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Emily Scherer for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Source images: The Texas Tribune and documents obtained by ProPublica. Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott repeated a claim he’s made for the past five years. He stated that the number of people crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally “posed an ongoing and imminent threat” across the state. In doing so, he renewed a border security disaster proclamation that has greatly expanded his powers without going through the state Legislature. Abbott’s declaration stands in sharp contrast to the numbers reported by the Trump administration, which says the drop in the flow of migrants crossing the border has been unprecedented and has reached historic lows since it took over in January 2025.  Yet, since Abbott first declared an emergency at the border during the Biden administration in 2021, he’s renewed or amended the proclamation at least 69 times — 21 of those during Trump’s tenure.  The Republican governor, ...

Margaret Flatley for ProPublica Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack. Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts.  In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942.  More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system ...

They were victims, not abusers. That’s what they told police officers, attorneys, visitors and anyone else who would listen. It didn’t matter. The women were all taken to a sprawling immigration detention center in the woods of west Michigan and handed thin jumpsuits — red, to mark them as a high security risk. Inside the North Lake Processing Center, they talked about the men whose calls to police landed them there. The boyfriends or husbands who threatened to get them deported and cut them off from their children. The men, or sometimes women, who hit them, pulled their hair or choked them, bruising their throats. They didn’t know where to go for help before, but now, in the confines of a cold cellblock in a former prison, the women helped one another. If one spoke to somebody on the outside who could connect them with advice, legal aid or money for the commissary, she’d pass around a tablet used for calls so others could tell their stories. Migladys Bermudez, an ...