texting and all through weekends. He even showed me his phone and the text chain from the evening before that was hundreds of messages long over a four-hour period from 1-5 am. He told me they did this all the time. I thought it was a little strange but in my naïveté as a young, new teacher, I assumed this teenaged boy was close to this (female) teacher. After this training and with some wisdom, I can see how inappropriate this is and how it is potentially predatory.
I am wondering, should I report this now, so many years later? I know her boss, and she has told me that she is always concerned over this teacher’s boundaries with students. Also, she has a school phone since she is a coach, and the messages were sent from it. I feel uncomfortable sitting on this info but I am not sure how to proceed.
Yes, you should report it, particularly since this was only a few years ago, not decades ago. You can say, “I was uneasy about it at the time but after taking a child protection training, I realize this is something I should report.”
The teacher’s behavior was absolutely inappropriate. At a minimum she has a massive gap in her knowledge about safe boundaries to protect kids, and at a non-minimum it’s grooming and predatory behavior. It’s something the school needs to know about and address.
3. “Thanks for the sympathy but I don’t really need it”
My wife’s mother passed away last week. She was a complicated person who struggled with mental illness, and many of her relationships with family members were strained. I’ve never met my mother-in-law; she was invited, but did not attend our wedding. My wife had been estranged from her mother most of her adult life, but had recently gotten back in touch.
My leadership and team at work were amazing when I let them know that I’d be intermittently unavailable the following week for out-of-state travel and funeral activities. My manager even requested details of where to send flowers. The thing is, I view this week as more of an obligation and show of support for my wife with her family, versus a time to process devastating grief for a beloved family member. What’s the best way to say, “Thanks, but I’m not really that sad. Feel free to continue to email me with work stuff, and don’t bother sending flowers”? It sounds heartless without the backstory, but I also don’t feel comfortable ambushing my unsuspecting team with my wife’s family drama. The only reason that I needed to take nearly a full week off was because the funeral was located in a small town with no fast/convenient way to get there.
What’s the best way to approach this situation where: (1) I don’t want to take advantage of my team’s good will, which may have been offered under the assumption that this situation is more emotionally impactful than it really is; (2) I’d rather bank that good will and cash it in at some point in the future when I really need it for a more devastating/impactful personal disruption.
I don’t think you need to explain it! There’s a very wide range of closeness to in-laws, and people are generally aware that anyone in your shoes could be having a response anywhere from “devastating personal loss” to “here to support my spouse.” You can certainly say something like, “I appreciate it! She’s not someone I knew well, so for me this week is really about supporting Jane” … but I don’t even think that’s necessary, and you’re not taking advantage of (or using up) anyone’s good will.
4. Hiring manager offered me a lower-level job than I applied for
I recently applied for a role one level up on a new team that’s currently building itself up. I completed an internal HR screen and an interview with the hiring manager that seemed to go well. The next week, the recruiter told me that the hiring manager saw potential in me, but also saw gaps in experience that meant she wanted to bring me in the same role at a lower level — the level I currently am at. I asked for time to think it over, then sent a follow-up email the same day asking if the hiring manager herself could detail what gaps she saw in me. No response as of yet.
What are the potential reasons for a manager to offer this? Do they genuinely believe that I’m not actually qualified at the level I applied for, but just qualified enough for one level down? Are they trying to save money? Are there potentially some internal politics going on in regards to my years of experience? Do they have better candidates with more experience? If so, why not just offer to them instead? Is the hiring manager expecting to shift the work around to reflect the lower level (and salary)? Is this usually successful? Are there other reasons on the hiring side that I’m not seeing?
This offer honestly left a bad taste in my mouth; I think I would’ve been more willing to consider it had the hiring manager herself proposed it to me with some detail around exactly what gaps she saw. Please let me know if I’m missing something.
The most likely explanation is what they said it is: the hiring manager likes you but thinks your skills and/or experience aren’t at the level of the original role and you’d be a better fit for the job she did offer. Sure, it’s possible that there are some politics around your years of experience (like if other people on the team have been told they’re not ready to move up until they have more experience than you have), but it’s just as likely not to be that and instead is exactly what they said.
I don’t know exactly how your email asking about the gaps was worded, but ideally you would have just asked for a conversation with the hiring manager to learn more about the differences in the job being offered, and as part of that conversation could have asked where she thought your skills needed to develop in order to be ready for the higher-level position. That’s a good conversation to have anyway, because you do need to know the differences in the two roles. (I’m hopeful that your response didn’t come across as just “justify these alleged gaps,” which could seem off-key as opposed to “can you help me understand the differences in the two roles,” but it would depend on the exact wording.)
5. I’m paid 25% above market but want to change jobs
I’m facing a bit of a first-world dilemma — one I recognize I’m lucky to have. Due to a combination of circumstances, I’m currently earning about 25% above the market average for someone in my role and with my level of experience.
The problem is, I’m miserable in my job and really want to make a change. Unfortunately, no other opportunities are offering a similar salary, so I’m left with a tough choice: stay in a well-paying but unhappy role, or take a significant pay cut for the chance at greater job satisfaction. I’d really appreciate any advice you or your readers might have. I’m not based in the U.S., so benefits like health insurance don’t factor into the decision.
Yeah, being paid significantly above market rate can make it really hard to leave.
Assuming you have an idea of what you could expect to be paid if you change jobs, can you try living at that salary level for a while to see how you feel about it? Hell, open a separate bank account to put the “extra” money in so you’re not tempted to see it as yours. Maybe you’ll realize it’s perfectly doable and you’ll feel more comfortable switching jobs, or maybe it will make you realize you’d rather stay where you are. Either way, it should help to test out the change before deciding.
The City of Galena Park boasts on its website that “it has had efficient government administration through the years.”
In reality, it’s unlikely the town’s 10,000-plus residents know how their tax dollars are being spent.
That’s because the city has not posted any documents or details of its current $15.8 million budget on its website. In fact, the city just north of the Houston Ship Channel outside the East 610 Loop, has not posted any budget documents on its website in more than six years, a violation of state law.
Nor does its website include any third-party audits of the city’s finances, or even minutes from its city commission meetings this year.
Galena Park residents are frustrated.
“I’m going to keep fighting because there’s got to be somebody that’s going to pay attention,” said Jackie Gonzales, a resident of Galena Park for 45 years and president of the town’s civic club.
Galena Park, incorporated in 1935, celebrates its many city departments: “An excellent Police force and a very capable Fire Department. The City owns and maintains it’s (sic) own water and sewage disposal facilities. It has an olympic size swimming pool, two recreational facilities, a public library and numerous parks.
“You all of a sudden get this notice in the water bill that your taxes got up, but you don’t have no transparency about any of it,” Gonzales said. “You don’t know if there’s been a meeting and things like that. So, that’s why I’m getting involved, because I feel like she’s (Mayor Esmeralda Moya) got to provide us with this information so we can know about what’s going on.”
Earlier this year, the Houston Landing reviewed the websites of a dozen local cities and Harris County. Galena Park, by far, had the least informative website.
While Houston and the other cities published detailed line-item budgets going back years – in some cases, the materials were presented in multiple languages and in spreadsheets – Galena Park’s website only includes its budget for fiscal year 2018.
That is a violation of Texas’ Local Government Code, which requires cities to post their most recently approved budgets online if they have a website. While that law does not include any penalties against offenders, residents can seek a court order at a county court which could result in contempt of court if the city doesn’t comply.
The Landing filed an open records request with Galena Park for its most recent budgets. After 22 days and an $18 payment, the city provided budget documents for each of the past six years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The documents list revenues and spending amounts for various services and offices, but include no narrative or descriptions explaining how taxpayer money is being used.
Earlier this year, Gonzales submitted a public information request for the city’s most recent audit of its finances. About three weeks later, City Secretary Mayra Gonzales (no relation) responded with a short letter saying, “There are no responsive documents.”
State law requires taxing units to post their most recent audits online.
Additionally, there are no minutes on the city’s website for any of this year’s city commissioner meetings despite the corresponding agendas being available.
The latest minutes available are from January 2024 through September 2024.
A Landing review of those shows most meetings lasted less than five minutes, with the longest reaching 16 minutes. None of the minutes detail any exchanges between officials or the public. When someone from the public makes a comment, it’s noted in the minutes simply as “(Person’s name) addressed city council.”
The city canceled its two most recent scheduled public city commission meetings, the last meeting having occurred on April 15.
The webpage listing the current city commissioners is outdated and displays the names of former members. No contact information for any member is listed.
“Basic financial documents, audits and budgets, are almost universally easily available by any government body I know of,” said Austin attorney Bill Aleshire, who for more than a decade has focused on open government practices. “Hiding something as important as how much money is being collected and being spent, that is extremely undemocratic, as well as illegal.”
Texas Southern University political scientist and public affairs professor Michael Adams agreed.
“It undermines civic engagement. … It’s a violation of the basic tenets of democratic principles,” Adams said. “The budget explains everything about the policymaking process, the priorities of the government.”
Neither Gonzales, the city secretary, nor Mayor Esmeralda Moya, who has been in office since 2014 and was reelected last year by just 157 votes, responded to repeated emails and calls requesting comment on this story.
One way to seek accountability, Aleshire said, would be for residents to petition a court for a writ of mandamus requiring the city to comply with its legal duties.
“If they didn’t obey that court order, then they could be held in contempt of court and they could suffer a fine or go to jail for contempt of court,” said attorney Aleshire.
Galena Park resident Mark Groba tried that five years ago, after the city failed to respond to open records requests for copies of an ordinance in the required time, despite a ruling by the Texas Attorney General’s office. An appeals court eventually ruled two years later that Groba raised legitimate questions about the city’s potential violation of public records law and sent the case back to district court. The lawsuit later was dismissed after both parties opted not to move forward with it.
“It would just seem to me that if they wake up and realize when they’ve made a mistake, the law clearly requires them to put that on their website. Their attorney ought to be giving them good advice about going ahead and getting that done right away,” Aleshire said.
The city attorney for Galena Park, Robert Collins, did not respond to requests for comment.
Other residents have resorted to running for office to try to spark some change.
Martha Cantu Perez is a decades-long resident of Galena Park. She was part of the team that founded the town’s civic club and has unsuccessfully run for city commission. Perez said she is concerned about the city’s lack of financial transparency.
“This is a very small town. We need the money,” said Perez, who wants additional law enforcement and infrastructure improvements in the city.
Oscar Mireles, another decades-long resident of Galena Park who ran for mayor in the May 2024 elections, has been gathering government records through public information requests.
“A lot of the people in this community are here because they don’t have anywhere else. This is what they have. This is where they were born and where they’re gonna die. And they deserve better,” Mireles said.
Mireles is currently being sued by four city employees who have accused him of harassment, assault and defamation after they say he posted signs around town with their photos and text saying it is a felony to influence voters at the polls. Trial is scheduled for early 2026.
“It’s just harassment,” Mireles said. “They’re going around the city, anybody that talks back, they go after them.”
In a letter signed by Democratic U.S. Reps. Lizzie Fletcher, Sylvia Garcia and Al Green, they called the vacancies a “staffing crisis” and said the station meteorologist in charge, the warning coordination meteorologist and the science and operations officer are expected to leave due to “significant staffing reductions directed by President Trump and Elon Musk.”
OTTAWA – The Progressive Conservative party has dropped Pierre Poilievre as its leader in favour of an even older, whiter man – Andrew Scheer. “It’s an honour to be replaced by someone less young and even paler than me,” says Poilievre. “I thought I was pretty white, but I realize now that when people say […]
Oakville, ON – Local goldfish Tim Wells just admitted while the news about how bad Neil Gaiman is, he’s glad that his favourite actor Mel Gibson still has a clean slate. “Thank god he’s never done anything wrong,” explained Tim erroneously. “You keep seeing celebrities you idolized letting you down over and over, but no […]
Pride Houston 365, which has been putting on a parade for nearly 50 years, has its annual festival and parade scheduled for June 28. Houston’s New Faces of Pride, a competing nonprofit founded in 2023, organized a parade last summer but will not be doing so this year.
The Texas Renaissance Festival is an annual fall event that's been held for more than 50 years in a small town about 55 miles northwest of Houston. It was the subject of a 2024 documentary series called "Ren Faire" that streamed on Max.
Wait ... aren't they like: a few years from tearing all that down and sticking it in a trench?
Deemed the "Underpassage," the project will install lighting at the Interstate 69 underpasses at Texas Avenue and Rusk Street, near the Astros' home ballpark.
President Donald Trump’s administration said that it is going to pay immigrants who are in the United States illegally and return to their home country voluntarily $1,000 as it pushes forward with its mass deportation agenda. What do you think?
“I’d rather get that in a more stable currency, if possible.”
Calvin Sutton, Boat Namer
“When Donald Trump promises to pay you, you know he’s telling the truth.”
Polygon was founded in 2012 when Vox Media spent
significant money to poach top journalists from popular
gaming blogs like Kotaku, Joystiq, and The Escapist. After
initially publishing as the Gaming section of Vox.com for a few
months, the Polygon domain launched alongside a series
of flashy videos hyping up the staff’s lofty goals for
video game journalism. In the years since, Polygon has become a
respected source for news and views on the gaming and
entertainment industries — one that Ars Technica has cited
frequently during my tenure as senior gaming editor. [...]
According to publications like The Wrap and
Aftermath, numerous Valnet writers have claimed that they
receive low pay for long articles, but Valnet insists that working
conditions are good. It even sued The Wrap in federal court,
saying that Valnet “relies on its reputation as a supporter of
high-quality journalism and of talented writers and editors to
staff its ever-growing business and need for engaging and
well-written content.”
Just brutal. I’m not huge into games, but Polygon has been one of my go-to sources for game-related news for years. If I wanted to catch up on something like, say, Nintendo’s Switch 2 announcements, I knew I could go to Polygon and they’d have the coverage nailed. Polygon was everything you could want: good writing, good design, no hype, trustworthy coverage and analysis.
There’s very little good news in media these days. The only talented people I see launching new things are doing it on Substack, and I think that’s going to end poorly for all of them.
Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site
covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that
surround them.
You might remember most of us from Kotaku, where we broke news,
covered events, and brought you hard-hitting investigations. You
might also have seen us at Motherboard by Vice, The Verge and The
Washington Post’s games vertical Launcher. We got back together to
start this site not just so we could all blog together again, but
to try something new for ourselves and for games journalism.
These days it’s tough for journalism, especially about games. The
past few years have seen mass layoffs and site closures, with
remaining writers being asked to do more and more with less and
less. The ad-supported model is crumbling, social media is a mess,
and the businessmen and private equity firms buying up news
outlets don’t care about workers, readers, and quality writing,
they only care about profits. The five of us saw our sites closed,
ourselves and our colleagues laid off, and our workplaces turned
hostile in management’s pursuit of growth at all costs. [...]
As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and
to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to
writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming
and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow
to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past
experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent,
written for people rather than SEO. You’ll get a site that
prioritizes the reader experience, with no invasive popups or ads
that burn up your device.
They’re a smart crew, so of course, they’re not launching this on Substack. (They’re using a platform called Lede, upon which the excellent Defector has built itself.) How can you not love a site with this ode to a classic bit of kit: “Bring Back Those Long-Ass Game Show Mics”. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.
The U.S.-Mexico border is perhaps the most widely discussed and poorly understood region in the country.
MAGA influencers and nationalistic politicians have inaccurately portrayed border communities as dangerous crime hotspots akin to a warzone and overwhelmed by asylum-seekers. In reality, border communities—at least on the U.S. side—are some of the country’s safest.
Joe Frank Martinez (Courtesy/Val Verde County Sheriff’s Office)
Joe Frank Martinez is the sheriff of Val Verde County, home to the border city of Del Rio. He’s a conservative Democrat: He’s pro-gun and anti-abortion, and he supports Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion-dollar Operation Lone Star militarization mission, which has flooded South Texas with police and soldiers and new stretches of border wall.
In summer 2021, Del Rio was thrown into the national spotlight when nearly 20,000 Haitian migrants came to the city’s border to seek refuge.
In recent years, previously Democratic strongholds among the state’s border communities have shifted to the right politically as Trump has made significant gains among Latino Texans, including in 81-percent-Hispanic Val Verde County. In the 2016 presidential election, only 43 percent of voters in Val Verde went for Trump. In 2024, that number increased to almost 63 percent.
A county top cop’s job is local policing, but even Martinez’s position has recently been politicized, and some of his community members expect him to take a tougher stance on immigration. In his most recent bid for sheriff, he was pressured to change parties, but he prevailed easily as a Democrat.
The Texas Observer spoke to Martinez about Operation Lone Star, South Texas voters’ rightward shift, and the realities of living on the border.
TO: Border crossings are at a historic low. Do you think Texas should cut back on Operation Lone Star funding?
I don’t, not at this time. I agree with the stance that the governor’s taking. We have a processing center [for Operation Lone Star] that was very instrumental in the arrests that DPS was making initially. In Val Verde County, there’s 443 charges pending on individuals that did not appear to court. I know that in Kinney County, there’s a little over 1,900. There’s 100-something in Dimmit [County]. All these individuals are gonna be arrested somewhere throughout the state—and they’re gonna be brought back to the county of arrest. So you can’t burden the local jails to house these individuals. My taxpayers shouldn’t be burdened with that financial loss.
OLS funds need to be looked at different. How can they still continue to support what’s going on? At the front door, you were there to make all the arrests. But at the back door, you still have to wait for the prosecution. A lot of these individuals are coming back to those counties where they were arrested. So don’t pull the rug out from under us just yet.
Immigration enforcement has historically been the role of the federal government, but the push for an expansion of 287(g) agreements expands those duties to local beat cops and sheriff’s deputies. Do you view immigration enforcement as a job that should also be tasked to local law enforcement?
I do not, not in our communities. We’re right at the front line, so we have plenty of Border Patrol agents to do their job. If we make a detention of an individual whose immigration status is questioned, we’re gonna call Border Patrol. I may have three to four deputies work in a single shift, patrolling 3,200 square miles. I’m not gonna deprive my citizens of calls for service because my deputies are tied up handling an immigration issue. It’d take anywhere from two to three minutes to get a Border Patrol agent on site. So we’ll just turn it over to Border Patrol.
What misconceptions do you think Americans have about life in border communities?
They don’t know what we experience—or don’t experience—on a day-to-day basis. Some of those people that are commenting or viewing from a million miles away don’t have a clue. I invite those people to come to the border and take a tour of the border at any time. Give me a call. Right now, they’re not gonna see anything, ’cause nothing’s happening. Governor Abbott has a border wall that is being constructed there in Val Verde County from Lake Amistad south along the river to Del Rio. And that’s gonna help protect my community.
My disagreement with that is that it put some of my residents on the wrong side of that wall. About 87-88 residents. Those people that have lived out there, overall, their entire lives. Some of those are absentee owners. I visited … with a handful of them. They don’t like looking at the structure. But for safety, they know what they need to do to protect their property. They can’t leave anything laying out in their yard because it might get hauled off. Somebody swims across the river and loads it on a boat, takes it back or whatever. So there’s mixed feelings on that. But for the most part, that wall … is really going to help [with] moving the flow of traffic away from my community.
In recent years, voters in many Texas border counties have moved to the right politically. Have you felt the impact of this shift in your community?
So at the local level, no. At the federal level, because of the previous administration, you could feel that shift, people going to the right. I might have lost some voters for my stance. I came out on top in that election, so that’s all that matters. I will continue to maintain my principles. I’m more conservative, more middle of the road. In our county government, we have five or six elected Republicans; everybody else is a Democrat.
You were pressured to change parties in this recent election, correct? What was that like and why did you choose to not change parties?
I want to stand on my morals and principles. I saw back in the ’60s and ’70s when my dad fought for the underprivileged in our communities. I helped as a young kid [to] dig post holes to put a mailbox on for the people that had no mail service, and that’s what that group was fighting for back in the day. This is a group of people that were Democrat back in the day. Friends of my dad. That’s what they fought for, to be equal. They had no mail service, some of our colonias. Just because I don’t agree with what they’re doing at the federal level, I’m not gonna abandon my beliefs just to go along with the flow. My beliefs and principles have remained steady and I’m not going to change.
Have your community’s expectations of your job changed as a result of increased border crossings in recent years?
There’s a group on the far right that wishes I’d done things a little bit different. There’s a photo out there of me helping a lady and a child out of the river. They were already on U.S. soil. What kind of human would I be if I couldn’t help a fellow human? What that picture doesn’t show is that that lady and that child were turned over to Border Patrol immediately within 30 seconds. Throughout my community, there’s guys that won’t talk to me because I helped the lady out of the river. Technically, she was in the U.S. already. It was no different than if I’m with somebody that’s coming across private land somewhere and is dehydrated or whatever, with me helping them by giving them water. No different.
When you recently introduced Governor Abbott to give a speech at the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition conference, you spoke about a 2021 event in Del Rio that you referred to as “the Haitian invasion,” as if the migrants were trying to cross for a foreign army. Why did you use the term “invasion”?
People have classified it as an invasion. That comes from the federal government, or comes from comments made by the public. There were masses of people. There [were] 19,000 people underneath that bridge, and they were just coming and going as they pleased. I guess that’s how I’ve referred to it. “Haitian invasion” just sounds right. People were coming and going, nothing was being done. It does ring like a military term, but I’m not a military person. My federal partners and my state partners and my deputies, they struggled over those 16 days trying to make sure that nobody died. There was … one baby born underneath that bridge. Things were out of control.
I was asking if you view that—to call it “invasion”—as dehumanizing language. I was wondering how you square that up with the fact that you also helped people out of the river.
I picked it up from comments being made at that time by either some of our federal or state representatives. I don’t know. … It’s a term that just stuck. To change it now to something else—you know, I’m not going to do that. The situation has kind of calmed down. So I have to think about that question, your questioning on the term of “invasion,” and evaluate it, see how I move forward.
Is there anything else that you wish people knew about your job as a border sheriff?
Before people start commenting on the border, come visit the border. Right now there’s nothing going on. I took a group … of about 12-14 people to the border. They thought it was a war zone. I took them on a border tour [during the Biden administration]. Their tone changed completely. They thought they had to wear helmets and vests and all that kind of stuff. It’s not a war zone. These [migrants] are people that try to come across to find a better way of life. At the same time, they see what I go through, so it kind of puts it into perspective. They’re not looking at it anymore from a million miles away. They’re right there. I invite you to go to the border.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
College-level Texas art students take note: Throughline Collective has announced a statewide open call for Future Forward, a juried group exhibition scheduled for August 8-30 at the Houston-based group’s 1,000-square-foot artist-run space in Midtown.
The Isabella Court building in Houston, where Throughline Collective’s gallery space is located
Throughline Collective touts itself as an inclusive, convention-challenging space that encourages freedom of expression and experimentation beyond traditional gallery models.
Madi Murphy. Photo: Marissa Lynn
Madi Murphy, Associate Curator of Fotofest, will serve as curator of the exhibition. Ms. Murphy and Throughline artists will select two students for a two-person exhibition at Throughline in 2026. The two artists selected will receive mentorship with Throughline member artists, help with installation, promotion through Throughline’s social media channels, a public artist talk, an exhibition stipend, and curatorial freedom in design of the exhibition.
Ms. Murphy is a practicing artist who most recently has participated in residencies at Wildacres Retreat in Little Switzerland, North Carolina; Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina; and Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts in Seattle, Washington. She received a BFA in Photography from Maryland Institute College of Art and holds a University of Houston MA in Arts Leadership and Graduate Certificate in Museum and Gallery Management.
All undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled in any degree-seeking program at a Texas-based institution are eligible to apply for inclusion in Future Forward. All artistic mediums are welcomed for the exhibition, with no size limit beyond a need to fit through the gallery’s 8-foot high and 4-foot wide doorway. Artists will be responsible for shipping their artwork, and will receive 100% of proceeds from sales.
The application fee is $30, which helps cover exhibition production costs and Throughline’s yearly gallery programming. Applications are due Sunday, June 1, and proof of student status is required. Artists will be notified by Sunday, June 23.
In an email to Glasstire, members of the Throughline Collective said of launching the Future Forward exhibition, “We hope to use this as a platform to help facilitate a greater unity in the college community throughout Texas.”
TUCSON, AZ—Expressing concerns after she observed several of the telltale warning signs, fourth-grade teacher Patricia Cormac told reporters Wednesday that she could tell a student in her class with spiky hair and sunglasses came from a rad home. “When you’ve been in this profession as long as I have, little behavioral tics like skateboarding into school 10 minutes late or repeatedly hitting classmates with a thumbs-ups can be a red flag that a child is experiencing some totally sick behavior behind the scenes,” said Cormac, confirming that her suspicions began when she saw markings around her student’s arms and shoulders that were likely left by a badass temporary tattoo of a dinosaur. “At this point, it’s too early to say how severe the situation is. It could just be that the family is going through a pretty awesome period and things will settle back to normal, but it could be something larger. I remember we had a case a couple years ago where it turned out a student had nothing to eat at home but Mountain Dew Code Red and triple pepperoni pizzas with extra cheese.” Cormac added that in this case it was likely a social worker would eventually be called in to do a chillness check.
President Donald Trump is directing the reopening and expansion of Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on a hard-to-reach California island off San Francisco that has been closed for more than 60 years. What do you think?
“There’s something so romantic about being a political prisoner by the water.”
Isabel Hassan, Sausage Spicer
“I’ll support any order that shuts down a museum.”
Zack McNeil, Snake Breeder
“But he’d be squandering its potential as an evil lair!”
“The Darién Gap, a stretch of nearly impenetrable rainforest along the border with Colombia, was transformed into a migratory highway in recent years as more than 1.2 million people from around the world traveled north toward the United States [seeking humanitarian aid].” — AP
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It’s me: a woman who crawled through the most dangerous terrain on earth with my entire family for the sole purpose of stabbing a pen-like object into a series of perforated holes at a school gymnasium, YMCA, or struggling retail location. I’m not a deeply sympathetic figure seeking asylum from an unstable government, poverty, or persecution, but a specter-like being whose entire motivation is canceling your vote out with mine and, god willing, forcing you to circle the parking lot at your community center one extra time after snagging the choice spot the Founding Fathers would have wanted you to have.
I am a part of a proud, rich tradition that gave your nation the welfare queen, antifa false flag January 6 insurgents, and high school classmates who say mean things about you, not because they sincerely dislike you, but out of jealousy. I am your worst nightmare: someone who called in sick from one of my two exploitative jobs and briefly suppressed my PTSD to infinitesimally increase the chance of electing, what, a few Democrats? Independents? A motivational speaker–turned–lieutenant governor candidate whose two-thousand-word statement doesn’t contain a single paragraph break?
You might ask yourself, but probably won’t: Does that make any sense? Not really. But then, what obsession does? The heart wants what it wants.
Why do so many immigrants come through California? Porous borders? Simple geography? Those are the answers of a simpleton. What I and others like me seek is not a respite from the several-thousand-mile trek that has turned our feet to ribbons but a ballot as long as a CVS receipt asking you for feedback in exchange for a chance at winning a gift card. Your propositions alone make the journey worth it. That kidney dialysis one that pops up every election cycle is like ASMR for people with a proclivity like mine. Is it a union thing? Do patients want this? If passed, does it overturn some other obscure statute that is not mentioned in the literature? It took us a dozen study sessions, a monumental translation effort, and passing the hat to bring in paid experts to crack it, but crack it we did. And we will have our voice heard, deportation threats and jail time be damned. If we don’t, why did we bother to come here at all?
Truly, it’s all we talk about on our journey north. Yes, there are a few exchanges about avoiding robbery and rape by local armed groups and whether this or that stream has potable water, but those are purely logistical matters. As we crossed into Panama, my husband and I spent a lot of time wondering which snakes in our makeshift campsites were poisonous. Once we got our cell service back and could look it up, we were back to debating who we would vote for in the West Side council race.
“Are we voting that blonde lady back in?” I asked.
My husband shook his head in disgust. “That NIMBY? Of course not.”
I think of us not as brave souls taking extreme measures for better lives, but as members of the ballot box illuminati. Do you have any idea how many of us showed up in an audit of Georgia’s voter rolls, out of 8.2 million registered voters? Guess! But pick a really low number, so when I tell you it’s twenty, it’ll still sound like a lot.
Of course, it’s not only migrants from the south who are undermining the sacred right of your people that one-third of you don’t bother to exercise. I’m speaking of Europeans, Canadians, and Asians who, I’m sorry to say, we in the community know to be low-information voters. That’s what you get from people who got here on a commercial plane ride and then sat on their asses until their tourist visas expired. Even their voter fraud efforts are embarrassingly lazy. They show up at your church or water park–turned–polling place and fire off American-sounding names like “Marty McFly” or “Gwendolyn McDipshit” until the elderly lady running her finger down the dot matrix printout finds an approximate match. The next thing you know, the country’s worst sheriff has won a second term.
Even if they get busted, big deal. They return to their serviceable home nations, short half the NASDAQ, and watch your country burn.
We don’t have that luxury.
We need your country to function, and frankly, you’re letting it slip from your fingers.
We’re doing our bit to stop you from kicking older people into the streets, tanking your economy, and hobbling your finest universities. And, yes, we would strongly prefer to have a viable network of bike lanes, and we don’t get why that’s controversial.
If you choose to crack down on us, you have only yourself to blame for what happens after. It’s your choice, America.
Until then, hit us up for judge recommendations; we’re literally the only reliable source. We’re easy to find; we’re the ones wearing the I VOTED stickers.
As recently noted, authoritarian assholes don’t like public broadcasting. Because they don’t like the idea of untethering U.S. journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based media system. If we bolstered real independent journalism or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth. Yuck!
That’s at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on public broadcasting and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which uses a modest amount of taxpayer funds to help support organizations like PBS and NPR. As we noted recently, U.S. “public broadcasting” is a shadow of the true concept after years of being undermined. But it’s a major ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots all the same.
Clearly incapable of getting the votes needed to take action in Congress, Trump signed an executive order on May 1 calling for an end of taxpayer funding of U.S. public broadcasting. The claim is that both PBS and NPR exhibit a “left wing bias”:
“The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage. The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”
Except the “maximum extend allowed by law” isn’t very much. NPR and PBS are funded by CPB through 2027, and it requires an act of Congress to change that. So the EO tries to tap dance around the law by demanding the CPB rewrite grant eligibility rules by June 30 to ban funding for either NPR or PBS. This is, CPB President Patricia Harrison tells Ars Technica, very clearly illegal:
“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the president’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” statutorily forbidding “any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”
Not only is the U.S. right wing starving public broadcasting of funding forcing them to embrace more traditional commercialization, Trump’s earlobe nibbler over at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now launching sham investigations into public broadcasting’s reliance on commercials. Carr claims, without evidence, PBS and NPR are violating on-air sponsorship or “underwriting” rules.
This is all an extension of decades of right wing claims that any criticism of right wing ideology has a “left wing bias” and is to be immediately discredited. One irony is that NPR’s coverage (like CBS, WAPO, the LA Times, and countless others) has folded to this bullying by being friendlier to Republicans than ever, which actively helped normalize authoritarianism this last election season. And they are still being bullied.
The $535 million that Congress currently allocates to the CPB covers roughly 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget. So even calling this “public funding” is generous (especially in comparison to public media funding in Europe), and yet they’re still being bullied.
That’s because this has nothing to do with government efficiency or saving taxpayers money. It has everything to do with authoritarians controlling the flow of information and the shape of modern media, which they prefer to be a combination of right wing propaganda and feckless, obedient, oligarch controlled mush terrified of having too pointed a relationship with the truth.
This has always been the truth. And it has always been ignored by people like Donald Trump, who combine “if it bleeds, it leads” media narratives with the always-exploitable fear of “others.”
Whether a migrant is in this country legally or illegally, the odds of them committing criminal acts are much lower than those for US citizens. And it makes sense. Any criminal act committed by a migrant — even one here legally — can provide grounds for deportation. US citizens, however, don’t need to worry about that. All they have to worry about is this Leader of the Free World’s ranking on the incarcerations-per-capita leader boards — one that puts a whole lot of autocratic nations to shame.
Sure, other nations might use homosexuality, being female, blasphemy, or simply adhering to the “wrong” religion as an excuse to lock up people en masse. Our kink happens to be drugs, which doesn’t make us any better than our rivals. In fact, it might make us worse because we’re not comfortable openly proclaiming we’re locking up minorities just because they’re minorities.
Anyway, back to the bullshit about immigrants being innately criminal. It’s never been true. And it’s still just as false, even if the anti-immigrant rhetoric has been amplified considerably during the Trump years. Ilya Somin directs us to the latest report on migrant crime rates compiled by the Cato Institute. What the report [PDF] says will come as no surprise to anyone — not even those who continue to deliberately ignore this evidence.
Our consistent finding is that legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, followed by illegal immigrants, and that native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and legal immigrants are 74 percent less likely to be incarcerated….
Here’s more of the data, which the Cato Institute agrees is somewhat stymied by the fact that the government generally doesn’t do much to track the residency status of arrestees unless it serves their political purpose. For most of the last decade, though, pushing the “immigrants are criminals” narrative has been at the forefront of immigration discussions, so it makes sense there might be more of this specific data recently. Even so, the data contradicts the narrative.
An estimated 1,617,197 native-born Americans, 67,813 illegal immigrants, and 58,515 legal immigrants were incarcerated in 2023. The incarceration rate for native-born Americans was 1,221 per 100,000; 613 per 100,000 for illegal immigrants; and 319 per 100,000 for legal immigrants in 2022. […] If native-born Americans were incarcerated at the same rate as illegal immigrants, about 806,000 fewer natives would be incarcerated. Conversely, if natives were incarcerated at the same rate as legal immigrants, about 1.2 million fewer native-born Americans would be incarcerated.
Look at that! A solution to jail overcrowding. Just allow more immigration! And if you think crime rates are still too high, this will do the trick as well, as Somin notes in his post:
In sum, immigration – including the illegal kind – is actually reducing our crime rate, not raising it.
Cato even has an answer for the racists who continue to believe the only reason US citizens commit more crimes than immigrants is because the US is home to a lot of Black people. Please read through this entire quote because the last sentence is worth the wait.
A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….
Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.
LOL. It’s truly a pleasure to watch bigots be informed that compounding their bigotry doesn’t suddenly make them right. It only makes them as wrong as they’ve always been, give or take a few percentage points.
Not that this matters to the bigots. They’ll continue to insist the facts aren’t the facts and their gut feelings about immigrants and non-white US citizens are what really matters. And they definitely love a government similarly compelled by ignorance but with the power to make their delusions a reality.
For the rest of us, this simply says what we’ve always known. Immigrants are a positive addition to this nation and have always been. That they’ve managed to survive wave after wave of hatred and government infliction of misery shows how much they’re willing to sacrifice just to give their offspring a better shot at living a meaningful life.
Those of us born in the US are just lucky to be here. We didn’t have to do anything and we’re still treated like we’ve done the most to secure what is now considered to be an exalted status. It’s not that the immigrants are trying to steal a nation from us. It’s that we’re too complacent to fully appreciate the freedoms we have. And under this administration, complacency is going to result in a nation that doesn’t provide hope for anyone, no matter where they’re from.
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