#Rays 2021 Spring Training

[mariacallous]

If you want to understand how the immigration debate came to dominate electoral politics in the United States—in no small part helping Donald Trump take back the White House—you have to take a closer look at Texas, and specifically at its governor, Greg Abbott. The three-term leader “single-handedly changed the national politics around immigration,” a senior Biden Administration official tells Jonathan Blitzer, who reports from Texas, for this week’s issue, about Abbott’s rapid consolidation of power.

Blitzer, who has written extensively on immigration, explores how Abbott matched his party’s rightward turn on a variety of other issues, including school choice, abortion, and transgender rights—and tapped into unexpected support in the borderlands, which are heavily Hispanic and historically Democratic. “If anyone should get credit for flipping South Texas, it’s Abbott, not Trump,” a veteran political reporter says. And now, as Trump attempts to move forward on his most radical and complex anti-immigration measures, Blitzer notes that “any path to achieving his aims runs through Texas.”

The Wall Ranch, in Eagle Pass, Texas, occupies a thousand acres of scrubland along the Mexican border. Several times a day, freight trains coming from Mexico stop on the southern edge of the property, where a large X-ray machine scans the cars to check if people are hiding inside. One morning in early January, the ranch’s owner, Martín Wall, a forty-five-year-old cattleman and a seventh-generation Texan, showed me around. Between 2022 and 2023, he said, more than two hundred migrants crossed through his land each day to board the trains and travel farther north. Discarded clothes and trash piled up in the brush. A tractor was vandalized. Wire fences that Wall had erected to keep his cattle from wandering into the road were repeatedly cut. Once, Wall came inside for lunch and found two men in his kitchen. “Hell, you can grab their phones and they have pins,” he told me. “They have my house marked.”

We were sitting in Wall’s pickup truck. The muzzle of a hunting rifle poked out from the back seat, and a water bottle on the front console was filled with the brown swill of chewing tobacco. Wall, who is tall and burly, with long hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, told me that he’d spent more than three hundred thousand dollars making repairs on the ranch. “I’ve been totally crippled by this,” he said. The problem began “as soon as Biden went in. We got forgotten about down here.”

By the end of last year, the number of migrants arriving at the border was at its lowest ebb since 2020, owing in large part to a dramatic increase in apprehensions in Mexico, and a series of stricter policies adopted in the final months of the Biden Administration. In February, after Donald Trump’s first month back in office, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded fewer encounters with migrants than at any other time in at least a quarter century. But Wall, who flies a large Trump flag at the entrance to his ranch, attributed the change to a single person: Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas.

In the spring of 2021, Abbott announced that Texas would “not be an accomplice to the open border policies” of the Biden Administration. He issued a disaster declaration and launched an eleven-billion-dollar enforcement crackdown called Operation Lone Star. Thousands of state troopers from the Department of Public Safety were dispatched to arrest migrants in the borderlands. The Texas National Guard placed floating buoys in the Rio Grande to make it harder to swim across, and strung up more than a hundred miles of razor wire to ensnare anyone who did. Both moves prompted federal lawsuits. “The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border,” Abbott said in a radio interview. “Because, of course, the Biden Administration would charge us with murder.”

The following spring, Abbott began busing migrants to New York, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. More than a hundred thousand people arrived in those cities as a result—an influx that overwhelmed government resources, stoked local resentments, and deepened divisions among Democrats. Abbott’s strategy was to inflict the pain felt by constituents like Wall on liberal voters who lived far from the border. In response, congressional Democrats backed legislation to increase border security and restrict asylum. When the Biden White House asked other cities to help take in migrants, local officials privately told the President’s aides they were worried that Abbott would target them next. A senior Biden Administration official told me, “Greg Abbott single-handedly changed the national politics around immigration.”

The federal government has the sole authority to enforce the country’s immigration laws. But Biden, Abbott said, had “broken the compact between the United States and the States” by failing to enforce immigration laws passed by Congress. When Biden stopped construction on Trump’s border wall, Abbott directed his state to keep building. Invoking Article I of the Constitution, he declared that the state had been “invaded” and therefore had the “authority to defend and protect itself.”

Last January, on orders from Abbott, the state seized control of Shelby Park, a public plot in Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. Border Patrol agents, who had long operated inside the park, were barred. The following month, with the Presidential campaign under way, Trump gave a speech alongside Abbott in front of the park’s razor-wire fences. Abbott was a “spectacular man,” Trump said afterward. More than a dozen Republican governors, in a show of support for Abbott, had sent their own guardsmen to the border. When I visited Shelby Park recently, with a chaperon from the Texas National Guard, an airboat from Florida still floated in the water.

Martín Wall’s ranch had become ground zero for Operation Lone Star. He and his wife were among the first landowners to agree to let state troopers onto their property. The Department of Public Safety was “our Border Patrol,” Wall told me. National Republicans treated Eagle Pass like it was the site of a partisan pilgrimage. Senators visited, as did the Speaker of the House and Elon Musk, who’d recently moved to Texas himself. Wall and I got out of his truck and walked through a grove of mesquite trees. Dense coils of concertina wire snaked through the brush. Without Abbott, Wall said, “my family wouldn’t still be here.”

On January 20th, the day of Trump’s second Inauguration, the President was telling an overflow crowd at the Capitol how he’d won—immigration was his “No. 1 issue,” he said—when he caught sight of Abbott. The Governor, a paraplegic who has used a wheelchair since an accident in his twenties, was sitting toward the back of the audience, in a dark suit. At sixty-seven, he has a full head of wispy gray hair, a muted speaking style, and an air of conventionality which belies his far-right politics. “We couldn’t get you up in the front row?” Trump asked, with a grin.

Abbott, who is in his third term as governor and is poised to run for a fourth, is an unlikely MAGA hero. He has spent three decades in government, first as a justice on the state Supreme Court and then as the longest-serving attorney general in Texas history. In style, he is the antithesis of the President—highly scripted and canny. “He’s not flashy or well spoken,” Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who ran against Abbott for governor in 2022, told me. “He’s rarely memorable.” State politicians tend to describe Abbott as a run-of-the-mill Republican who once had more in common with the Chamber of Commerce than with the Party’s raucous, populist base. As one Democratic operative in Texas put it, “He could always associate himself with the bomb throwers and not ever look like one.”

Texas is home to about thirty-one million people, but statewide elections are effectively decided by just one and a half million of them—the average turnout in the Republican primary. In the past decade, as that constituency moved right, Abbott refashioned himself as a conservative crusader and a culture warrior. He has signed some of the country’s harshest anti-abortion bills, restricted the rights of transgender people, and fought diversity initiatives at state universities. Since the COVID pandemic, Abbott has made liberal use of the governor’s power to declare statewide emergencies, which has allowed him to circumvent judicial and legislative checks. His longevity in office has conferred additional powers: thousands of state officials owe their jobs to Abbott appointments, and his campaign war chest, which dwarfs those of his closest rivals, has brought him to the edge of political invincibility. “He’s a tough motherfucker, and don’t believe otherwise,” Bill Miller, a Republican lobbyist, told me. “As governor, he has begun exercising power in a way that’s not previously been seen.”

Last year, in a move that was unprecedented in the history of Texas politics, Abbott attacked reliable members of his own party. Twenty-one Republicans in the state House had broken with him on a policy that he’d elevated as a priority in the 2023 legislative session: vouchers for religious schools, an issue known among supporters as “school choice.” Conservatives aren’t usually strong opponents of vouchers, but in Texas’s rural communities public schools are often both the only option for students and a major source of local employment. The state, where some six million students attend public schools, ranks near the bottom in education funding nationally. Each time a bill to establish a statewide voucher system has come up in the House, it has failed; the 2023 legislative session was no different.

For most of Abbott’s career, he had barely mentioned the issue, but a few things had changed. Frustration with public schools during the pandemic, one of the Governor’s advisers told me, had begun to “turn the tide” in favor of “parents’ rights.” The state’s top political fund-raisers—a pair of Christian nationalists—were bankrolling the effort. So were out-of-state donors like the TikTok investor Jeff Yass, from Pennsylvania, who contributed more than six million dollars, and a group affiliated with Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former Education Secretary, which added another four million dollars.

After the bill was defeated, Abbott called a special session, forcing lawmakers to return to the capitol to weigh his proposal for a second time. The Governor, according to one of his top staffers, “was out there saying, ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Pass this thing or I’m going to go after you.’ ” Hugh Shine, a Republican in the House who voted against the voucher measure, told me, “My colleagues and I were with the governor 99.9 per cent of the time. When I came up, in the Reagan years, I was told, If someone’s with you eighty per cent of the time, they’re your friend.” When the legislation again failed in the special session, Abbott targeted the bill’s Republican opponents with primary challengers, not only campaigning with them but flooding the districts with ads. The attacks themselves, though, had little to do with vouchers. “He accused us of being weak on the border, that we were weak on property taxes, that we wanted to raise taxes,” Steve Allison, a Republican from San Antonio, said. “That was absolutely false.”

When eleven of the incumbents targeted by Abbott—including Shine and Allison—lost or dropped their candidacies the following year, Abbott said, “The overall message from this year’s primaries is clear: Texans want school choice.” The vast sums of money that Abbott unleashed, along with his zero-sum assessment of political loyalty, has proved persuasive. The measure is almost certain to pass this year. “He had to flex his muscles,” Miller said. “Make people respect you, which is really what it’s all about. The rule is: nothing succeeds like success.”

Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations face a number of logistical obstacles. The Department of Homeland Security lacks the resources to detain and deport undocumented immigrants at a scale that meets the President’s ambitions. Any path to achieving his aims runs through Texas. At the U.S. Capitol in January, Trump went off on a tangent about the border wall but kept returning to Abbott, praising him for his actions on immigration. “You didn’t do that for politics—you did it because you wanted to do the right thing,” Trump said. “But it sure as hell worked for politics.” Abbott beamed. By way of reply, he mouthed, “Self-preservation.”

July 14, 1984, was a muggy, overcast day in Houston. Abbott, then twenty-six and studying for the Texas bar exam, decided to go for a run. He and his wife, Cecilia, who’d been married for three years, were living a couple of miles from downtown, where Abbott was due to start a job as an associate at one of the city’s most prestigious law firms. “Running was a refreshing break from sitting at a desk,” Abbott later wrote in a memoir. He had been a competitive runner in high school; in college, at the University of Texas, and then in law school, at Vanderbilt, he jogged obsessively. On this particular afternoon, his study partner joined him, and they ran side by side on the streets of a leafy, affluent neighborhood.

After about a mile, the sidewalk narrowed. Abbott went ahead. A loud crack rang out, and Abbott was knocked to the ground. A giant oak tree in the front yard of a divorce attorney had collapsed on him. “The good news was that I was still conscious,” he later wrote. “The bad news was that I had not lost consciousness.” While his friend sprinted off to call an ambulance, Abbott, lying on his back, remembered a movie that he and Cecilia had recently watched about a man who’d been paralyzed in a tragic accident. “If that ever happened to me,” Abbott had told her, “just put me to death.”

Abbott had grown up in a family of modest means in East Texas, before moving, as a young teen-ager, with his churchgoing parents and his brother to Duncanville, a small suburb of Dallas. His father died of a heart attack when Abbott was sixteen, and his mother went to work as a real-estate agent to support the family. Abbott mowed lawns and stocked shelves at a general store after school. A scholarship from the Duncanville Police Department helped him get through college. The night before his accident, Abbott and his wife had attended a lavish gala hosted by his law firm. As he later put it, “This was the beginning of the life we’d been striving for.”

Abbott spent ten days in intensive care, and another month in the hospital. Surgeons had to remove bone fragments from his back, fuse together his damaged vertebrae, and insert two steel rods along his spine. Eventually, he regained use of his arms and his hands, but he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. “Think about how young they were,” a close family friend told me. “Cecilia was twenty-four when he had his accident. That’s young to be figuring out all the things—the hospitals and all that.”

Colleagues at Abbott’s law firm introduced him to a well-regarded personal-injury attorney named Don Riddle, who agreed to represent him when other lawyers had refused. “Look at the bare facts,” Riddle told me. “A tree falls on a young man and paralyzes him. That doesn’t look like much of a case. Who are you going to collect against?”

It turned out that the homeowner had hired a deep-pocketed company to inspect the tree, which was rotted at its core. “Things got better once we did discovery,” Riddle said. He remembered Abbott as upbeat, pleasant, and not the least bit self-pitying: “One of the things he said early on was ‘I will walk again.’ He was very confident.” When Riddle eventually secured a lucrative settlement in the case, Abbott wanted it all in cash. “He never had any money, so the few million that they were willing to put up looked like a lot,” Riddle told me. He persuaded Abbott to opt for a structured settlement, worth the equivalent of eight million dollars, with tax-free payments accruing for the rest of his life.

Abbott’s work ethic has always been a personal point of pride. In his memoir, he recalls taking the bar exam in a wheelchair, in July, 1985, only a year after his accident, and going to work at his law firm each day in a body brace, arriving before his colleagues and leaving after them. In the courtroom, he fashioned himself as a tenacious litigator. At one point, he represented a hospital sued by a man who alleged an injury in a “slip and fall incident.” During a tense cross-examination, the man rushed from the witness box and beat Abbott’s wheelchair with his cane. “I was on my way,” Abbott wrote. A few years later, when Abbott was thirty-four, he was elected as a district judge in Harris County, where he earned a reputation as a fair-minded jurist with a doctrinaire conservative bent. The Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists voted him Trial Judge of the Year.

The nineties were a period of political realignment in Texas. Since Reconstruction, the state had been run by Democrats, though intraparty fissures grew throughout the sixties and seventies. “Republicans were in the Democratic Party, because there was only one party,” Ann Richards, the last Democrat to serve as the state’s governor, once said. “We wanted them out of the Democratic Party, and they got out in spades.” In 1994, George W. Bush upset Richards in the governor’s race. Eight years later, Republicans won the state House for the first time since 1872. The new Republican speaker, Tom Craddick, partnered with Tom DeLay, a former exterminator from Sugar Land who’d become the Majority Whip in the U.S. House, to force through a redistricting plan that put Republicans on a path to long-term dominance in the state. “Texas became a model for how to get control,” Craddick later said, as my colleague Lawrence Wright wrote in his book “God Save Texas.”

The architect of the Republican takeover was Karl Rove, who served as a top adviser to Governor Bush. In 1995, when a vacancy opened on the state Supreme Court, Rove suggested that Bush invite Abbott to the governor’s mansion for a meeting. “He’s young, he’s Republican, and he’s in a wheelchair,” Rove told him. According to Texas Monthly, Bush was impressed by Abbott’s positive outlook on life after the accident. Rove said, “I knew when he finished, he was the guy Bush was looking for.”

In Texas, Supreme Court justices are elected, and Abbott demonstrated an immediate facility for the more overtly political elements of the job. He published a newsletter called The Abbott Advisor, which provided updates on the court’s activities, and he routinely gave speeches to Republican groups across the state. Colleagues and political insiders consider him to be the best fund-raiser in Texas history. Abbott raised close to three hundred million dollars in his first decade as governor, according to ProPublica. This may be a function of his trademark persistence rather than of tact. When one donor cut him a six-figure check, Abbott replied, “Now you’re in my top one hundred closest friends.” Someone recalled a meeting in which another donor handed Abbott an envelope containing his contribution. “He couldn’t wait to tear that envelope open,” the person told me. “I’ve delivered a million checks to a million people. The one thing that’s gauche is to open the check. He does that.”

Abbott’s judicial philosophy tracked with the prevailing views of mainstream Republicans. But one issue was awkward for him personally. Like Bush, he was a proponent of tort reform, a Republican-led effort to fight “frivolous lawsuits” by capping the dollar amounts of personal damages won in civil court. When asked about his own sizable payout, Abbott maintained that he wasn’t trying to block legitimate injury claims. Riddle considered the argument disingenuous. Tort-reform advocates were backed by powerful interest groups, such as the Texas Association of Business and Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which was made up of large insurers, doctors, construction companies, and retailers. “Frivolous cases were not their enemy,” Riddle said. “Good, honest cases were the ones that the insurance companies had a problem with.”

Riddle and Abbott had become friends in the years after Riddle handled his case. To their mutual amusement, Riddle once argued a case before Abbott in court. But their friendship soured “around the time that the tort-reform thing came along,” Riddle told me. “If Abbott’s case had come along after the reform of the tort system, we could not have achieved a settlement like the one we got.” He and Abbott never spoke again.

In 1997, most states required sitting judges to resign before running for nonjudicial office. That year, every member of the Texas Supreme Court voted to adopt such a policy—except Abbott. When he left the court, in 2001, to run for attorney general, roughly a quarter of the money that he raised for his campaign came from groups such as Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Texas Monthly reported. He outspent his opponent, won handily, and held on to the office for the next thirteen years.

As attorney general, Abbott took a number of positions that would surprise his present-day supporters. He opposed a legislative proposal to tax remittances sent home by immigrants living in Texas and a push to end birthright citizenship. According to Texas Public Radio, his office brought more than seventy cases against fraudsters who preyed on undocumented immigrants. In 2007, when Texas legislators tried to pass a series of bills toughening the state’s treatment of undocumented immigrants, Abbott blocked the effort, saying that such enforcement was “not Texas’s job” but, rather, that of the federal government.

In other areas, Abbott confirmed his partisan bona fides. In 2003, he named Ted Cruz, then a former Justice Department lawyer, as the state’s solicitor general. Three years later, he created an investigative unit to uncover instances of voter fraud. Despite a $1.5-million investment, his office struggled to find any serious perpetrators; instead, it pursued people such as Gloria Meeks, a sixty-nine-year-old Black woman from Fort Worth who had helped a neighbor vote by mail. Meeks had failed to include her name and her signature on the back of her neighbor’s ballot, prompting two agents from Abbott’s office to visit her at home. In a sworn statement, Meeks said that the agents “peeped into my bathroom window not once but twice while I was in my bathroom drying off from my bath.”

Texas politicians have a rich tradition of resisting the federal government, but Abbott may have done more than anyone else to professionalize the practice. This was partly a result of a new dynamic in Washington, where Congress was growing increasingly polarized. After Republicans retook the House in 2010, the view among conservatives was that President Barack Obama was overstepping his powers out of frustration with congressional inaction. “Now we have the President acting like a king,” Abbott said at the time. One study found that Republican attorneys general took part in legal challenges against the federal government just five times during Bill Clinton’s Presidency; in the first seven years of the Obama Administration, they intervened ninety-seven times. Texas was at the center of at least thirty of these cases while Abbott was attorney general. “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home,” he liked to say.

By 2016, the attorney general’s office had spent more than six million dollars suing the White House. When critics in Texas objected to the cost, Abbott told his staff, “Don’t read the paper, don’t become victim to someone else’s narrative,” John Scott, a deputy attorney general at the time, told me. Abbott’s office sued the White House over the Affordable Care Act, environmental regulations, transgender rights, education policy, and immigration enforcement. In 2014, during Abbott’s final month as attorney general, he challenged a federal program called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, which would have shielded some five million people from deportation. A judge in the Southern District of Texas ultimately ruled in favor of the state.

Abbott often based his legal arguments on an obscure statute called the Administrative Procedure Act, which allowed federal judges to block policies for being “arbitrary” and “capricious.” During Trump’s first term, invoking the Administrative Procedure Act became the primary means by which Democratic attorneys general, as well as groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, halted the President’s policies. Republicans took the same approach once Biden entered the White House. But before Abbott, Scott told me, “nobody had ever really done that.” To justify Texas’s standing in such cases, Abbott’s attorneys solicited comments from state officials affected by the President’s policies. “We went to state agencies and said, ‘This is how it’s going to affect you,’ ’’ Daniel Hodge, then a top deputy in the office, said. “We inserted ourselves as a check and balance.”

The headquarters of Abbott’s political operation is on the third floor of a nondescript building a few blocks from the capitol, in Austin. When I visited, earlier this year, campaign paraphernalia decorated the walls, and Abbott-family Christmas cards were piled on a table in the lobby, underneath a large photo of Trump after last year’s assassination attempt, his face spattered with blood. I was there to meet the most influential political operative in Texas, who, luckily for me, was in town. Dave Carney, Abbott’s top adviser, lives in New Hampshire. Since 1997, he has commuted to Austin every other week. “I never thought of moving,” he said. “Texas is hot as hell, and they have snakes.”

Carney, who’s sixty-five, is more than six feet tall, heavyset, and profane, with a gray goatee and a rumpled appearance. He served as the White House political director under President George H. W. Bush and is credited with helping Republicans win back the Senate in 1994. A Bush Cabinet member once described him as “temperamental and a bit nuts, but he defines action—he gets stuff done.” In 1998, Carney ran Rick Perry’s successful bid for lieutenant governor. Perry, a former agriculture commissioner and state legislator, went on to serve three terms as governor. Now, with Abbott on the eve of a fourth term, Carney has been the main adviser to the two longest-serving governors in the state’s history.

Perry and Abbott are a study in contrasts. Perry was, as Carney put it, “a chitchatter,” magnetic and outgoing, with a talent for remembering names and relating to people. “When he would meet with someone, there would be a ten-minute conversation, trying to find one thing that you and he had in common,” Carney said. Abbott’s chief characteristic, on the other hand, is lawyerly discipline. “He reads every bill before he signs it, which is unusual,” Carney said. Because of a quirk in the state’s legislative schedule, that amounts to some eleven hundred bills in roughly twenty days. “He does find stuff, and he’ll put a note on it,” Carney said. “That’s one of the things about Abbott. He thinks everything is going to go to court, and so, the things that he cares about, he’s literally hyper-focussed on making sure that it will pass constitutional scrutiny.”

In 2014, most of liberal America was familiar with Abbott’s opponent in the governor’s race: Wendy Davis, a Democratic state senator from Fort Worth who had filibustered an anti-abortion bill on the floor of the legislature for thirteen hours. Democrats from across the country poured money into her campaign, and a team of Obama-aligned operatives set up a group called Battleground Texas to help run it. “The national media wanted the story that Texas was turning purple, that the great red bastion was being broken,” Wayne Hamilton, who managed Abbott’s campaign, told me. Davis was intent on debating Abbott, but he would do so only with strict conditions; their first debate was on a Friday night, in an auditorium without an audience. “They definitely didn’t want any attention on the real issues,” Davis told me. Abbott linked Davis to Obama, and went on to defeat her by twenty points. Matt Angle, the director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic PAC, told me, “Once you get tagged as a national Democrat or a national liberal, you can’t get from here to there.”

In Abbott’s first six months as governor, he vetoed more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of legislative directives, but his own policy aims were largely undefined. As one former state official told me, “He’s always been an enigma. He often lacks strong opinions, unless forced to develop them by others.” His predecessors, the person said, “had a definitive idea of what they wanted to achieve. Abbott’s often not steering. He looks at currents in the water to see which way his boat is going.”

Lawmakers in Austin had considered Perry “House trained,” Sarah Davis, a former Republican representative from Houston, told me. “His office would call and say he’s not going to sign this bill. With Abbott, you’d get a call after it was vetoed.” Staffers in the governor’s office sometimes referred to Abbott’s review of legislation as his “ruling period.” “What I found interesting is the similarity between being a judge and being a governor,” Abbott later told the Austin American-Statesman. “You have lawyers on each side representing different interests and 99 percent of the time those interests work themselves out and the judge never really has to get involved.”

In Texas, the governor’s powers are somewhat constrained, in part because the lieutenant governor, who is elected independently, presides over the state Senate. When Abbott took office, one of his political rivals, Dan Patrick, became lieutenant governor. Patrick, a Republican ideologue with ties to Rush Limbaugh, was a former radio host who once broadcast his own vasectomy live on air. If Abbott represented Texas’s Republican mainstream, Patrick was an embodiment of the Tea Party wing. Many political insiders regarded Patrick, not Abbott, as the ascendant figure in Austin.

The 2017 legislative session, which began the same month that Trump entered the White House, was dominated by causes championed by Patrick, most notably a fractious bill requiring trans students to use bathrooms that corresponded to the gender they’d been assigned at birth. A year earlier, a similar bill in North Carolina had provoked national boycotts that cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. Abbott kept his distance from the debate in Texas, leaving the speaker of the state House, a moderate Republican named Joe Straus, to fight off the effort. “He will stay out of the conflicts where he doesn’t see a clear gain for himself,” James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project, at the University of Texas, told me. “On the trans-bathroom bill, Abbott let Straus take all the heat.”

Abbott, however, was playing both sides. The chairman of the committee responsible for the bathroom bill got word from the governor’s office that Abbott “didn’t want to see that bill on my desk,” Sarah Davis told me. But when the regular session ended without the bill’s passage, Abbott blamed Straus, called a special session, and added the bill back on to the agenda. Many Republican lawmakers were resigned to Abbott’s public posturing. But forcing them to reconsider legislation that he didn’t want passed felt like a betrayal. “That frayed a lot of feelings,” an Abbott staffer told me.

In the spring of 2017, Abbott signed into law a measure that allowed local law-enforcement officers to check the immigration status of anyone they arrested. Arizona had passed a similar law, but Texas’s version included a component that punished sheriffs and police chiefs who didn’t inquire about immigration status, by fining them or removing them from office. Several months earlier, the Travis County sheriff, Sally Hernandez, had defended Austin’s sanctuary policy, which limited the city’s coöperation with federal immigration enforcement. Abbott called her “Sanctuary Sally” and cut off more than a million dollars in grant money to the county. The new legislation, he said on Fox News, “will put the hammer down on Travis County as well as any sanctuary-city policy in the state of Texas.”

A federal appeals court ultimately froze the provision mandating penalties for local law enforcement. But Abbott had succeeded in putting his stamp on one of the signal fights of the early Trump era. The Governor has long recognized the political utility of the immigration issue. Randall Erben, Abbott’s first legislative director, said, “He would tell us, ‘This is a big deal. I want eight hundred million dollars for border security.’ We’d say, ‘That’s a lot of money,’ and he’d say, ‘Yes, it is, and that’s what we need.’ ” When I asked O’Rourke what it was like to debate Abbott, he told me, “If I raise the issue of poor performance in public schools or the exodus of teachers or the fact that our education lags in the state, he’ll say there are Mexicans coming to kill you. If you point to the failure of the power grid, he’ll point to the border.”

As Abbott prepared for his 2018 reëlection campaign, he and Carney decided to target a region that most other Texas Republicans considered a lost cause: the borderlands, which are heavily Hispanic and historically Democratic. Carney had commissioned a focus group of Latino voters in McAllen, in South Texas, and made two unexpected findings—the voters wanted less gun control and more border security. Many of them were especially hostile to new immigrants. “They’re resentful about them taking up classroom space. They’re resentful about people thinking they’re illegal,” Carney said. “The Democrats ignore the Hispanics. They believe that demography is destiny or whatever.” The key for Abbott and the Republicans was to increase G.O.P. turnout in South Texas, Carney said, and “it’s hard to get turnout when you don’t have local candidates.”

Abbott’s super PAC hired Eric Hollander, a young consultant from South Carolina, to recruit candidates for offices such as justice of the peace and county judge in places along the border where Democrats hadn’t faced Republican challengers in years. “Because Abbott would dominate in 2018, I could tell people that they could win on his coattails,” Hollander said. With money from the PAC, Hollander paid the candidates’ filing fees. His reports went to Carney, who updated the Governor each week. Ultimately, seventeen candidates backed by Abbott’s PAC won their races that year. The effort benefitted Republicans in other ways, too. Early in his travels, Hollander heard from local Party members that Ted Cruz, who was running for reëlection to the U.S. Senate, was falling behind his opponent, Beto O’Rourke. “Abbott saved Ted Cruz,” Angle, the Democratic operative, told me. “Cruz would have lost if it weren’t for the Abbott field operation.”

The recruitment effort, known as Project Red TX, is still operating today. In 2024, it focussed on persuading Democrats who had grown disgruntled during the Biden years. After the election, in which Trump carried almost every South Texas county and local Republicans made inroads throughout the region, I spoke with Wayne Hamilton, who runs Project Red TX. Democrats act like immigration is a “racial thing,” he told me. But “it’s about people who are not supposed to be here taking up resources from Texans. And Texans are the ones who have to pay for it.” As the veteran political reporter Scott Braddock put it, “If anyone should get credit for flipping South Texas, it’s Abbott, not Trump.”

Early one morning in July, 2023, a Venezuelan family of five hid in the brush along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Mexican city of Piedras Negras. Cartel members patrolled the area in search of migrants to extort. On the opposite side of the river, in Eagle Pass, a phalanx of Texas guardsmen stood watch with rifles. Crossing was “a marathon,” a thirty-two-year-old Venezuelan man, whom I’ll call Antonio, told me. He was a student organizer who’d been forced to flee the country with his wife, his sister, a one-year-old nephew, and a seven-year-old stepson. “I came prepared on the issue of political asylum,” he told me. He knew, in other words, that anyone who arrived in the U.S. had a legal right to seek it.

When the family reached the shore, the guardsmen told Antonio that only women and children could enter the country. “I don’t have anywhere to go back to,” he said. His wife began to cry. The soldiers put thick plastic cuffs on his wrists and ankles and led him away. “You’re committing the crime of trespassing,” one of them told him.

Operation Lone Star was devised to counter the legal premise that only the federal government is allowed to make immigration arrests. The governor’s office, prompted by complaints from ranchers like Martín Wall, found a work-around by charging undocumented migrants with the misdemeanor of trespassing. Abbott asked landowners to sign agreements giving agents from the state’s Department of Public Safety permission to make arrests on their properties. Some declined, but most didn’t. Since 2021, according to the D.P.S., the state has arrested more than fifty thousand people as part of the effort.

Antonio was loaded onto a van with six other men and driven to a temporary processing center. “We didn’t think this was going to be that serious,” he said. After a day or two of sleeping on the floor of a large cell, he and the others boarded another bus and were driven two hours southeast to the Briscoe Unit, one of three retrofitted prisons that the state was using to detain people charged under Operation Lone Star. There have been widespread complaints of abysmal conditions at these facilities: rampant mold, rodent and insect infestations, spoiled food. Antonio was most bothered by being treated as a criminal. He told me that he’d never been to jail before, and that it was several days before he was allowed to speak with his wife. After a week, he posted bond and was handed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At that point, he was given a preliminary asylum screening, which he passed. He was released with a future court date. When we spoke, in early February, he was working as a foreman on a roofing job in Utah.

“Much of Operation Lone Star feels like a very expensive form of political theatre,” Amrutha Jindal, the executive director of Lone Star Defenders, told me. Based in Houston, she leads a group of public defenders who coördinate representation for people who are charged under Operation Lone Star and can’t afford lawyers. The organization has helped some seventeen thousand defendants to date. Roughly seventy-five per cent of the cases involve trespassing.

When Abbott first announced the initiative, he said that Texas was being forced to do the job that the federal government had shirked. But, although the state could arrest and charge migrants for trespassing, it eventually had to return them to federal immigration authorities. In effect, Jindal said, Texas was creating an elaborate “detour.” It was paying for thousands of agents to make arrests, for jails and processing centers and the personnel to staff them, and for dozens of judges to hear the trespassing cases. The migrants often ended up where they had started. Many, like Antonio, had credible asylum claims; others were simply released because ICE resources were limited.

At the same time, the state still had to deal with people who were eventually deported. To get out of criminal detention, roughly forty per cent of migrants charged with trespassing under Operation Lone Star pleaded out. About half of them posted bond, which on average was twenty-seven hundred dollars, an unusually steep sum. Even after being deported, defendants were required to attend virtual hearings with a Texas judge; those who failed to appear forfeited their bond. “There are thousands of cases in Kinney and Maverick Counties where the clients are no longer in the country,” Jindal told me. “On Zoom, you see the background behind a defendant, and it’s a ranch in Honduras or Guatemala.”

David Martínez, a warm and voluble lawyer in his sixties, is the attorney for Val Verde County, about an hour north of Eagle Pass. His brother, Joe Frank Martínez, is the sheriff. Both are lifelong Democrats, with moderate politics that have allowed them to survive the steady rightward shift in Del Rio, a border city of about thirty-five thousand people, where the brothers grew up and now live. Shortly after Operation Lone Star was announced, the D.P.S. section chief from Laredo came to town to explain the new policy. David told him, “I don’t ever have a problem prosecuting a case when I’ve got a good case to prosecute.”

Problems emerged a few months later, when he started receiving case files. Footage from the body and dashboard cameras of D.P.S. troopers showed them leading migrants from public to private land, where they could be arrested for trespassing. “A D.P.S. trooper would direct a group of people to walk through that gate right there, or to sit under that tree and to wait until someone comes,” David told me. “I probably ended up dismissing or rejecting close to sixty per cent of the cases.” He dropped other cases because people were languishing in pretrial detention. By law, the county attorney had a month to press charges against someone before it had to release them. David said, “There were way too many occasions where, when I got the file, I would learn that that person had already been sitting in jail for sixty days, ninety days, or one hundred and twenty days.”

At meetings of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, David raised his concerns. “Voices like mine were being drowned out by the louder voices of ‘We’ve got to get behind the Governor, we’ve got to put a stop to this illegal-immigration problem,’ ” he said. A friend with connections to Abbott’s office called David one day to tell him that he was “on the Governor’s radar.” David replied, “He can call me and I’m happy to discuss why I’m making the decisions that I’m making.” The call never came.

Joe Frank, his brother, was on better terms with Abbott. When he expressed misgivings about the county’s limited detention space, Abbott called him personally, on a Saturday, and offered to erect a large processing center in the parking lot of the county jail. People are now detained there before the state buses them to the Briscoe Unit, at virtually no cost to the county. “I appreciate what the Governor did,” Joe Frank told me. Three years later, on the eve of his reëlection bid for sheriff, he received a call from Project Red TX, inviting him to switch parties. When he declined, the group tried to unseat him. He won, but the race was unexpectedly tight. During the campaign, Project Red TX highlighted a photo of him helping to pull a young mother and her child from the Rio Grande. The image neglected to show the full context: he was standing in front of a large group of D.P.S. and Border Patrol agents, who were waiting to take her into custody.

Abbott’s supporters and detractors can all agree on one point central to his political rise: the Biden Administration, by mishandling the situation at the border, created a vacuum for the Governor to exploit. In the summer of 2021, shortly after Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, he held a summit in Del Rio. Owing to smuggling routes and migration patterns, the city historically has been spared the humanitarian emergencies that have flared up elsewhere along the border. But that was changing. In September, 2021, fifteen thousand migrants, most of them from Haiti, got trapped under a bridge between Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. The next year, the Border Patrol released forty-nine thousand people to a city shelter; in 2023, it was fifty-seven thousand.

Close to a thousand people showed up to the summit, including officials, ranchers, and residents from outside the county. Local Democrats and Republicans approached Abbott with different versions of the same plea: to transfer the newly arrived migrants to bigger cities with more resources. When several people suggested sending buses to places like Dallas, Abbott dismissed the idea. “That doesn’t help,” Gardner Pate, then a senior aide to Abbott, told me. “You take them from Del Rio and you send them to Corpus Christi, or you send them to Houston. It’s the same from a Texas point of view.”

Back in Austin, Abbott began holding meetings with top staffers from the Texas Division of Emergency Management. They concluded that it would be better to send migrants not only out of the state but to sanctuary cities. The question was how. “We could not get big enough planes to land on runways in Eagle Pass and Del Rio,” Luis Saenz, Abbott’s chief of staff at the time, told me. Someone suggested chartering smaller planes, but that was too expensive. “Why don’t we send buses?” Abbott said.

The busing strategy, he told his staff, couldn’t be just a “one-time thing.” It needed to withstand federal scrutiny. “Before we put one person on a bus, Abbott and the legal team were looking at us and saying, ‘We can’t be accused of kidnapping,’ ” Saenz told me. “We knew the Biden Administration would prosecute anyone if they could. So that’s when we came up with notices in English, Spanish, and other languages and had people sign them saying that they knew where they were going.”

The federal government can’t hold all the migrants it takes into custody. It usually releases a large share of them to local shelters, many of which are bootstrap operations that rely on donations to provide clothes, food, and other assistance. The lone shelter in Del Rio, the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, can’t even house migrants overnight. On a cold morning in January, Tiffany Burrow, the head of the shelter, met with me in an unheated room with racks of clothes and shoes. Three years earlier, W. Nim Kidd, the head of the state’s Division of Emergency Management, had visited Val Verde with a proposition for Burrow. The state wanted to bus migrants to Washington. Would she help them do it?

Burrow was skeptical of Kidd’s pitch, but the situation was dire enough that she made a counterproposal. “We can’t have buses running 24/7,” she said. “There has to be a curfew. There has to be coördination and contingency plans for drivers, in case of a flat tire or if a woman goes into labor. And I needed to have someone I could speak with in the receiving city.” It was unsettling that Texas didn’t seem to be making arrangements with state or local authorities farther north, Burrow said, but that was beyond her control. Without some form of intervention, she told me, “this area would have been overrun.”

Kidd offered to let Burrow travel on one of the first buses to Washington. “That trip set the baseline,” Burrow said. “We weren’t aligned on the why. But there was a sense of decency, and it matched the motive of humanitarian aid that we had here.”

Abbott staffers insist that the busing program was as much a policy necessity as it was a political maneuver. But the Governor’s advisers admitted that they’d expected a more dramatic response when the earliest buses arrived in Washington. “No one in D.C. seemed to care,” Carney said. “So we sent them to the Naval Observatory”—where Vice-President Kamala Harris lived—“and it got a little attention.”

According to an analysis by the Times, Texas sent some six thousand migrants to Washington before it bused a single person to New York. But that didn’t mean New York wasn’t feeling a new sort of strain. As the over-all number of arrivals at the border increased, the federal government was forced to release more people in nearby towns and cities. “The nonprofits couldn’t keep up,” Saenz told me. These groups, together with local officials, started sending their own buses to cities outside the state. That, rather than Abbott’s busing program, is what appears to have first led New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, to call out Abbott publicly, in July, 2022. “Adams says, you know, Governor Abbott is a mean bastard or whatever, sending these people up here, using people as political pawns,” Carney recalled. “But we hadn’t fucking sent anybody to New York.” (Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokesperson for Adams, told me, “We asked people who sent you here, and they told us the Texas government.”)

Adams’s statements helped generate headlines and “nationalize” the scheme, a former Abbott aide said. Carney told me that, when Abbott saw the news, “he said, ‘If I’m going to get blamed, then I’m going to get the fucking credit.’ So we asked people, ‘Who wants to go to New York?’ Everyone wanted to go. So we just started up the buses.” Eventually, Abbott would send forty-five thousand people to New York, most of them Venezuelans, along with another thirty-seven thousand people to Chicago, nineteen thousand to Denver, and twelve thousand to Washington.

By the middle of September, Abbott hadn’t just confounded Democrats; he’d inspired Republican copycats. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who was preparing to run for President the following year, spent $1.5 million flying forty-nine migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. DeSantis’s office had paid an operative who recruited migrants in San Antonio, often by misleading them about where they were going. After a county sheriff in Texas filed kidnapping charges, DeSantis’s chief of staff called Abbott’s office to admit that they’d made a mistake. He then asked if Abbott might say that both governors had been working together all along. Abbott declined, but he and his staff kept quiet about the request.

The busing continued for more than two years, but Burrow participated for only eighteen months. She pulled out, she told me, when it became clear that the priorities in Austin had changed. “They got big in the head,” she said. “They said, We’re going to make a command center. We’re going to send buses to every state in the country. We’re going to run them 24/7, and we don’t want to say where the buses were going.” City officials in Del Rio continued the busing, but, by the start of 2024, arrivals started to decrease. The governor’s office “wanted the headlines to explode,” Burrow said. “But, at that moment, the actual number was about to take a dive.”

In December and January, when I travelled along the border, the general atmosphere was sleepy, but evidence of Operation Lone Star was everywhere. The Governor had set up two “forward operating bases” for the Texas National Guard, in Eagle Pass and Del Rio. D.P.S. pickup trucks filled parking lots and roadways. I asked the manager at a La Quinta Inn where I was staying why everything in the hotel seemed so new. The hotel had been built just two years earlier, he told me, to accommodate all the state agents staying in town because of Operation Lone Star.

The flood of agents brought their own problems. In El Paso, a heavily Democratic city in West Texas, local officials have been documenting a rise in high-speed car chases initiated by the D.P.S. in pursuit of alleged human smugglers. There was a six-hundred-and-twenty-five-per-cent increase in such chases between 2022 and 2023, according to the El Paso County attorney’s office. Most of them began in the western end of town, along the border with New Mexico, where D.P.S. troopers were getting tipped off by sympathetic Border Patrol agents. Eighty-five per cent of the incidents started with a routine traffic violation, but about half involved pursuits that reached more than a hundred miles per hour. Residents have complained about chases in their neighborhoods and around schools, hospitals, and places of worship. “It all coincided with Operation Lone Star,” Christina Sanchez, the county attorney, told me.

Just before Christmas, I visited Sanchez at her office downtown, next to the county jail. She and her staff were seeing markedly more accidents as a result of the chases, some of them fatal. One of them, in July, 2023, resulted in a collision with two other cars on the road, sending nine people to the hospital. Another, in October, 2024, led to a crash that killed a forty-four-year-old mother on her way to work. A Human Rights Watch investigation found that, in communities where Operation Lone Star was in effect, vehicle pursuits have caused a hundred and six deaths and more than three hundred injuries. “There are no D.P.S. policy guidelines for how they conduct these chases,” Sanchez told me. “We have the buoys, the concertina wire, we have the troopers. But that increased activity doesn’t necessarily equate to a safer environment for the community.”

The city and county governments in El Paso have clashed with Abbott before. During the pandemic, a local judge challenged an order from the Governor that banned mask mandates and required businesses to reopen. County officials have joined lawsuits against some of the state’s immigration policies. Abbott’s repeated claims that the state was being “invaded” by migrants were especially jarring to city residents. In 2019, a twenty-one-year-old from a small town outside Dallas had travelled to a Walmart in El Paso and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle, killing twenty-three shoppers. In an online post before the attack, the shooter had written about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and claimed to be “simply defending my country.”

To qualify for state grants under Operation Lone Star, the city and the county had to issue disaster declarations. Sanchez told me that officials initially “held off at the local level because there really was this concern about what we’re saying to our community with language like ‘invasion.’ ” Their hesitation was costly. El Paso gets money from the U.S. government for holding federal inmates in county jails—typically, about thirty-three thousand dollars a day. By law, however, El Paso had to give priority to state detainees, including those arrested under Operation Lone Star. The city declared an emergency in December, 2022, and the county finally followed suit in July, 2024. But the sums that they eventually received from state grants didn’t cover the budget shortfalls.

Late last year, Sergio Coronado, an El Paso County commissioner, met with D.P.S. representatives to communicate his concerns. His constituents, in addition to complaining about the high-speed chases, had reported being racially profiled. One evening in October, 2023, a family of four was driving on the west side of the city when a blue Silverado abruptly stopped in front of their car. According to a statement taken by the county commissioner’s office, a white vehicle then boxed them in from behind. Agents got out and surrounded the car with their guns drawn. They were looking for smugglers and had stopped the wrong vehicle. In 2023, a forty-eight-year-old El Paso resident was taking medicine to her grandmother when she was arrested by state troopers on a stakeout, who had mistaken her for a smuggler. “They heard us out,” Coronado told me of the D.P.S. agents. “But I didn’t get the feeling that they were going to be responsive.”

At one point, Coronado asked the agents why, with the state spending more than eleven billion dollars on Operation Lone Star, the D.P.S. didn’t use helicopters to conduct the chases in a more responsible manner. “Our helicopter is in Lubbock,” he was told. “It needs repairs.”

In the same special session in which Abbott’s voucher proposal was defeated, the legislature passed a sweeping and audacious immigration-enforcement bill. “These measures were deliberately paired,” a senior House aide told me. “The immigration bill kept things more or less in line.”

The measure, known as Senate Bill 4, allows state officials to arrest anyone they suspect of crossing the border illegally and, if they’re undocumented, to deport them. The bill appeared to contradict a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that struck down sections of a similar law in Arizona, on the ground that it preëmpted federal authority over immigration. (Antonin Scalia, in a forceful dissent, wrote, “As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory.”) The Biden Justice Department sued Texas, arguing that the state was usurping the powers of the federal government, and the case went to a federal appeals court. Last March, on the same day that Texas’s solicitor general defended S.B. 4 before the appellate judges, Abbott spoke at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Austin. “We found ways to try to craft that law to be consistent with the dissent that was wrote in the Arizona case by Justice Scalia,” he said.

With Trump in the White House, the Justice Department is no longer expected to contest S.B. 4 in court. Lucas Guttentag, a former senior adviser at the Justice Department and a professor at Stanford Law School, told me that the Trump Administration “will abandon the principle that the U.S. fought for and won before the Supreme Court in the Arizona case—namely, that the federal government must have sole authority over the enforcement of immigration laws.”

There are strategic reasons for this reversal. The new Administration’s first set of executive orders made the same argument that Abbott did when he declared a state emergency: the country is in the midst of an “invasion.” But ICE has already struggled to deliver on the deportation numbers that Trump campaigned on. Three top officials at the agency have been demoted as a result. Thomas Homan, the President’s so-called border czar, has said that he is “not happy.” The most obvious way for the federal government to boost arrests is to enlist states in its wider enforcement effort.

Texas will almost certainly be a key partner. The state’s land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, has offered the Administration a fourteen-hundred-acre ranch in Starr County to build a detention facility. “We have thirteen million acres around the state,” she said. “We want them to be able to utilize that.” In January, Homan spent a night at the governor’s mansion before he and Abbott visited members of the Texas National Guard in Eagle Pass. “The cavalry is here,” Abbott told them.

The D.P.S. agents who’d been policing private land were now, on Abbott’s orders, working with the Department of Homeland Security to “track down the thousands of illegal immigrants with active warrants across Texas and deport them from our country.” The Texas National Guard, for its part, has radically broadened its remit. On January 31st, the Trump Administration signed an agreement with Abbott that relied on a previously unused section of the Immigration and Nationality Act called the “mass-influx provision,” which gives state law-enforcement officers the powers of federal immigration agents. According to the agreement, the Texas National Guard can now deport migrants. This will not only “massively increase the government’s resources beyond what’s currently appropriated” by Congress, Guttentag told me. “It unleashes this separate immigrant-detention-and-deportation force at the state level.” Operation Lone Star, he added, “is a preview of the illegality, inhumanity, and sheer cruelty that results.”

In 2021, Abbott’s disaster declaration automatically suspended laws governing how the state spent money on Operation Lone Star. Four years later, those temporary measures have essentially become permanent. The Texas Observer recently reported that at least $3.5 billion in Operation Lone Star funding has gone to no-bid contracts and emergency procurement orders. Executives at some of the companies benefitting from the state’s largesse have made generous donations to Abbott’s campaign fund. Operation Lone Star, in the meantime, has become a significant part of the Texas economy. Already, the state legislature is proposing another $6.5 billion for border security. A few weeks ago, with migrant-arrival numbers at historic lows, Starr County declared a border disaster. It hadn’t done so at any point in the past four years, but, according to the Texas Tribune, the county wanted money for more prosecutors because a state program had been cut. Its best chance of accessing the funds was applying through Operation Lone Star.

In mid-February, while the Trump Administration was slashing the federal budget and firing thousands of government employees, Abbott travelled to Washington to make a request. In meetings with Trump, and then with House Speaker Mike Johnson, he explained that he wanted Congress to reimburse Texas for the cost of Operation Lone Star, which he called “services rendered.” “This is a payment for real-estate assets and improvements provided by the state,” he said. Carney, Abbott’s political adviser, put it more simply. “It wasn’t a Texas thing as much as an American thing,” he told me. “I think everybody recognizes that Texas went above and beyond.”

[dankusner]

The Unchecked Authority of Greg Abbott

The Texas governor gained national attention by busing migrants to Democratic cities.

Now he’s paving the way for President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign.

“As governor, he has begun exercising power in a way that’s not previously been seen,” a Republican lobbyist said.Illustration by Diego Mallo

The Wall Ranch, in Eagle Pass, Texas, occupies a thousand acres of scrubland along the Mexican border.

Several times a day, freight trains coming from Mexico stop on the southern edge of the property, where a large X-ray machine scans the cars to check if people are hiding inside.

One morning in early January, the ranch’s owner, Martín Wall, a forty-five-year-old cattleman and a seventh-generation Texan, showed me around.

Between 2022 and 2023, he said, more than two hundred migrants crossed through his land each day to board the trains and travel farther north.

Discarded clothes and trash piled up in the brush.

A tractor was vandalized.

Wire fences that Wall had erected to keep his cattle from wandering into the road were repeatedly cut.

Once, Wall came inside for lunch and found two men in his kitchen.

“Hell, you can grab their phones and they have pins,” he told me.

“They have my house marked.”

We were sitting in Wall’s pickup truck.

The muzzle of a hunting rifle poked out from the back seat, and a water bottle on the front console was filled with the brown swill of chewing tobacco.

Wall, who is tall and burly, with long hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, told me that he’d spent more than three hundred thousand dollars making repairs on the ranch.

“I’ve been totally crippled by this,” he said.

The problem began “as soon as Biden went in. We got forgotten about down here.”

By the end of last year, the number of migrants arriving at the border was at its lowest ebb since 2020, owing in large part to a dramatic increase in apprehensions in Mexico, and a series of stricter policies adopted in the final months of the Biden Administration.

In February, after Donald Trump’s first month back in office, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded fewer encounters with migrants than at any other time in at least a quarter century.

But Wall, who flies a large Trump flag at the entrance to his ranch, attributed the change to a single person: Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas.

In the spring of 2021, Abbott announced that Texas would “not be an accomplice to the open border policies” of the Biden Administration.

He issued a disaster declaration and launched an eleven-billion-dollar enforcement crackdown called Operation Lone Star.

Thousands of state troopers from the Department of Public Safety were dispatched to arrest migrants in the borderlands.

The Texas National Guard placed floating buoys in the Rio Grande to make it harder to swim across, and strung up more than a hundred miles of razor wire to ensnare anyone who did.

Both moves prompted federal lawsuits.

“The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border,” Abbott said in a radio interview.

“Because, of course, the Biden Administration would charge us with murder.”

The following spring, Abbott began busing migrants to New York, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.

More than a hundred thousand people arrived in those cities as a result—an influx that overwhelmed government resources, stoked local resentments, and deepened divisions among Democrats.

Abbott’s strategy was to inflict the pain felt by constituents like Wall on liberal voters who lived far from the border.

In response, congressional Democrats backed legislation to increase border security and restrict asylum.

When the Biden White House asked other cities to help take in migrants, local officials privately told the President’s aides they were worried that Abbott would target them next.

A senior Biden Administration official told me, “Greg Abbott single-handedly changed the national politics around immigration.”

The federal government has the sole authority to enforce the country’s immigration laws.

But Biden, Abbott said, had “broken the compact between the United States and the States” by failing to enforce immigration laws passed by Congress.

When Biden stopped construction on Trump’s border wall, Abbott directed his state to keep building.

Invoking Article I of the Constitution, he declared that the state had been “invaded” and therefore had the “authority to defend and protect itself.”

Last January, on orders from Abbott, the state seized control of Shelby Park, a public plot in Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande.

Border Patrol agents, who had long operated inside the park, were barred.

The following month, with the Presidential campaign under way, Trump gave a speech alongside Abbott in front of the park’s razor-wire fences.

Abbott was a “spectacular man,” Trump said afterward.

More than a dozen Republican governors, in a show of support for Abbott, had sent their own guardsmen to the border.

When I visited Shelby Park recently, with a chaperon from the Texas National Guard, an airboat from Florida still floated in the water.

Martín Wall’s ranch had become ground zero for Operation Lone Star.

He and his wife were among the first landowners to agree to let state troopers onto their property.

The Department of Public Safety was “our Border Patrol,” Wall told me.

National Republicans treated Eagle Pass like it was the site of a partisan pilgrimage.

Senators visited, as did the Speaker of the House and Elon Musk, who’d recently moved to Texas himself.

Wall and I got out of his truck and walked through a grove of mesquite trees.

Dense coils of concertina wire snaked through the brush.

Without Abbott, Wall said, “my family wouldn’t still be here.”

On January 20th, the day of Trump’s second Inauguration, the President was telling an overflow crowd at the Capitol how he’d won—immigration was his “No. 1 issue,” he said—when he caught sight of Abbott.

The Governor, a paraplegic who has used a wheelchair since an accident in his twenties, was sitting toward the back of the audience, in a dark suit.

At sixty-seven, he has a full head of wispy gray hair, a muted speaking style, and an air of conventionality which belies his far-right politics.

“We couldn’t get you up in the front row?” Trump asked, with a grin.

Abbott, who is in his third term as governor and is poised to run for a fourth, is an unlikely MAGA hero.

He has spent three decades in government, first as a justice on the state Supreme Court and then as the longest-serving attorney general in Texas history.

In style, he is the antithesis of the President—highly scripted and canny.

“He’s not flashy or well spoken,” Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who ran against Abbott for governor in 2022, told me.

“He’s rarely memorable.”

State politicians tend to describe Abbott as a run-of-the-mill Republican who once had more in common with the Chamber of Commerce than with the Party’s raucous, populist base.

As one Democratic operative in Texas put it, “He could always associate himself with the bomb throwers and not ever look like one.”

“I’d love to be a morning person, but I like spending my nights awake and racked by crushing anxiety too much.”

Texas is home to about thirty-one million people, but statewide elections are effectively decided by just one and a half million of them—the average turnout in the Republican primary.

In the past decade, as that constituency moved right, Abbott refashioned himself as a conservative crusader and a culture warrior.

He has signed some of the country’s harshest anti-abortion bills, restricted the rights of transgender people, and fought diversity initiatives at state universities.

Since the COVID pandemic, Abbott has made liberal use of the governor’s power to declare statewide emergencies, which has allowed him to circumvent judicial and legislative checks.

His longevity in office has conferred additional powers: thousands of state officials owe their jobs to Abbott appointments, and his campaign war chest, which dwarfs those of his closest rivals, has brought him to the edge of political invincibility.

“He’s a tough motherfucker, and don’t believe otherwise,” Bill Miller, a Republican lobbyist, told me.

“As governor, he has begun exercising power in a way that’s not previously been seen.”

Last year, in a move that was unprecedented in the history of Texas politics, Abbott attacked reliable members of his own party.

Twenty-one Republicans in the state House had broken with him on a policy that he’d elevated as a priority in the 2023 legislative session: vouchers for religious schools, an issue known among supporters as “school choice.”

Conservatives aren’t usually strong opponents of vouchers, but in Texas’s rural communities public schools are often both the only option for students and a major source of local employment.

The state, where some six million students attend public schools, ranks near the bottom in education funding nationally.

Each time a bill to establish a statewide voucher system has come up in the House, it has failed; the 2023 legislative session was no different.

For most of Abbott’s career, he had barely mentioned the issue, but a few things had changed.

Frustration with public schools during the pandemic, one of the Governor’s advisers told me, had begun to “turn the tide” in favor of “parents’ rights.”

The state’s top political fund-raisers—a pair of Christian nationalists—were bankrolling the effort.

So were out-of-state donors like the TikTok investor Jeff Yass, from Pennsylvania, who contributed more than six million dollars, and a group affiliated with Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former Education Secretary, which added another four million dollars.

After the bill was defeated, Abbott called a special session, forcing lawmakers to return to the capitol to weigh his proposal for a second time.

The Governor, according to one of his top staffers, “was out there saying, ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Pass this thing or I’m going to go after you.’ ”

Hugh Shine, a Republican in the House who voted against the voucher measure, told me, “My colleagues and I were with the governor 99.9 per cent of the time. When I came up, in the Reagan years, I was told, If someone’s with you eighty per cent of the time, they’re your friend.”

When the legislation again failed in the special session, Abbott targeted the bill’s Republican opponents with primary challengers, not only campaigning with them but flooding the districts with ads.

The attacks themselves, though, had little to do with vouchers.

“He accused us of being weak on the border, that we were weak on property taxes, that we wanted to raise taxes,” Steve Allison, a Republican from San Antonio, said.

“That was absolutely false.”

When eleven of the incumbents targeted by Abbott—including Shine and Allison—lost or dropped their candidacies the following year, Abbott said, “The overall message from this year’s primaries is clear: Texans want school choice.”

The vast sums of money that Abbott unleashed, along with his zero-sum assessment of political loyalty, has proved persuasive.

The measure is almost certain to pass this year.

“He had to flex his muscles,” Miller said.

“Make people respect you, which is really what it’s all about. The rule is: nothing succeeds like success.”

Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations face a number of logistical obstacles.

The Department of Homeland Security lacks the resources to detain and deport undocumented immigrants at a scale that meets the President’s ambitions.

Any path to achieving his aims runs through Texas.

At the U.S. Capitol in January, Trump went off on a tangent about the border wall but kept returning to Abbott, praising him for his actions on immigration.

“You didn’t do that for politics—you did it because you wanted to do the right thing,” Trump said.

“But it sure as hell worked for politics.” Abbott beamed.

By way of reply, he mouthed, “Self-preservation.”

July 14, 1984, was a muggy, overcast day in Houston.

Abbott, then twenty-six and studying for the Texas bar exam, decided to go for a run.

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He and his wife, Cecilia, who’d been married for three years, were living a couple of miles from downtown, where Abbott was due to start a job as an associate at one of the city’s most prestigious law firms.

“Running was a refreshing break from sitting at a desk,” Abbott later wrote in a memoir.

He had been a competitive runner in high school;

in college, at the University of Texas, and then in law school, at Vanderbilt, he jogged obsessively.

On this particular afternoon, his study partner joined him, and they ran side by side on the streets of a leafy, affluent neighborhood.

After about a mile, the sidewalk narrowed.

Abbott went ahead.

A loud crack rang out, and Abbott was knocked to the ground.

A giant oak tree in the front yard of a divorce attorney had collapsed on him.

“The good news was that I was still conscious,” he later wrote.

“The bad news was that I had not lost consciousness.”

While his friend sprinted off to call an ambulance, Abbott, lying on his back, remembered a movie that he and Cecilia had recently watched about a man who’d been paralyzed in a tragic accident.

“If that ever happened to me,” Abbott had told her, “just put me to death.”

Abbott had grown up in a family of modest means in East Texas, before moving, as a young teen-ager, with his churchgoing parents and his brother to Duncanville, a small suburb of Dallas.

His father died of a heart attack when Abbott was sixteen, and his mother went to work as a real-estate agent to support the family.

Abbott mowed lawns and stocked shelves at a general store after school.

A scholarship from the Duncanville Police Department helped him get through college.

The night before his accident, Abbott and his wife had attended a lavish gala hosted by his law firm.

As he later put it, “This was the beginning of the life we’d been striving for.”

Abbott spent ten days in intensive care, and another month in the hospital.

Surgeons had to remove bone fragments from his back, fuse together his damaged vertebrae, and insert two steel rods along his spine.

Eventually, he regained use of his arms and his hands, but he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

���Think about how young they were,” a close family friend told me.

“Cecilia was twenty-four when he had his accident. That’s young to be figuring out all the things—the hospitals and all that.”

Colleagues at Abbott’s law firm introduced him to a well-regarded personal-injury attorney named Don Riddle, who agreed to represent him when other lawyers had refused.

“Look at the bare facts,” Riddle told me.

“A tree falls on a young man and paralyzes him. That doesn’t look like much of a case. Who are you going to collect against?”

It turned out that the homeowner had hired a deep-pocketed company to inspect the tree, which was rotted at its core.

“Things got better once we did discovery,” Riddle said.

He remembered Abbott as upbeat, pleasant, and not the least bit self-pitying:

“One of the things he said early on was ‘I will walk again.’ He was very confident.”

When Riddle eventually secured a lucrative settlement in the case, Abbott wanted it all in cash.

“He never had any money, so the few million that they were willing to put up looked like a lot,” Riddle told me.

He persuaded Abbott to opt for a structured settlement, worth the equivalent of eight million dollars, with tax-free payments accruing for the rest of his life.

Abbott’s work ethic has always been a personal point of pride.

In his memoir, he recalls taking the bar exam in a wheelchair, in July, 1985, only a year after his accident, and going to work at his law firm each day in a body brace, arriving before his colleagues and leaving after them.

In the courtroom, he fashioned himself as a tenacious litigator.

At one point, he represented a hospital sued by a man who alleged an injury in a “slip and fall incident.”

During a tense cross-examination, the man rushed from the witness box and beat Abbott’s wheelchair with his cane.

“I was on my way,” Abbott wrote.

A few years later, when Abbott was thirty-four, he was elected as a district judge in Harris County, where he earned a reputation as a fair-minded jurist with a doctrinaire conservative bent.

The Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists voted him Trial Judge of the Year.

The nineties were a period of political realignment in Texas.

Since Reconstruction, the state had been run by Democrats, though intraparty fissures grew throughout the sixties and seventies.

“Republicans were in the Democratic Party, because there was only one party,” Ann Richards, the last Democrat to serve as the state’s governor, once said. “We wanted them out of the Democratic Party, and they got out in spades.”

In 1994, George W. Bush upset Richards in the governor’s race.

Eight years later, Republicans won the state House for the first time since 1872.

The new Republican speaker, Tom Craddick, partnered with Tom DeLay, a former exterminator from Sugar Land who’d become the Majority Whip in the U.S. House, to force through a redistricting plan that put Republicans on a path to long-term dominance in the state.

“Texas became a model for how to get control,” Craddick later said, as my colleague Lawrence Wright wrote in his book “God Save Texas.”

The architect of the Republican takeover was Karl Rove, who served as a top adviser to Governor Bush.

In 1995, when a vacancy opened on the state Supreme Court, Rove suggested that Bush invite Abbott to the governor’s mansion for a meeting.

“He’s young, he’s Republican, and he’s in a wheelchair,” Rove told him.

According to Texas Monthly, Bush was impressed by Abbott’s positive outlook on life after the accident.

Rove said, “I knew when he finished, he was the guy Bush was looking for.”

In Texas, Supreme Court justices are elected, and Abbott demonstrated an immediate facility for the more overtly political elements of the job.

He published a newsletter called The Abbott Advisor, which provided updates on the court’s activities, and he routinely gave speeches to Republican groups across the state.

Colleagues and political insiders consider him to be the best fund-raiser in Texas history.

Abbott raised close to three hundred million dollars in his first decade as governor, according to ProPublica.

This may be a function of his trademark persistence rather than of tact.

When one donor cut him a six-figure check, Abbott replied, “Now you’re in my top one hundred closest friends.”

Someone recalled a meeting in which another donor handed Abbott an envelope containing his contribution.

“He couldn’t wait to tear that envelope open,” the person told me.

“I’ve delivered a million checks to a million people. The one thing that’s gauche is to open the check. He does that.”

Abbott’s judicial philosophy tracked with the prevailing views of mainstream Republicans.

But one issue was awkward for him personally.

Like Bush, he was a proponent of tort reform, a Republican-led effort to fight “frivolous lawsuits” by capping the dollar amounts of personal damages won in civil court.

When asked about his own sizable payout, Abbott maintained that he wasn’t trying to block legitimate injury claims.

Riddle considered the argument disingenuous.

Tort-reform advocates were backed by powerful interest groups, such as the Texas Association of Business and Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which was made up of large insurers, doctors, construction companies, and retailers.

“Frivolous cases were not their enemy,” Riddle said.

“Good, honest cases were the ones that the insurance companies had a problem with.”

Riddle and Abbott had become friends in the years after Riddle handled his case.

To their mutual amusement, Riddle once argued a case before Abbott in court.

But their friendship soured “around the time that the tort-reform thing came along,” Riddle told me.

“If Abbott’s case had come along after the reform of the tort system, we could not have achieved a settlement like the one we got.”

He and Abbott never spoke again.

In 1997, most states required sitting judges to resign before running for nonjudicial office.

That year, every member of the Texas Supreme Court voted to adopt such a policy—except Abbott.

When he left the court, in 2001, to run for attorney general, roughly a quarter of the money that he raised for his campaign came from groups such as Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Texas Monthly reported.

He outspent his opponent, won handily, and held on to the office for the next thirteen years.

As attorney general, Abbott took a number of positions that would surprise his present-day supporters.

He opposed a legislative proposal to tax remittances sent home by immigrants living in Texas and a push to end birthright citizenship.

According to Texas Public Radio, his office brought more than seventy cases against fraudsters who preyed on undocumented immigrants.

In 2007, when Texas legislators tried to pass a series of bills toughening the state’s treatment of undocumented immigrants, Abbott blocked the effort, saying that such enforcement was “not Texas’s job” but, rather, that of the federal government.

In other areas, Abbott confirmed his partisan bona fides.

In 2003, he named Ted Cruz, then a former Justice Department lawyer, as the state’s solicitor general.

Three years later, he created an investigative unit to uncover instances of voter fraud.

Despite a $1.5-million investment, his office struggled to find any serious perpetrators;

instead, it pursued people such as Gloria Meeks, a sixty-nine-year-old Black woman from Fort Worth who had helped a neighbor vote by mail.

Meeks had failed to include her name and her signature on the back of her neighbor’s ballot, prompting two agents from Abbott’s office to visit her at home.

In a sworn statement, Meeks said that the agents “peeped into my bathroom window not once but twice while I was in my bathroom drying off from my bath.”

Texas politicians have a rich tradition of resisting the federal government, but Abbott may have done more than anyone else to professionalize the practice.

This was partly a result of a new dynamic in Washington, where Congress was growing increasingly polarized.

After Republicans retook the House in 2010, the view among conservatives was that President Barack Obama was overstepping his powers out of frustration with congressional inaction.

“Now we have the President acting like a king,” Abbott said at the time.

One study found that Republican attorneys general took part in legal challenges against the federal government just five times during Bill Clinton’s Presidency;

in the first seven years of the Obama Administration, they intervened ninety-seven times.

Texas was at the center of at least thirty of these cases while Abbott was attorney general.

“I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home,” he liked to say.

By 2016, the attorney general’s office had spent more than six million dollars suing the White House.

When critics in Texas objected to the cost, Abbott told his staff, “Don’t read the paper, don’t become victim to someone else’s narrative,” John Scott, a deputy attorney general at the time, told me. Abbott’s office sued the White House over the Affordable Care Act, environmental regulations, transgender rights, education policy, and immigration enforcement.

In 2014, during Abbott’s final month as attorney general, he challenged a federal program called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, which would have shielded some five million people from deportation.

A judge in the Southern District of Texas ultimately ruled in favor of the state.

Abbott often based his legal arguments on an obscure statute called the Administrative Procedure Act, which allowed federal judges to block policies for being “arbitrary” and “capricious.”

During Trump’s first term, invoking the Administrative Procedure Act became the primary means by which Democratic attorneys general, as well as groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, halted the President’s policies.

Republicans took the same approach once Biden entered the White House.

But before Abbott, Scott told me, “nobody had ever really done that.”

To justify Texas’s standing in such cases, Abbott’s attorneys solicited comments from state officials affected by the President’s policies.

“We went to state agencies and said, ‘This is how it’s going to affect you,’ ’’ Daniel Hodge, then a top deputy in the office, said.

“We inserted ourselves as a check and balance.”

The headquarters of Abbott’s political operation is on the third floor of a nondescript building a few blocks from the capitol, in Austin.

When I visited, earlier this year, campaign paraphernalia decorated the walls, and Abbott-family Christmas cards were piled on a table in the lobby, underneath a large photo of Trump after last year’s assassination attempt, his face spattered with blood.

I was there to meet the most influential political operative in Texas, who, luckily for me, was in town.

Dave Carney, Abbott’s top adviser, lives in New Hampshire.

Since 1997, he has commuted to Austin every other week.

“I never thought of moving,” he said.

“Texas is hot as hell, and they have snakes.”

Carney, who’s sixty-five, is more than six feet tall, heavyset, and profane, with a gray goatee and a rumpled appearance.

He served as the White House political director under President George H. W. Bush and is credited with helping Republicans win back the Senate in 1994.

A Bush Cabinet member once described him as “temperamental and a bit nuts, but he defines action—he gets stuff done.”

In 1998, Carney ran Rick Perry’s successful bid for lieutenant governor.

Perry, a former agriculture commissioner and state legislator, went on to serve three terms as governor.

Now, with Abbott on the eve of a fourth term, Carney has been the main adviser to the two longest-serving governors in the state’s history.

Perry and Abbott are a study in contrasts.

Perry was, as Carney put it, “a chitchatter,” magnetic and outgoing, with a talent for remembering names and relating to people.

“When he would meet with someone, there would be a ten-minute conversation, trying to find one thing that you and he had in common,” Carney said.

Abbott’s chief characteristic, on the other hand, is lawyerly discipline.

“He reads every bill before he signs it, which is unusual,” Carney said.

Because of a quirk in the state’s legislative schedule, that amounts to some eleven hundred bills in roughly twenty days.

“He does find stuff, and he’ll put a note on it,” Carney said.

“That’s one of the things about Abbott. He thinks everything is going to go to court, and so, the things that he cares about, he’s literally hyper-focussed on making sure that it will pass constitutional scrutiny.”

In 2014, most of liberal America was familiar with Abbott’s opponent in the governor’s race:

Wendy Davis, a Democratic state senator from Fort Worth who had filibustered an anti-abortion bill on the floor of the legislature for thirteen hours.

Democrats from across the country poured money into her campaign, and a team of Obama-aligned operatives set up a group called Battleground Texas to help run it.

“The national media wanted the story that Texas was turning purple, that the great red bastion was being broken,” Wayne Hamilton, who managed Abbott’s campaign, told me.

Davis was intent on debating Abbott, but he would do so only with strict conditions; their first debate was on a Friday night, in an auditorium without an audience.

“They definitely didn’t want any attention on the real issues,” Davis told me.

Abbott linked Davis to Obama, and went on to defeat her by twenty points.

Matt Angle, the director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic PAC, told me, “Once you get tagged as a national Democrat or a national liberal, you can’t get from here to there.”

In Abbott’s first six months as governor, he vetoed more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of legislative directives, but his own policy aims were largely undefined.

As one former state official told me, “He’s always been an enigma.

He often lacks strong opinions, unless forced to develop them by others.”

His predecessors, the person said, “had a definitive idea of what they wanted to achieve. Abbott’s often not steering. He looks at currents in the water to see which way his boat is going.”

Lawmakers in Austin had considered Perry “House trained,” Sarah Davis, a former Republican representative from Houston, told me.

“His office would call and say he’s not going to sign this bill. With Abbott, you’d get a call after it was vetoed.”

Staffers in the governor’s office sometimes referred to Abbott’s review of legislation as his “ruling period.”

“What I found interesting is the similarity between being a judge and being a governor,” Abbott later told the Austin American-Statesman.

“You have lawyers on each side representing different interests and 99 percent of the time those interests work themselves out and the judge never really has to get involved.”

In Texas, the governor’s powers are somewhat constrained, in part because the lieutenant governor, who is elected independently, presides over the state Senate.

When Abbott took office, one of his political rivals, Dan Patrick, became lieutenant governor.

Patrick, a Republican ideologue with ties to Rush Limbaugh, was a former radio host who once broadcast his own vasectomy live on air.

If Abbott represented Texas’s Republican mainstream, Patrick was an embodiment of the Tea Party wing.

Many political insiders regarded Patrick, not Abbott, as the ascendant figure in Austin.

The 2017 legislative session, which began the same month that Trump entered the White House, was dominated by causes championed by Patrick, most notably a fractious bill requiring trans students to use bathrooms that corresponded to the gender they’d been assigned at birth.

A year earlier, a similar bill in North Carolina had provoked national boycotts that cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

Abbott kept his distance from the debate in Texas, leaving the speaker of the state House, a moderate Republican named Joe Straus, to fight off the effort.

“He will stay out of the conflicts where he doesn’t see a clear gain for himself,” James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project, at the University of Texas, told me. “On the trans-bathroom bill, Abbott let Straus take all the heat.”

Abbott, however, was playing both sides.

The chairman of the committee responsible for the bathroom bill got word from the governor’s office that Abbott “didn’t want to see that bill on my desk,” Sarah Davis told me.

But when the regular session ended without the bill’s passage, Abbott blamed Straus, called a special session, and added the bill back on to the agenda.

Many Republican lawmakers were resigned to Abbott’s public posturing.

But forcing them to reconsider legislation that he didn’t want passed felt like a betrayal.

“That frayed a lot of feelings,” an Abbott staffer told me.

In the spring of 2017, Abbott signed into law a measure that allowed local law-enforcement officers to check the immigration status of anyone they arrested.

Arizona had passed a similar law, but Texas’s version included a component that punished sheriffs and police chiefs who didn’t inquire about immigration status, by fining them or removing them from office.

Several months earlier, the Travis County sheriff, Sally Hernandez, had defended Austin’s sanctuary policy, which limited the city’s coöperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Abbott called her “Sanctuary Sally” and cut off more than a million dollars in grant money to the county.

The new legislation, he said on Fox News, “will put the hammer down on Travis County as well as any sanctuary-city policy in the state of Texas.”

A federal appeals court ultimately froze the provision mandating penalties for local law enforcement.

But Abbott had succeeded in putting his stamp on one of the signal fights of the early Trump era.

The Governor has long recognized the political utility of the immigration issue.

Randall Erben, Abbott’s first legislative director, said, “He would tell us, ‘This is a big deal. I want eight hundred million dollars for border security.’ We’d say, ‘That’s a lot of money,’ and he’d say, ‘Yes, it is, and that’s what we need.’ ”

When I asked O’Rourke what it was like to debate Abbott, he told me, “If I raise the issue of poor performance in public schools or the exodus of teachers or the fact that our education lags in the state, he’ll say there are Mexicans coming to kill you. If you point to the failure of the power grid, he’ll point to the border.”

As Abbott prepared for his 2018 reëlection campaign, he and Carney decided to target a region that most other Texas Republicans considered a lost cause: the borderlands, which are heavily Hispanic and historically Democratic.

Carney had commissioned a focus group of Latino voters in McAllen, in South Texas, and made two unexpected findings—the voters wanted less gun control and more border security.

Many of them were especially hostile to new immigrants.

“They’re resentful about them taking up classroom space. They’re resentful about people thinking they’re illegal,” Carney said.

“The Democrats ignore the Hispanics. They believe that demography is destiny or whatever.”

The key for Abbott and the Republicans was to increase G.O.P. turnout in South Texas, Carney said, and “it’s hard to get turnout when you don’t have local candidates.”

Abbott’s super PAC hired Eric Hollander, a young consultant from South Carolina, to recruit candidates for offices such as justice of the peace and county judge in places along the border where Democrats hadn’t faced Republican challengers in years.

“Because Abbott would dominate in 2018, I could tell people that they could win on his coattails,” Hollander said.

With money from the PAC, Hollander paid the candidates’ filing fees.

His reports went to Carney, who updated the Governor each week.

Ultimately, seventeen candidates backed by Abbott’s PAC won their races that year.

The effort benefitted Republicans in other ways, too.

Early in his travels, Hollander heard from local Party members that Ted Cruz, who was running for reëlection to the U.S. Senate, was falling behind his opponent, Beto O’Rourke.

“Abbott saved Ted Cruz,” Angle, the Democratic operative, told me.

“Cruz would have lost if it weren’t for the Abbott field operation.”

The recruitment effort, known as Project Red TX, is still operating today.

In 2024, it focussed on persuading Democrats who had grown disgruntled during the Biden years.

After the election, in which Trump carried almost every South Texas county and local Republicans made inroads throughout the region, I spoke with Wayne Hamilton, who runs Project Red TX.

Democrats act like immigration is a “racial thing,” he told me.

But “it’s about people who are not supposed to be here taking up resources from Texans. And Texans are the ones who have to pay for it.”

As the veteran political reporter Scott Braddock put it, “If anyone should get credit for flipping South Texas, it’s Abbott, not Trump.”

Early one morning in July, 2023, a Venezuelan family of five hid in the brush along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Mexican city of Piedras Negras.

Cartel members patrolled the area in search of migrants to extort.

On the opposite side of the river, in Eagle Pass, a phalanx of Texas guardsmen stood watch with rifles.

Crossing was “a marathon,” a thirty-two-year-old Venezuelan man, whom I’ll call Antonio, told me.

He was a student organizer who’d been forced to flee the country with his wife, his sister, a one-year-old nephew, and a seven-year-old stepson.

“I came prepared on the issue of political asylum,” he told me.

He knew, in other words, that anyone who arrived in the U.S. had a legal right to seek it.

When the family reached the shore, the guardsmen told Antonio that only women and children could enter the country.

“I don’t have anywhere to go back to,” he said.

His wife began to cry.

The soldiers put thick plastic cuffs on his wrists and ankles and led him away.

“You’re committing the crime of trespassing,” one of them told him.

Operation Lone Star was devised to counter the legal premise that only the federal government is allowed to make immigration arrests.

The governor’s office, prompted by complaints from ranchers like Martín Wall, found a work-around by charging undocumented migrants with the misdemeanor of trespassing.

Abbott asked landowners to sign agreements giving agents from the state’s Department of Public Safety permission to make arrests on their properties.

Some declined, but most didn’t.

Since 2021, according to the D.P.S., the state has arrested more than fifty thousand people as part of the effort.

Antonio was loaded onto a van with six other men and driven to a temporary processing center.

“We didn’t think this was going to be that serious,” he said.

After a day or two of sleeping on the floor of a large cell, he and the others boarded another bus and were driven two hours southeast to the Briscoe Unit, one of three retrofitted prisons that the state was using to detain people charged under Operation Lone Star.

There have been widespread complaints of abysmal conditions at these facilities: rampant mold, rodent and insect infestations, spoiled food.

Antonio was most bothered by being treated as a criminal.

He told me that he’d never been to jail before, and that it was several days before he was allowed to speak with his wife.

After a week, he posted bond and was handed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At that point, he was given a preliminary asylum screening, which he passed.

He was released with a future court date.

When we spoke, in early February, he was working as a foreman on a roofing job in Utah.

“Much of Operation Lone Star feels like a very expensive form of political theatre,” Amrutha Jindal, the executive director of Lone Star Defenders, told me.

Based in Houston, she leads a group of public defenders who coördinate representation for people who are charged under Operation Lone Star and can’t afford lawyers.

The organization has helped some seventeen thousand defendants to date. Roughly seventy-five per cent of the cases involve trespassing.

When Abbott first announced the initiative, he said that Texas was being forced to do the job that the federal government had shirked.

But, although the state could arrest and charge migrants for trespassing, it eventually had to return them to federal immigration authorities.

In effect, Jindal said, Texas was creating an elaborate “detour.”

It was paying for thousands of agents to make arrests, for jails and processing centers and the personnel to staff them, and for dozens of judges to hear the trespassing cases.

The migrants often ended up where they had started.

Many, like Antonio, had credible asylum claims;

others were simply released because ICE resources were limited.

At the same time, the state still had to deal with people who were eventually deported.

To get out of criminal detention, roughly forty per cent of migrants charged with trespassing under Operation Lone Star pleaded out.

About half of them posted bond, which on average was twenty-seven hundred dollars, an unusually steep sum.

Even after being deported, defendants were required to attend virtual hearings with a Texas judge;

those who failed to appear forfeited their bond.

“There are thousands of cases in Kinney and Maverick Counties where the clients are no longer in the country,” Jindal told me.

“On Zoom, you see the background behind a defendant, and it’s a ranch in Honduras or Guatemala.”

David Martínez, a warm and voluble lawyer in his sixties, is the attorney for Val Verde County, about an hour north of Eagle Pass.

His brother, Joe Frank Martínez, is the sheriff.

Both are lifelong Democrats, with moderate politics that have allowed them to survive the steady rightward shift in Del Rio, a border city of about thirty-five thousand people, where the brothers grew up and now live.

Shortly after Operation Lone Star was announced, the D.P.S. section chief from Laredo came to town to explain the new policy.

David told him, “I don’t ever have a problem prosecuting a case when I’ve got a good case to prosecute.”

Problems emerged a few months later, when he started receiving case files.

Footage from the body and dashboard cameras of D.P.S. troopers showed them leading migrants from public to private land, where they could be arrested for trespassing.

“A D.P.S. trooper would direct a group of people to walk through that gate right there, or to sit under that tree and to wait until someone comes,” David told me.

“I probably ended up dismissing or rejecting close to sixty per cent of the cases.”

He dropped other cases because people were languishing in pretrial detention.

By law, the county attorney had a month to press charges against someone before it had to release them. David said,

“There were way too many occasions where, when I got the file, I would learn that that person had already been sitting in jail for sixty days, ninety days, or one hundred and twenty days.”

At meetings of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, David raised his concerns.

“Voices like mine were being drowned out by the louder voices of ‘We’ve got to get behind the Governor, we’ve got to put a stop to this illegal-immigration problem,’ ” he said.

A friend with connections to Abbott’s office called David one day to tell him that he was “on the Governor’s radar.”

David replied, “He can call me and I’m happy to discuss why I’m making the decisions that I’m making.”

The call never came.

Joe Frank, his brother, was on better terms with Abbott.

When he expressed misgivings about the county’s limited detention space, Abbott called him personally, on a Saturday, and offered to erect a large processing center in the parking lot of the county jail.

People are now detained there before the state buses them to the Briscoe Unit, at virtually no cost to the county.

“I appreciate what the Governor did,” Joe Frank told me.

Three years later, on the eve of his reëlection bid for sheriff, he received a call from Project Red TX, inviting him to switch parties.

When he declined, the group tried to unseat him.

He won, but the race was unexpectedly tight.

During the campaign, Project Red TX highlighted a photo of him helping to pull a young mother and her child from the Rio Grande.

The image neglected to show the full context:

he was standing in front of a large group of D.P.S. and Border Patrol agents, who were waiting to take her into custody.

Abbott’s supporters and detractors can all agree on one point central to his political rise:

the Biden Administration, by mishandling the situation at the border, created a vacuum for the Governor to exploit.

In the summer of 2021, shortly after Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, he held a summit in Del Rio.

Owing to smuggling routes and migration patterns, the city historically has been spared the humanitarian emergencies that have flared up elsewhere along the border.

But that was changing.

In September, 2021, fifteen thousand migrants, most of them from Haiti, got trapped under a bridge between Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.

The next year, the Border Patrol released forty-nine thousand people to a city shelter;

in 2023, it was fifty-seven thousand.

Close to a thousand people showed up to the summit, including officials, ranchers, and residents from outside the county.

Local Democrats and Republicans approached Abbott with different versions of the same plea:

to transfer the newly arrived migrants to bigger cities with more resources.

When several people suggested sending buses to places like Dallas, Abbott dismissed the idea.

“That doesn’t help,” Gardner Pate, then a senior aide to Abbott, told me.

“You take them from Del Rio and you send them to Corpus Christi, or you send them to Houston. It’s the same from a Texas point of view.”

Back in Austin, Abbott began holding meetings with top staffers from the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

They concluded that it would be better to send migrants not only out of the state but to sanctuary cities.

The question was how.

“We could not get big enough planes to land on runways in Eagle Pass and Del Rio,” Luis Saenz, Abbott’s chief of staff at the time, told me.

Someone suggested chartering smaller planes, but that was too expensive.

“Why don’t we send buses?” Abbott said.

The busing strategy, he told his staff, couldn’t be just a “one-time thing.”

It needed to withstand federal scrutiny.

“Before we put one person on a bus, Abbott and the legal team were looking at us and saying, ‘We can’t be accused of kidnapping,’ ” Saenz told me.

“We knew the Biden Administration would prosecute anyone if they could. So that’s when we came up with notices in English, Spanish, and other languages and had people sign them saying that they knew where they were going.”

The federal government can’t hold all the migrants it takes into custody.

It usually releases a large share of them to local shelters, many of which are bootstrap operations that rely on donations to provide clothes, food, and other assistance.

The lone shelter in Del Rio, the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, can’t even house migrants overnight.

On a cold morning in January, Tiffany Burrow, the head of the shelter, met with me in an unheated room with racks of clothes and shoes.

Three years earlier, W. Nim Kidd, the head of the state’s Division of Emergency Management, had visited Val Verde with a proposition for Burrow.

The state wanted to bus migrants to Washington.

Would she help them do it?

Burrow was skeptical of Kidd’s pitch, but the situation was dire enough that she made a counterproposal.

“We can’t have buses running 24/7,” she said.

“There has to be a curfew. There has to be coördination and contingency plans for drivers, in case of a flat tire or if a woman goes into labor. And I needed to have someone I could speak with in the receiving city.”

It was unsettling that Texas didn’t seem to be making arrangements with state or local authorities farther north, Burrow said, but that was beyond her control.

Without some form of intervention, she told me, “this area would have been overrun.”

Kidd offered to let Burrow travel on one of the first buses to Washington.

“That trip set the baseline,” Burrow said.

“We weren’t aligned on the why. But there was a sense of decency, and it matched the motive of humanitarian aid that we had here.”

Abbott staffers insist that the busing program was as much a policy necessity as it was a political maneuver.

But the Governor’s advisers admitted that they’d expected a more dramatic response when the earliest buses arrived in Washington.

“No one in D.C. seemed to care,” Carney said.

“So we sent them to the Naval Observatory”—where Vice-President Kamala Harris lived—“and it got a little attention.”

According to an analysis by the Times, Texas sent some six thousand migrants to Washington before it bused a single person to New York.

But that didn’t mean New York wasn’t feeling a new sort of strain.

As the over-all number of arrivals at the border increased, the federal government was forced to release more people in nearby towns and cities.

“The nonprofits couldn’t keep up,” Saenz told me.

These groups, together with local officials, started sending their own buses to cities outside the state.

That, rather than Abbott’s busing program, is what appears to have first led New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, to call out Abbott publicly, in July, 2022.

“Adams says, you know, Governor Abbott is a mean bastard or whatever, sending these people up here, using people as political pawns,” Carney recalled.

“But we hadn’t fucking sent anybody to New York.”

(Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokesperson for Adams, told me, “We asked people who sent you here, and they told us the Texas government.”)

Adams’s statements helped generate headlines and “nationalize” the scheme, a former Abbott aide said.

Carney told me that, when Abbott saw the news, “he said, ‘If I’m going to get blamed, then I’m going to get the fucking credit.’ So we asked people, ‘Who wants to go to New York?’ Everyone wanted to go. So we just started up the buses.”

Eventually, Abbott would send forty-five thousand people to New York, most of them Venezuelans, along with another thirty-seven thousand people to Chicago, nineteen thousand to Denver, and twelve thousand to Washington.

By the middle of September, Abbott hadn’t just confounded Democrats;

he’d inspired Republican copycats.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who was preparing to run for President the following year, spent $1.5 million flying forty-nine migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.

DeSantis’s office had paid an operative who recruited migrants in San Antonio, often by misleading them about where they were going.

After a county sheriff in Texas filed kidnapping charges, DeSantis’s chief of staff called Abbott’s office to admit that they’d made a mistake.

He then asked if Abbott might say that both governors had been working together all along.

Abbott declined, but he and his staff kept quiet about the request.

“He’s not your typical doomsayer.”

The busing continued for more than two years, but Burrow participated for only eighteen months.

She pulled out, she told me, when it became clear that the priorities in Austin had changed. “They got big in the head,” she said.

“They said, We’re going to make a command center. We’re going to send buses to every state in the country. We’re going to run them 24/7, and we don’t want to say where the buses were going.”

City officials in Del Rio continued the busing, but, by the start of 2024, arrivals started to decrease.

The governor’s office “wanted the headlines to explode,” Burrow said.

“But, at that moment, the actual number was about to take a dive.”

In December and January, when I travelled along the border, the general atmosphere was sleepy, but evidence of Operation Lone Star was everywhere. The Governor had set up two “forward operating bases” for the Texas National Guard, in Eagle Pass and Del Rio.

D.P.S. pickup trucks filled parking lots and roadways.

I asked the manager at a La Quinta Inn where I was staying why everything in the hotel seemed so new.

The hotel had been built just two years earlier, he told me, to accommodate all the state agents staying in town because of Operation Lone Star.

The flood of agents brought their own problems.

In El Paso, a heavily Democratic city in West Texas, local officials have been documenting a rise in high-speed car chases initiated by the D.P.S. in pursuit of alleged human smugglers.

There was a six-hundred-and-twenty-five-per-cent increase in such chases between 2022 and 2023, according to the El Paso County attorney’s office.

Most of them began in the western end of town, along the border with New Mexico, where D.P.S. troopers were getting tipped off by sympathetic Border Patrol agents.

Eighty-five per cent of the incidents started with a routine traffic violation, but about half involved pursuits that reached more than a hundred miles per hour.

Residents have complained about chases in their neighborhoods and around schools, hospitals, and places of worship.

“It all coincided with Operation Lone Star,” Christina Sanchez, the county attorney, told me.

Just before Christmas, I visited Sanchez at her office downtown, next to the county jail.

She and her staff were seeing markedly more accidents as a result of the chases, some of them fatal.

One of them, in July, 2023, resulted in a collision with two other cars on the road, sending nine people to the hospital.

Another, in October, 2024, led to a crash that killed a forty-four-year-old mother on her way to work.

A Human Rights Watch investigation found that, in communities where Operation Lone Star was in effect, vehicle pursuits have caused a hundred and six deaths and more than three hundred injuries.

“There are no D.P.S. policy guidelines for how they conduct these chases,” Sanchez told me.

“We have the buoys, the concertina wire, we have the troopers. But that increased activity doesn’t necessarily equate to a safer environment for the community.”

The city and county governments in El Paso have clashed with Abbott before.

During the pandemic, a local judge challenged an order from the Governor that banned mask mandates and required businesses to reopen.

County officials have joined lawsuits against some of the state’s immigration policies.

Abbott’s repeated claims that the state was being “invaded” by migrants were especially jarring to city residents.

In 2019, a twenty-one-year-old from a small town outside Dallas had travelled to a Walmart in El Paso and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle, killing twenty-three shoppers.

In an online post before the attack, the shooter had written about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and claimed to be “simply defending my country.”

To qualify for state grants under Operation Lone Star, the city and the county had to issue disaster declarations.

Sanchez told me that officials initially “held off at the local level because there really was this concern about what we’re saying to our community with language like ‘invasion.’ ”

Their hesitation was costly.

El Paso gets money from the U.S. government for holding federal inmates in county jails—typically, about thirty-three thousand dollars a day.

By law, however, El Paso had to give priority to state detainees, including those arrested under Operation Lone Star.

The city declared an emergency in December, 2022, and the county finally followed suit in July, 2024.

But the sums that they eventually received from state grants didn’t cover the budget shortfalls.

Late last year, Sergio Coronado, an El Paso County commissioner, met with D.P.S. representatives to communicate his concerns.

His constituents, in addition to complaining about the high-speed chases, had reported being racially profiled.

One evening in October, 2023, a family of four was driving on the west side of the city when a blue Silverado abruptly stopped in front of their car.

According to a statement taken by the county commissioner’s office, a white vehicle then boxed them in from behind.

Agents got out and surrounded the car with their guns drawn.

They were looking for smugglers and had stopped the wrong vehicle.

In 2023, a forty-eight-year-old El Paso resident was taking medicine to her grandmother when she was arrested by state troopers on a stakeout, who had mistaken her for a smuggler.

“They heard us out,” Coronado told me of the D.P.S. agents.

“But I didn’t get the feeling that they were going to be responsive.”

At one point, Coronado asked the agents why, with the state spending more than eleven billion dollars on Operation Lone Star, the D.P.S. didn’t use helicopters to conduct the chases in a more responsible manner.

“Our helicopter is in Lubbock,” he was told.

“It needs repairs.”

In the same special session in which Abbott’s voucher proposal was defeated, the legislature passed a sweeping and audacious immigration-enforcement bill.

“These measures were deliberately paired,” a senior House aide told me.

“The immigration bill kept things more or less in line.”

The measure, known as Senate Bill 4, allows state officials to arrest anyone they suspect of crossing the border illegally and, if they’re undocumented, to deport them.

The bill appeared to contradict a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that struck down sections of a similar law in Arizona, on the ground that it preëmpted federal authority over immigration.

(Antonin Scalia, in a forceful dissent, wrote, “As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory.”)

The Biden Justice Department sued Texas, arguing that the state was usurping the powers of the federal government, and the case went to a federal appeals court.

Last March, on the same day that Texas’s solicitor general defended S.B. 4 before the appellate judges, Abbott spoke at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Austin.

“We found ways to try to craft that law to be consistent with the dissent that was wrote in the Arizona case by Justice Scalia,” he said.

With Trump in the White House, the Justice Department is no longer expected to contest S.B. 4 in court.

Lucas Guttentag, a former senior adviser at the Justice Department and a professor at Stanford Law School, told me that the Trump Administration “will abandon the principle that the U.S. fought for and won before the Supreme Court in the Arizona case—namely, that the federal government must have sole authority over the enforcement of immigration laws.”

There are strategic reasons for this reversal.

The new Administration’s first set of executive orders made the same argument that Abbott did when he declared a state emergency: the country is in the midst of an “invasion.”

But ICE has already struggled to deliver on the deportation numbers that Trump campaigned on.

Three top officials at the agency have been demoted as a result.

Thomas Homan, the President’s so-called border czar, has said that he is “not happy.”

The most obvious way for the federal government to boost arrests is to enlist states in its wider enforcement effort.

Texas will almost certainly be a key partner.

The state’s land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, has offered the Administration a fourteen-hundred-acre ranch in Starr County to build a detention facility.

“We have thirteen million acres around the state,” she said.

“We want them to be able to utilize that.”

In January, Homan spent a night at the governor’s mansion before he and Abbott visited members of the Texas National Guard in Eagle Pass.

“The cavalry is here,” Abbott told them.

The D.P.S. agents who’d been policing private land were now, on Abbott’s orders, working with the Department of Homeland Security to “track down the thousands of illegal immigrants with active warrants across Texas and deport them from our country.”

The Texas National Guard, for its part, has radically broadened its remit.

On January 31st, the Trump Administration signed an agreement with Abbott that relied on a previously unused section of the Immigration and Nationality Act called the “mass-influx provision,” which gives state law-enforcement officers the powers of federal immigration agents.

According to the agreement, the Texas National Guard can now deport migrants.

This will not only “massively increase the government’s resources beyond what’s currently appropriated” by Congress, Guttentag told me.

“It unleashes this separate immigrant-detention-and-deportation force at the state level.”

Operation Lone Star, he added, “is a preview of the illegality, inhumanity, and sheer cruelty that results.”

In 2021, Abbott’s disaster declaration automatically suspended laws governing how the state spent money on Operation Lone Star.

Four years later, those temporary measures have essentially become permanent.

The Texas Observer recently reported that at least $3.5 billion in Operation Lone Star funding has gone to no-bid contracts and emergency procurement orders.

Executives at some of the companies benefitting from the state’s largesse have made generous donations to Abbott’s campaign fund.

Operation Lone Star, in the meantime, has become a significant part of the Texas economy.

Already, the state legislature is proposing another $6.5 billion for border security.

A few weeks ago, with migrant-arrival numbers at historic lows, Starr County declared a border disaster.

It hadn’t done so at any point in the past four years, but, according to the Texas Tribune, the county wanted money for more prosecutors because a state program had been cut.

Its best chance of accessing the funds was applying through Operation Lone Star.

In mid-February, while the Trump Administration was slashing the federal budget and firing thousands of government employees, Abbott travelled to Washington to make a request.

In meetings with Trump, and then with House Speaker Mike Johnson, he explained that he wanted Congress to reimburse Texas for the cost of Operation Lone Star, which he called “services rendered.”

“This is a payment for real-estate assets and improvements provided by the state,” he said.

Carney, Abbott’s political adviser, put it more simply.

“It wasn’t a Texas thing as much as an American thing,” he told me.

“I think everybody recognizes that Texas went above and beyond.”

[sensitive-virgo]

Opening Potential: The Comprehensive Guide to Dental Assistant Salaries in Colorado

Unlocking Potential: ⁣The ​Comprehensive Guide to Dental Assistant Salaries in Colorado

Unlocking Potential: The Comprehensive ⁣Guide to Dental Assistant Salaries in Colorado

As the healthcare sector continues to grow, ​the ⁣demand for ⁣dental professionals, particularly dental assistants, is⁢ on the rise. If you’re considering a career as a dental assistant in Colorado or ‌are simply curious about the salaries⁣ associated with this role, you’re in the right place. This comprehensive guide⁢ covers everything from average salaries to factors affecting​ compensation, job prospects, and tips ​for aspiring dental assistants.

1. Understanding Dental Assistants’ Roles and Responsibilities

A dental assistant plays an​ essential role in a‍ dental clinic. ‌Their responsibilities typically⁢ include:

Preparing patients for treatments and procedures

Assisting dentists during examinations and surgeries

Managing⁢ patient records and scheduling appointments

Taking X-rays and providing patient education

Maintaining a‌ sterile and clean environment

2. What Influences Dental Assistant Salaries in Colorado?

Several factors can influence the‌ salary of a dental assistant, including:

Location: Salaries can vary based on geographic location. Urban⁢ areas tend to offer higher wages than ‍rural⁣ regions.

Experience: ‍ Entry-level dental‌ assistants earn less than those with several years of experience.

Specialization: Specialized dental assistants, such as those trained in radiography or orthodontics, may earn higher salaries.

Education: Holding certifications from accredited dental ⁣assisting programs can enhance job ⁤prospects and salary potential.

Employer​ Type: Salaries may differ depending on‌ whether you work in a⁣ private practice, group practice, or hospital setting.

3. Average Dental Assistant Salary in Colorado

As of 2023, the average dental assistant salary in Colorado is approximately $42,000⁢ per year. However, salaries can range widely based on the ⁣factors mentioned earlier.

Experience Level

Average Salary

Entry-Level (0-1 years)

$36,000

Mid-Level (2-5 ⁢years)

$42,000

Experienced (5+ years)

$50,000+

4. Benefits of Working as a Dental Assistant ​in Colorado

Beyond⁣ the salary, working as a dental assistant in‍ Colorado comes with a range of benefits, including:

Job Stability: The demand for dental assistants is projected to grow, offering job⁤ security.

Health Benefits: Many employers provide health insurance, retirement plans, and⁤ paid time off.

Flexibility: Dental‌ offices often offer‌ part-time opportunities and flexible schedules.

Continuing Education: Many dental assistants have access to​ ongoing ⁢training, enhancing career ​growth.

5. Practical Tips ‍for Boosting Your ⁤Salary as a‌ Dental Assistant

Obtain Additional Certifications: Consider​ specialized training ⁤in areas like radiology or orthodontics.

Seek Employment in High-Paying Regions: ⁤Larger⁤ cities tend to offer ⁤better pay.

Gain ​Experience: ‌Aim to work with diverse dental teams ⁣to enhance your skills and marketability.

Network: Attend dental conferences ⁢and seminars to meet industry professionals.

6. Case Study: Salary Insights from⁢ a Local Dental Assistant

Let’s explore the experience of Emily, a ⁢dental⁢ assistant​ in ⁤Denver. ⁤Emily started her career at‌ $36,000 as an entry-level assistant in 2021. By 2023, after​ obtaining her certification in ⁤radiography and gaining two years of experience, her ⁢salary reached $45,000. Her story highlights how skill development can ⁢significantly influence ⁣salary potential.

7.⁢ First-Hand Experience: What It’s Like to Be a Dental Assistant in Colorado

We interviewed Alex, a dental assistant based in Colorado Springs, who ⁢shared, “I love my‌ job because every ​day is⁤ different.⁢ I get to interact⁣ with ‍patients and help them feel more comfortable during their visits. Plus, with ​the ​demand for dental ⁢services‍ growing, I feel​ secure in my position.”

8. Conclusion

becoming a dental assistant in⁤ Colorado can be a fulfilling and financially‍ rewarding‍ career choice. By understanding the salary landscape, recognizing the factors that influence⁢ wages, and following practical tips for career advancement, you can unlock your potential in this exciting field. Whether ⁤you’re just ⁣starting or considering a transition, the⁤ opportunities are plentiful‌ for dedicated professionals. ​With ongoing education and specialization, you ​can ensure a prosperous future in dental assisting in Colorado.

https://dentalassistantclasses.net/opening-potential-the-comprehensive-guide-to-dental-assistant-salaries-in-colorado/

[nbmsports]

Limiting MLB Draft to 20 Rounds Trades Magic for Efficiency

On Sunday in Seattle, for the fourth year in a row — enough for a full class of college prospects — Major League Baseball will hold a streamlined version of its amateur draft. From an event with unlimited rounds to one with 50 rounds, then 40, and now just 20, the draft is exclusive and efficient, in keeping with baseball’s restructured minor league system.But efficiency has a cost: the countless long-shot careers that may never be realized. Dozens of current major leaguers turned pro after being drafted in rounds that no longer exist. They are grateful for their timing.“Twenty rounds doesn’t seem like quite enough,” said Kevin Kiermaier, the center fielder of the Toronto Blue Jays who was picked in the 31st round by the Tampa Bay Rays in 2010. “I mean, if it was like that now, then I would have never had an opportunity.”Kiermaier, 33, is perhaps the best modern example of the talent that once bubbled far below the surface of the draft. Chosen 941st overall from a community college in Illinois, he has won three Gold Gloves, played in the World Series and earned more than $60 million in an 11-year career.Four players who made the All-Star team last summer — David Bednar, Nestor Cortes, Ty France and Joe Mantiply — were also chosen after the 20th round. So were two members of the Houston Astros’ World Series-clinching lineup last fall (Chas McCormick and Martín Maldonado) and several other longtime major leaguers, like Jesse Chavez, Seth Lugo, Kevin Pillar and Rowdy Tellez.Two Hall of Famers (Mike Piazza and John Smoltz) were drafted in extinct rounds, as were several others with a case for Cooperstown, like Mark Buehrle, Keith Hernandez, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada. Many low-drafted players could have stayed amateurs and tried to improve their draft position the next year — but their careers, of course, would have then unfolded differently.“Cutting the numbers down, you’re going to have to create other opportunities for those kinds of players that would have been drafted to come into the game,” said Omar Minaya, a former general manager and longtime scout who now advises the Yankees. “Players do develop late sometimes, so it’s good that M.L.B. is doing things to put those infrastructures in place.”Starting with the 2021 season, teams have been limited to 180 players under club control — there was no limit before — and four domestic farm teams, plus one or two “complex teams” that operate from the spring training base. Short-season Class A teams were eliminated, partly because of the calendar; in 2021, the league shifted the date of the draft from June to July, to coincide with the All-Star Game and raise its profile.Some teams that were cut are now part of M.L.B.’s predraft league, created for scouts to get one last look at prospects before making their picks. Other teams have joined so-called partner leagues — the American Association, the Atlantic League, the Frontier League and the Pioneer League — partially funded by M.L.B. but independent of any specific franchise.Undrafted players, in theory, can join one of those teams in hopes of attracting interest from M.L.B. But removing them from the draft acknowledges the staggering odds against them.“When a player signs a professional contract, you want that player to have some chance of one day becoming a major league player,” said Morgan Sword, M.L.B.’s executive vice president for baseball operations. “That’s why players become minor league players, because they want to one day become major league players. And we did have a lot of players in the system who had — what’s the right way to say it? — almost no chance of ever reaching the major leagues.”Then again, to paraphrase Jim Carrey in “Dumb and Dumber,” there is a huge difference between almost no chance and no chance. A draft selection — whatever the round — certifies that a major league franchise sees something in a player, and often that is all the player wants.“It was definitely nice to know that they picked me for a reason, and I could get to go show it off and play my game,” said Zach McKinstry, the Detroit Tigers’ regular leadoff hitter, who was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 33rd round in 2016. “I got an opportunity right when I signed. I spent three days in Arizona and then they sent me to low A and I played on a championship team that year.”McKinstry, who played at Central Michigan University, was a backup before a teammate’s injury gave him a chance to elbow his way to the Dodgers. He was keenly aware that most minor leaguers — especially when the draft lasted 40 rounds or more — were needed only so the better prospects had somewhere to play.“There’s a lot of injustice in the game, real or imagined, so there would be a lot of negative thoughts in those scrums in the outfield during batting practice,” said Bob Scanlan, a San Diego Padres broadcaster who pitched nine seasons in the majors after signing as a 25th-round pick in 1984. “There was a lot of talk like: ‘You know you don’t mean anything to this organization. You’re just here as a filler piece. Why are you even working your tail off?’”Scanlan was 17 when he signed with Philadelphia, turning down U.C.L.A. for the allure of the quality coaching he would get in pro ball. In recent decades, though, college programs have become more sophisticated, with advanced facilities and instruction that offered an appealing alternative to the dusty outposts that once made up the low minors.“The development time is less and less with the caps on the total number of players, so the guys you would pick late are probably going to go to college,” said Matt Arnold, the Milwaukee Brewers’ general manager. “Signing and then going to Helena, or wherever, is going to be less appealing than a really nice A.C.C. or SEC school — and even those second-tier programs have a lot of things they can sell.”Sword said the costs of improvements across the minor leagues — in ballparks, travel, nutrition and salaries — far outweigh the savings from eliminating so many draft picks; “it’s probably nine figures per year leaguewide,” he said. Sword added that in 2021, more than 200 players jumped from partner leagues to the affiliated minors.“The paths for those types of guys to the big leagues exist just as they always have,” he said. “It’s just that the path is different than it once was.”Even so, it stands to reason that with half as many draft picks as there were just four years ago, hundreds more players from each class are now giving up their baseball dreams for more realistic careers. Arnold, who grew up in Bakersfield, Calif., rooting for a since-departed Class A team, wonders about the impact of losing so many acolytes for the sport.“A lot of those guys, even if you were a 35th rounder from the middle of nowhere, you go home and you start an academy, and now you’re a hero,” Arnold said. “You’re a guy that played pro ball, and you bring it back home. And maybe he wasn’t great, but he carries the game with him as a steward in a way that I think we’ll miss.”The guys who make it, perhaps, will have to preach a little louder. Kiermaier, for one, embraces the role.“I look back at how everything evolved for me, and I’m so thankful for my journey,” he said. “I’ll never forget that I was a 31st rounder. I’m proud of that. That number means a lot to me.” Source link Read the full article

[x-raysspex]

LBWMF: Glasnow dominant across four innings against Atlanta

LBWMF: Glasnow dominant across four innings against Atlanta

That flow. (Photo Credit: Tampa Bay Rays) Tyler Glasnow was dominant against Atlanta on Thursday, allowing just one hit and a walk while striking out seven across four dominant frames. Glasnow threw 34 of 52 pitches for strikes (65% strike rate) and retired 11 consecutive batters after Ronald Acuña Jr. led off the contest with an infield hit to third. Glasnow walked Marcell Ozuna with two down…

[glasball]

Thigh

3/15/2021 Port Charlotte, Florida

[recurring-polynya]

Fanfic Round-up 2022

Well. I survived 2022. Sometimes that's all you can say.

It was my worst writing year on record, by far. I posted 199,638 words this year, which sounds pretty good, but a huge chunk of that was written in 2021. A more honest estimate puts me at 113k or possibly even more like 103k. :/

Anyway, so what did I do?

Well, I spent the first part of the year posting What We Do with Our Hearts, which is the aforementioned big chunk of workcount I did in 2021. Overall, I feel like it was well-received, especially for being a story about a guy's not-great relationship with his grandfather. It never got a whole lot of kudos compared to hits, which is perplexing to me-- I don't know if people started it and didn't like it, or just forgot or what. I got lots and lots of comments on it, tho, so I know that the people who liked it really liked it, and that's all that really matters.

I also did a couple of short stories for Rukia's birthday, which you can find in chapters 2-4 of my anthology fic, Squad Six is Jerks, vol III. The first is about Rukia and Ichigo trying to talk about their love lives like the idiots they are, and the second two are continuations of some of my more popular AUs, the transcendentally stupid Rukia and Renji join Squad 11 much to the dismay of Byakuya's blood pressure AU, and a modern AU where Renji is a tattoo artist and Rukia is his high-powered businesswoman client (more about this later).

a jackrabbit underneath isn't a very happy one. I always thought there was an extra dimension of Awful to that Academy-training-trip-gone-nightmare story, in the sense that Rukia and Renji say some unkind things to one another shortly before Renji departs, and I wanted to poke around at that bruise.

ohhhhhhhhh, I wanted to badly to finish a little in love this year, and I worked on it a bunch and didn't feel particularly good about it and gave up. I did write one single interlude chapter, which was about Rukia coming to live with the Kuchiki, except in this AU, her sister is there, dying. I sure was a ray of sunshine in the early part of this year!

I should back up actually, because that's not exactly true. I spent a lot of the spring on a sequential art project, my Soul Society Tattoo Artist AU, which wasn't exactly fanfic, but it took up some of the same space in my brain. There's a tattoo artist-related subplot in What We Do with Our Hearts, and I think I was looking back at it and realized that I had missed a prime opportunity to do a Tattoo Artist AU that took place in-universe, in the sense that it's all still in Soul Society, but thru a series of Hisana-related twists, Rukia and Renji never met in Inuzuri, Renji never made it to Shin'ou, and becomes a tattoo artist, instead. I mean, there is a fanfic part, two entirely separate fanfic parts, actually, none of which I actually posted. It was probably the most fun thing I worked on this year, and I hope to pick it back up again eventually.

I guess I did some short stories, too, this year? I wrote a little present for @fluffnflightillustrations that takes place in her Princess-Knight AU. I did a prompts even around May, where I got people to suggest "What if?" scenarios. You can find them in my what if requests tag, or they are collected in Chapters 6-13 of Squad Six is Jerks, vol III.

Okay, now we're back up to the summer where I failed to finish a little in love. I eventually gave up, because it just wasn't happening, and I picked up that Modern Tattoo Artist AU again, and tooled into an actual story, this could be permanent, you know. It is complete, I finished it up right before Christmas. I've always wanted to write a romcom, and now I can say I have done it. It's a pretty cute story, I guess, and I would probably like it more if someone else had written it. I'm not sure if it's because it's a modern AU, which I like to read but feel weird about writing, or if it's because I wrote it in an as-I-went format instead of writing the whole thing out, but I got almost zero sense of satisfaction after finishing it, which was...frustrating. I'm glad other people liked it, at least-- statistically, it's one of my most popular fanfics by nearly every measure. Figures.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I wrote wherever is your heart, i call home, a porno about the joys of married people late night shower sex.

Edit, b/c I forgot: I also wrote a couple of short stories as part of the Bleach Returns! event in October, to celebrate the return of the anime! There was the Renji's Bad Tea: the Origin Story, and Happy Squad 10 Day, To Those Who Celebrate.

What an incredibly strange year!

I've spent the last two weeks or so in an absolute rage about how much I hate my own writing and how disappointed I am in myself, but, jeez, writing all that out, it feels like more than it was. I dunno. My resolution from last year was to have more fun writing and...I dunno. I feel like some of that was fun, but there was also a lot of making myself miserable, and then hardly having anything to show for it.

Anyway, I've decided that 2023 is not going to be a writing year. That's not to say I'm not going to do any writing, but I'm gonna put myself under any pressure, and if I don't write anything... well...¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe I've written enough. Mostly I just want get back to some of my projects that I've been neglecting. I really want to pick up the next part of Heart is a Muscle again, and I'm feeling a little kinder about what I managed to write of a little in love last summer. Finishing either of them would be amazing, but I'd honestly be happy to just make a little more progress. Anyway, every year doesn't have to be a writing year. I'm hoping to have an art year and a houseplant year and my-volunteer-job year and maybe do some redecorating in my house year. If some writing falls out as a byproduct, that's great, but if not, that's fine, too.

[julez-fiction]

Top 10 Movies : Stuck in Time with You.

This list is made up of those movies that have two people(sometimes more) usually romantic interests, but could be friends or family, that are stuck in an extraordinary time travel or time loop situation together. Movie night just got better. Read on below for this interesting top ten 10 list.

1. Passengers, 2016

Sci-Fi / Romance

IMDb: 7/10

Rotten Tomatoes: 30%

Director: Morten Tyldum

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Laurence Fishburne

Synopsis:

On a routine journey through space to a new home, two passengers, sleeping in suspended animation, are awakened 90 years too early when their ship malfunctions. As Jim and Aurora face living the rest of their lives on board, with every luxury they could ever ask for, they begin to fall for each other, unable to deny their intense attraction until they discover the ship is in grave danger. With the lives of 5,000 sleeping passengers at stake, only Jim and Aurora can save them all.

2. Palm Springs, 2020

Sci-Fi / Fantasy

IMDb: 7.4 / 10

Rotten Tomatoes: 94%

Director: Max Barbakow

Starring: Andy Samberg, Christin Milotti,Camila Mendes, J. k. Simmons

Synopsis:

Stuck in a time loop, two wedding guests develop a budding romance while living the same day over and over again.

3. The Fare, 2019

Romance / Thriller

IMDb: 6.2 / 10

Rotten Tomatoes: 100%

Director: D.C. Hamilton

Starring: Brinna Kelly, Gino Anthony Pesi

Synopsis:

When a charming woman climbs into his taxi, a taxi driver finds himself entranced until she disappears without a trace. When he resets his meter, he is brought back to the moment she first climbed into his cab, starting an endlessly repeating loop.

4. 6:45, 2021

Psychological Thriller / Thriller

IMDb: 3.9 / 10

Rotten Tomatoes: 69%

Director: Craig Singer

Starring: Augie Duke, Thomas G. Waites, Shasha K. Gordon, Ray Mancini

Synopsis:

A romantic weekend getaway turns into a demented cycle of terror when a couple find themselves living the same horrific day over and over again.

5. Enter Nowhere, 2011

Mystery / Thriller

IMDb: 6.5 / 10

Rotten Tomatoes: -

Director: Jack Heller

Starring: Scott Eastwood, Sara Paxton, Katherine Waterston

Synopsis:

Three strangers arrive one at a time in a remote cabin, and learn they have been brought together for a reason.

6. Edge of Tomorrow, 2014

Sci-Fi / Action

IMDb: 7.9/10

Rotten Tomatoes: 91%

Director: Doug Liman

Starring: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton

Synopsis:

When Earth falls under attack from invincible aliens, no military unit in the world is able to beat them. Maj. William Cage (Tom Cruise), an officer who has never seen combat, is assigned to a suicide mission. Killed within moments, Cage finds himself thrown into a time loop, in which he relives the same brutal fight -- and his death -- over and over again. However, Cage's fighting skills improve with each encore, bringing him and a comrade (Emily Blunt) ever closer to defeating the aliens.

7. Source Code, 2011

Sci-Fi / Action

IMDb: 7.5 / 10

Rotten Tomatoes: 92%

Director: Duncan Jones

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga

Synopsis:

Helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is part of a top-secret military operation that enables him to experience the last few minutes in the life of Sean Fentress, a man who died in a commuter-train explosion. The purpose of Colter's mission is to learn the identity of the bomber and prevent a similar catastrophe. As Colter lives Sean's final moments, he becomes more certain that he can prevent the first tragedy from occurring -- as long as he doesn't run out of time.

8. The Endless, 2017

Horror/Thriller

IMDb: 6.5/10

Rotten Tomatoes: 92%

Director: Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson

Starring: Aaron Moorhead, Justin Benson, Callie Hernandez, Tate Ellington

Synopsis: Two brothers receive a cryptic video message inspiring them to revisit the UFO death cult they escaped a decade earlier. Hoping to find the closure that they couldn't find as young men, they're forced to reconsider the cult's beliefs when confronted with unexplainable phenomena surrounding the camp. As the members prepare for the coming of a mysterious event, the brothers race to unravel the seemingly impossible truth before their lives become permanently entangled with the cult.

9. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, 2021

Romance / Fantasy

IMDb: 6.8/10

Rotten Tomatoes: 76%

Director: Ian Samuels

Starring: Kyle Allen, Kathryn Newton

Synopsis:

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is a 2021 American science fiction romantic comedy film directed by Ian Samuels, from a screenplay by Lev Grossman, based on his 2016 short story of the same name. It stars Kathryn Newton and Kyle Allen as two teenagers stuck in a time loop.

10. Repeaters, 2010

Thriller / Sci-Fi

IMDb: 5.7/10

Rotten Tomatoes: 20%

Director: Carl Bessai

Starring: Amanda Crew, Dustin Milligan, Richard de Klerk, Benjamin Ratner

Synopsis:

Three people find themselves in an impossibly confusing time labyrinth, where each day they wake up to face the same horrors as the day before.

[genshinwriter]

Xiao Reacts to You Wearing Shorts ft. Thigh Highs (Modern!AU)

Pairing: Xiao/GN!Reader Genre: Light fluff, modern!AU Word count: 732 words Spoilers: No Warning(s): It’s implied that the reader regularly wears dresses. Clothing is genderless, but just wanted to let you know :) Summary: “It’s unfair to spring that on your boyfriend.” “My boyfriend is fun to tease.” Post date: August 14, 2021

The agreed-upon time was 6:30 PM, but Xiao had been standing next to the train station exit for 20 minutes, and the clock hadn’t even struck six yet. He even had time to go home and change, slipping on a black windbreaker to hopefully block the sudden chill that signaled the end of summer.

Some of his friends would have called him a simp. Not that he cared. He hadn’t seen you in two weeks, and very sparsely even before then. When his music career took off, he had to give up many things, make compromises. Had to move twelve stations away from where he (and you) used to live.

You were—of course—excluded from all of that.

His eyes kept on glancing sideways, hoping to catch sight of one of your many sundresses, even though it was still too early for you to show up. He looked at the sea of people in a daze, the flow of the crowd almost hypnotizing. He didn’t even register that someone was calling his name until he received a tap on the shoulder.

“Hi!” 

And there you were, beaming rays of sunshine as you always did.

“I told you ‘exit 3,’” he sighed. “Also, why are you so early?”

“I kinda lost track of all the arrows—it’s such a big place!—but I found exit 4 and I thought it was good enough. Then I saw you across the street and ran over. I’m early ‘cause I took an earlier train just in case. It’s my first time here, after all.”

He watched as you marveled at the scenery around you with googly eyes. Sure, the train station back home and its connected commercial district had a few shops and famous chain restaurants, but it was nothing like this. He had always thought that the two McDonald’s, just hundreds of meters apart, were a bit excessive.

You stepped away from him to look around the corner of a building, amazed by the rows of stores and cafés even beyond the main road. It was only then his brain registered what you were wearing.

“Oh.” The sound came out involuntarily, and he quickly covered his mouth with his sleeve. Too late. You had already looked over your shoulder to find out what caused it. He knew you had figured it out when you followed his gaze and your right eyebrow shot up.

You retraced your steps and stood beside him, making sure that he was the only one who would be able to hear what you had to say next. “Pervert.”

He choked. “I am not a—”

“I’m wearing thigh highs! You can’t see anything!”

“No, that makes it worse!”

“Oho. So you’re like that huh, Xiao?”

“Like what?!” He could almost feel his ears steaming and had a strong urge to cover them up, though he had a feeling it would result in more teasing from you. Thankfully, you decided that he had had enough torture.

“Jokes aside though…how do you think I look?”

You were wearing a flowy white blouse with tails on either side that framed your thighs well. Your shorts were a nice light blue, and both items of clothing matched the colors of the flower pin on your head. He thought you were beautiful—you had always been—and that the change in wardrobe was a welcome one. His brain was full of praises for you.

His mouth, however, refused to cooperate. “You look—You’re…You have…long legs.”

“…yes, that’s why I started dating you. Your amazing compliments made me swoon,” you deadpanned.

“It’s unfair to spring that on your boyfriend.” He should have chosen lighter clothing. The level of his embarrassment alone was a more-than-sufficient heat source.

You giggled at his reaction; it was everything you had hoped for and more. “My boyfriend is fun to tease,” you grinned. “I’m pretty hungry. Let’s eat then go to an arcade!”

Despite being unfamiliar with the place, your arm looped around his and you started dragging him around with zero hesitation. He let you do as you pleased; maybe it was guilt from not being able to spend as much time with you anymore, maybe it was infatuation, but whatever it was still led him to lending you his jacket when you started shivering, and him offering you to stay the night after both of you lost track of time in the arcade.

Note:

I never thought I would get any reader at all for any of my work. I know my writing is halfway decent at best and that there are tons of things I have to work on. Though there aren’t many of you, I hope you all know that you’re greatly appreciated! :D Have a nice day, stay safe, and I wish you luck on all future pulls <3

[lonestarbattleship]

State Ship Series: USS UTAH

There have been one ship commissioned named after the state of Utah in the US Navy. The state was admitted into the United States on January 4, 1896.

1. USS UTAH (BB-31):

Class: Florida

Type: Dreadnought Battleship

Laid down: March 9, 1909

Christened/Launched: December 23, 1909

Commissioned: August 31, 1911

Re-designated: AG-16, July 1, 1931

Decommissioned: September 5, 1944

Stricken: November 13, 1944

Award: 1 battle star

Fate: sunk at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941

UTAH and her sister, USS FLORIDA (BB-30), were the first to arrive at Veracruz, Mexico following the Tampico Affair in April 1914 and sent ashore a landing party that began the occupation of the city. During WWI, she helped train new recruits in Chesapeake Bay and later was stationed in Ireland and protected convoys from German surface raiders.

For a brief time in the early 1920s, she served as the flagship of the US Fleet in Europe. In 1925, she was modernized at Boston Navy Yard. This removed her coal-fired boilers with new oil-fired models from the cancelled South Dakota class (1920), and her aft cage mast was replaced with a pole mast. A catapult was added to Turret no. 3 for floatplanes and torpedo blisters were added to her hull.

She became a training/target ship after the London Naval Treaty and redesignated as USS UTAH (AG-16). All of her plane handling equipment, torpedo blisters and weapons were removed, though her turrets were still mounted. She helped train newly recruited crews on boiler and steam equipment operations. The Navy added remote control equipment for her role as a target ship. News outlets at the time dubbed her a "Robot" battleship. She continued in this role for the next 9 years and participated in several Fleet Problem exercises.

"Anchored off Long Beach, California, April 18, 1935, while serving as a target ship."

In 1935, anti-aircraft guns were added to her main deck and turret tops to train AA gunners and was equipped with 1.1-inch/75-caliber guns, aka Chicago pianos. Later, 5-inch (127 mm)/38 cal dual-purpose guns in single mounts while at Puget Sound in 1941.

During the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some Japanese pilots confused her for an aircraft carrier and six torpedoes were launched against UTAH, two of them struck her portside, while another missed and hit USS RALEIGH (CL-7), an Omaha class cruiser moored near her. One crewman stayed behind, Chief Watertender Peter Tomich, to run the equipment and ensure as many as possible could escape. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously for his actions.

The Navy attempted to salvage her wreck by righting her hull in a similar fashion as USS OKLAHOMA (BB-37). Due to the harbor floor being softer than the side OKLAHOMA was on, this only partially righted the hull before it began to be drugged up the shore by the powerful winches. Work was abandoned as she contained no military value and her hull remains there to this day, often forgotten about compared to the wreck of USS ARIZONA (BB-39).

2. USS UTAH (SSN-801):

Class: Virginia, Block IV

Type: Nuclear Powered Attack Submarine

Ordered: April 28, 2014

Laid down: September 1, 2021

Sponsor: Kate Mabus, daughter of Former Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus.

Christened/Launched: TBD (possibly summer 2024)

Commissioned: TBD (possibly Spring/Summer 2025)

Motto: Vive fortis et liber (live strong and free)

Status: under construction

"The Navy specifically selected boat number '801' to be named UTAH, even jumping over some other as-yet-unnamed boats, as 801 is the telephone area code for Utah's capital, Salt Lake City."

Library of Congress: LC-D4-22783

U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command: 80-G-416384, 80-G-266626, NH 64301, NH 64498, 80-G-1025113

source, source

[violettelueur]

— FUSHIGURO MEGUMI || OPPOSITES DO ATTRACT 

↳ featuring : fushiguro megumi from jujutsu kaisen

↳ warnings : grammar issues

↳ form : imagine

↳ published : 06 february

↳ pronouns : non specified in imagine

↳ word count : 1.2k

↳ synopsis : after training for the kyoto sister-school goodwill event, you decided to take a short break by napping in the sun until a certain someone decides to interrupt you during that time with his divine dog by his side.

↳ barista’s notes : let me admit, this imagine is a whole mess and i didn’t know what i was thinking but HEY! ╲ʕ·ᴥ·　╲ʔ why not let you experience this mess with me ha? here is a little classic black coffee (jujutsu kaisen!) on the house! please enjoy and come back soon ʕ •ᴥ•ʔゝ☆

Currently, Japan was at the time during the season where it was the late spring nearing summer meaning it was nearly time for the humidity to rise but also the multiple rainfalls to arrive leaving some residences within the country to make sure they carried an umbrella or cover of sorts within their luggage not knowing when the sunlight could turn on them.

Making sure the remaining sunlight didn’t go to waste, you were currently laying down in the middle of the track field, where you and some of your friends had trained earlier for the Kyoto Sister-School Goodwill Event that was commencing soon leading you to take the opportunity to relax with your panther shikigamis before you were forced to get up again.

While you were resting your head on the back of one of the panthers, the other was resting its head on your outstretched legs to which provided you with some warmth away from the gentle winds that were passing by. If you had some effort, you would have summoned the rest of your shikigami to enjoy the beaming calm sunlight that was radiating to the world, but your curse energy was running now on low fuel at this moment in time due to the amount of training you did with…

“So this is where you have been?”

Slowly opening your eyes, you quickly covered them to block the rays from blinding you before slightly tilting your head to the side to find a familiar erratic-haired sorcerer looking down at you with a collected look on his face while the other face peering down to you wasn’t human, but rather a friendly black dog leading you to reach out with your other hand to caress the divine dog’s fur, who happily accepted the affection it was receiving from you.

“I don’t appreciate being ignored Y/N,” Fushiguro muttered before taking a seat next to your body while taking the chance to pet your panther shikigami causing it to purr in delight before slowly going back to sleep as it had been before.

“Sorry Megumi, but little wolfie here got my attention first,” you mentioned, before letting the shikigami walk to wherever it desired, leading the dog to carefully sniff at the other large cat that was laying on your legs causing your shikigami’s eyes to open revealing it’s beautiful marigold crystals that they were hiding before minding its business as it went back to sleep again - somewhat letting the dog continue to sniff it out, knowing it wouldn’t attack.

“Now that I think about it, it’s the first time our shikigami met ha?” you asked, as you continued to observe the two animals to which Fushiguro answered with a light ‘hm’ indicating that he agreed with you before turning to face you.

In Fushiguro’s mind, you and him were what some would say opposites and to be honest, he couldn’t really disagree with those assumptions. Fushiguro can admit he wasn’t one to be called cheerful but rather reserved with his feelings towards people while you could be called bright as well as open with some people. However, at the end of the day, you both were emotionally intelligent.

Not only your personalities were the opposite but also your curse techniques were as well. While both you and Fushiguro were users of inherited techniques, they could be somewhat called the same, it was just that he used shadows while you used light. Consequently, this cursed technique of yours led to you being continuously attacked and harassed by the three jujutsu clans wanting to buy you from your family, but the Zenins were the worst of them all. 

Since Gojo managed to arrange things behind the scenes to make sure he wasn’t sold, the alternative option they had was you due to how similar your technique was but also how unknown it seemed, leading to the Zenin clan to demand you to come to their residence. However, from what he could recall from his annoying teacher, your mother was the one to refuse the payments and threats no matter how much she struggled since the disappearance of your father, who was thought to be the one with the sorcerer blood.

“If you were sold, do you think we would be like we are now?” Fushiguro suddenly asked, causing you to give him a side glance before letting out a sigh. “To be honest, I don’t think so,” you answered honestly as you slowly reached out to him leading Fushiguro to look at the outstretched hand for a quick second before tenderly taking it into his as he tightly interlocking your fingers together.

“If I was sold, I probably would have been sent to Kyoto Jujutsu Tech rather than Toyko, I probably would have tried to run away multiple of times, I probably would have hated you rather than love you like I do now,” you commented, leading to the stoic sorcerer to blush shyly at your verbal affection. “Luckily, my mother had a heart and didn’t let me go,” you murmured as you began to slowly recall your past, remembering how your mother would bring you to her tight embrace when the head of the Zenin family would scream at her for not passing you to him as well as other sorcerers who demanded her to sell you off to them. 

“I hate the clans,” you absentmindedly stated.

Before Fushiguro could say something about your admission, both of you and Fushiguro heard a little yelp causing you both to suddenly turn to look at the side, only to find a little black panther running towards you leading you to put on a small smile before it suddenly climbed up your upper body as it then rested its head on your chest.

“I didn’t know you had a baby panther as a shikigami,” Fushiguro commented, as he inspected the little cat that had made itself comfortable while his divine dog took the opportunity to examine the adorable subject leading to the small cat to meow at the large dog. “I didn’t know about it either until the day I summoned the cute little thing,” you replied to your boyfriend and you began to pet the little feline causing it to cutely snuggle against your palm, greedily accepting the attention it was getting.

“Don’t you usually have your other shikigami out?” Fushiguro then questioned, as he took the opportunity to lay back on the grass - to which lead his divine dog to go by his side before resting its head on his chest - causing you to turn to look at him once again before answering in a ‘duh’ tone with, “well, I would but someone made me use all my curse energy during training today,” leading Fushiguro to stiffen up somewhat before relaxing once you used your thumb to endearingly caress the back of his hand that was still interlocked with you making him know that you were just joking with him.

“We really are opposites ha?” you rhetorically and randomly asked - surprising Fushiguro somewhat due to his exact earlier thoughts - to which lead you to begin listing everything you could from the top of your head, “shadow and light, anti-social and somewhat more social and then cats and dogs.”

“Opposites do attract Y/N,” Fushiguro quickly stated, before raising your interlocking hands to kiss the back of your hand before using it to hide his now bright rose face. Laughing at his new-found but short-lived confidence, you giggled slightly at the cute sight - almost as cute as the baby panther on your chest - before pulling your connecting hands away to fully see his flustered expression forcing him to see your gentle and kind smile.

“Opposites do attract Megumi”

© violettelueur 2021 : written and published by violettelueur - do not steal or repost

[epicstuckyficrecs]

Weekly Recap | February 8-21 2021

You get two weeks worth of fics this time because I got too busy last weekend and didn't have time to do my weekly recap :)

Complete

Evanstan Week 2021 by luninosity/ @luninosity​ (Evanstan | 10K | Mature): All my Evanstan Week little fics!

1. dodger 2. kisses  3. on set  4. first times (a first kiss, at least)  5. in space (alternate universe)  6. fluff  7. holiday 

���  Remote Access by Kalee60/ @kalee60​ (Modern AU, Roommates | 57K | Explicit): Bucky Barnes was in trouble. More trouble than he ever thought he could get into as a grown adult. And it was caused by two singular factors that should never have become entwined.One, his god-like housemate Steve Rogers, who was unfairly handsome and the perfect specimen of man in not only looks but personality - and completely out of Bucky’s league.Two, Bucky’s obsession with a new toy he’d purchased to fill his lonely nights (and other areas).But when Steve buys a new TV, suddenly these two seemingly separate parts of Bucky’s life crash together in a spectacular and obsessive way.Bucky soon finds himself not as in control as he thought - and that’s when things start to get interesting…

💙  Black and Blue by darter_blue/ @darter-blue​, the1918/ @the1918​ (Modern AU, Spies & Secret agents | 7K | Explicit): CIA Agent Bucky Barnes and Captain Steve Rogers, Army 207th, Military Intelligence, are two American spies working for two different intelligence agencies. They've developed somewhat of complicated relationship while chasing down the same leads.

Until One Day, We Won't Be by the1918/ @the1918​ (Evanstan RPF | 8K | Explicit): Six times Chris and Sebastian were alone. [+ one time they were not.]

💙  How to Bang Your Weapon (in This World and the Next) by Brokenwords, elkane/ @elkane​, Hark_bananas/ @harkbananas​, kocuria-visuals (kocuria)/ @kocuria​, Nospheratt/ @nospheratt​, profoundalpacakitten/ @profoundalpacakitten​, ScrambledScript, sublimepigeon/ @sublimepigeon, ursa (Canon Divergent, WS!Steve, WS\Bucky, Multiverse | 50K | Explicit): Hydra knows how to get the Asset to do their bidding. When they want a new Captain, a new Steven Grant Rogers from another universe to help grow Hydra’s collection of supersoldiers, of course they send the Asset. But little do they know that in any universe, a Bucky will always find a Steve, and a Steve will always protect a Bucky.

💙  What lies they told us by darter_blue/ @darter-blue​ (Mobster AU | 42K | Explicit): Steve Rogers might still see his ma every Sunday, but he isn’t the dutiful son. He gave up that life a long time ago. Bucky Barnes may be following in his fathers footsteps, but he wants to set a path to something more than where they’ll take him. Steve and Bucky’s lives have always intersected. There is something between them that exists, real and palpable. But they are opposite sides of a coin. Opposing families in a war for money and power. Blood and pain. And fate may bring them together, again and again, pulling them closer. But it always finds a way to rip them apart. What they need is a way to fight fate. To fight their families. To reach each other. To keep each other. 

the prosecution rests by dirtybinary/ @dirtybinary (Post-WS | 3K | Teen): The Asset has to admit, ending a mission with Captain America crying into his lap is pretty unexpected. Even for him, and he is trained to anticipate all contingencies.

💙  The Seed and the Root by the1918/ @the1918​ (Shrunkyclunks, Post-EG | 32K | Explicit): His hands and mouth are gentle on the outside, but on the inside, Steve is burning up. He’s got everything he’s ever wanted on the bed and land beneath him, and now it’s so much at once that he’s afraid he’ll combust into white, nuclear light. (Part 3 of 💙  Song of the Rolling Earth)

Burning For You by musette22/ @musette22​ (Evanstan RPF, Non-Famous Sebastian | 3K | Teen): Sebastian gets a little carried away when raving about the Mountain Lodge candle to a friend. It leads to an unexpected, fragrant encounter.

At The Bottom Of Everything by Anonymous (Evanstan RPF | 12K | Teen): Six years. That’s what they’re celebrating. Six years, of them. Of this. That's what Chris is happy about. Until the phone rings. Until he turns on the news.

💙  Slip Of The Tongue by this_wayward_life (Shrunkyslunks, Soulmate AU | 6K | Explicit): Mr Perfect Ass is even prettier from the front. His braid is loose enough that strands of hair have fallen to frame his face, and an oversized scarf is pulled up to just below his pouty, red mouth. He's big, with wide shoulders and thick arms and thighs that are straining at his jeans, and he's staring at Steve with a blush on his face and the prettiest eyes Steve has ever seen."Oh, god," Steve blurts out. "Please sit on my face."

(series) Kinktober 2020 by this_wayward_life (31 works | 80K | Explicit)

The Best Handjob Of Bucky Barnes's Damn Life (Handjob)

Soft (Eating Out)

The Benefits of A Sugar Baby  (Thigh Riding)

Black and Blue (Choking/Spanking)

Black Mesh, Red Leather (Daddy Kink)

Thank God For Company-Sanctioned Teambuilding Workshops (Blindfolded)

The Only Thing School Football Is Good For  (Blowjob)

Your Body, On Crumpled Sheets (Voyeurism)

Feeling Just Peachy (Accidental Stimulation)

Blood-slick (Knife Kink)

Bury Me (Restraints)

Summer Nights (Fingering)

Beautiful Shackles (Public Sex)

You Are My First, And You'll Be My Last (Sixty-Nine)

Cover My Body (Size Difference)

All Plugged Up (Toys)

the tenderest touch leaves the darkest of marks (Begging)

Sugar Cookies (In the kitchen)

Seeing Double (Threesome)

I'll crawl home to him (Edging)

Your Voice In My Ear (Phone sex)

Hold Me Close, Keep the Monsters at Bay (In the shower/tub)

Keep Me Warm (First Time)

He never asked me once about the wrong I did (BDSM/rough sex)

Unexpected (Caught masturbating)

Overcome (Overstimulation)

In the Crowd (Orgy)

Praise Your Baby (Praise kink)

Grab on my waist and put that body on me  (Dirty talk)

Rediscovery (Mutual Masturbation)

Think I Found Myself a Cheerleader (Dressed up)

WIP

💙  Underneath the Shattered Sky by JJK/ @trenchcoatsandtimetravel (Planet Hulk AU, Post-Endgame | 14/? | 55K | Mature): “I shouldn’t have tried to kiss you.” Steve sounded choked. “I’m sorry. It was out of line.” “It’s really okay.” “No, it’s not. You’re not him. You’re your own person, with your own history, your own thoughts and feelings. Your own life here. I can’t expect you to be him. It’s not fair. To either of you.” “Maybe not,” Bucky huffed back. “But in this universe, my Steve’s an asshole who left me. And in your universe, your Bucky was taken from you, so I don’t really know what’s fair anymore.”

💙  and the river flows beneath your skin by Deisderium/ @deisderium​ (Boarding School AU, Soulmates | 3/? | 20K | Mature): In which Steve and Bucky are forced to room together their senior year at boarding school, and accidentally soul bond to each other even though they kind of hate each other. All they have to do to get out of it is not kiss each other for a year so the accidental bond will fade. How hard could it be?

💙  The Root and the Stalk by the1918/ @the1918​ (Shrunkyclunks, Post-EG | 3/6 | 18K | Explicit): “My mom, she’s not perfect, but she always had this one saying. You can’t look right into the sunset, because the light will burn your eyes. So you have to face east, right?” Bucky tucks his forehead against Steve’s chest, staring down the gap between them, eyes on their feet. “And when you do, you can look at the ground, and you can see your own shadow.” Bucky raises his head after a contemplative silence and gazes up at Steve. Those stormy gray eyes are filled with luminance, iridescence, splintered rays of shining light. “Or—Mom would say—you can look in front of you.” His lashes kiss his cheeks in butterfly pulses every time he blinks. “And ‘God’s light at your back will show you everything.’” (Part 4 of 💙  Song of the Rolling Earth)

💙  Revenance by by JJK/ @trenchcoatsandtimetravel​, SinpaiCasanova (Bladerunnerblue) (The Old Guard AU/The Song of Achilles AU | 20/? | 62K | Mature | Warning: Violence, MCD): And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Or, the one where Steve and Bucky are immortal and used to be known as Achilles and Patroclus.

💙  my soul and my youth (it’s all for you to use) by voxofthevoid/ @voxofthevoid​ (Post-Endgame (non-compliant) | 1/2 | 7K | Explicit): He waits until Bucky’s got a happy mouthful of eggs and toast. “I want to fuck you when you’re asleep.” Steve smiles his sweetest smile, and Bucky’s eyes narrow further, until they’re luminous blue slits. He swallows. Steve helplessly tracks the bob of his throat and drags his eyes back up to Bucky’s. “Steven Grant,” Bucky says, tone somewhere between amusement and admonishment. “Way to spring that on a guy.”

Re-read

I [Heart] You by writeonclara (Canon, magic curse | 1K | General): “Steve’s been hit with a curse,” Natasha said. She said it calmly, so Bucky didn’t immediately go flying out of the apartment to tear apart the Tower in search of Steve. Then again, Natasha would probably be calm if New York City spontaneously burst into flames. He lowered the coffee pot and squinted at her. “Of course he has,” he said. He felt, abruptly, exhausted. “What is it?” “The witch kept ranting about sexual repression and archaic moral principles,” she continued blithely.

[thebakingqueen5]

KW 2021: Role Swap

Day 4 for Kataang Week 2021 hosted by @kataang-week with the prompt Role Swap!

This is taken more in a figurative sense- rather than Katara being the Avatar and Aang her teacher, I wanted to shift their relationship dynamics and just add some pregnancy fluff of course, so enjoy!

Links: FF.net | AO3

Summary: Another year, another summer, another week of prompts celebrating our favorite couple. Kataang Week 2021 Day 4: Role Swap. Expansion upon the Yin/Yang oneshot from KVB 2021. During Katara’s first pregnancy, an interesting change in dynamics occurs.

Word Count: 2.6K

Aang let out a groan as a beam of sunlight shone through the glass window directly onto his face, promptly waking the airbender up. He rubbed his groggy eyes, yawning as his senses awakened, and rolled over onto his side, arms expecting to find his wife’s form peacefully resting next to him.

“That’s weird,” he frowned. Aang patted the empty space again, reaching farther across the bed this time. Nothing.

Aang was naturally quite an early riser, far more so than Katara, and it had become routine for them to cuddle for an hour or two in the mornings before properly getting ready for the day. So where was she?

With a short blast of air from his hands, Aang propelled himself upright so that he was standing on the hard, cold, stone floor of the Air Temple. He closed his eyes in concentration, blocking out all other sounds and sights to focus on the vibrations under his feet.

Aang muttered to himself, eyebrows knitted, “She’s not on this floor… not in the temple at all actually, so where- the spring? What’s she doing there so early?”

Wanting to know what his dear wife was up to, the airbender quickly grabbed some blankets from the cupboard (early mornings on the island tended to be quite chilly) as well as some moon peaches from the kitchen and made his way through the temple corridors until he was standing outside, his natural element instantly surrounding him with a refreshing cool breeze.

“Ah,” Aang sighed, taking a deep breath. He basked in the sun’s rays for a few moments, eyes closed as the sounds of birds chirping and the distant crashing of waves onto the shore filled his ears and relaxed his senses.

Then, remembering why he came out in the first place, the airbender began trekking uphill to the west side of the island, resuming his search for Katara.

In their early days of exploring, the waterbender had discovered a secluded stream hidden in the forest that cascaded into the sea if you followed it far enough. It also had a few natural hot springs along it, and it had quickly become one of Katara’s favorite spots not only to bend and spar, but to also just unwind and relax.

“Kataraaaaa,” Aang called out, pushing away the vines that covered the entrance to her little nook. “Where’d you go, sweetie?” He could hear the burbling of the water as it flowed over the rocks under its surface as well as the soft croaks of the frogs who called it home. He had to be getting close.

“Over here, Aang!”

The airbender’s head perked up in the direction of her voice and he grinned widely when he saw her, pleasantly surprised.

Katara’s eyes were still closed, her features serene from her seat on top of a round, flat boulder overlooking a wider part of the stream. She had obviously been meditating, but that wasn’t quite what shocked Aang the most.

Instead of her traditional fur-lined Water Tribe garb, she was wearing Air Nomad robes in warmer shades of yellow, orange, and dark red like the fall leaves. Her swollen belly poked out from under the loose layers of fabric, and she had never looked so beautiful to Aang (except maybe on their wedding day).

“Hey, Tara,” the airbender murmured, walking up to her. He gave her a hug from behind and pressed a kiss to her temple, one of his hands interlocking with hers around the middle of her stomach while the other rested on top of her bump.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Quite early to be all the way out here, no?”

Katara slowly fluttered her eyelids open, the corners of her mouth turning up as she leaned back against him. “Well, your child wouldn’t stop kicking me and woke me up, so I figured we’d try and relax for some time.”

Aang pouted. “Why is she always my child when she’s bothering her amazing and beautiful mom?”

“Because he gets it from his dad,” she deadpanned in response.

“Meanie.” Aang gave her a look and stuck his tongue out at her, causing them both to dissolve into laughter.

“Meditating isn’t usually your thing, nor are those,” he pointed out as he gestured to her clothing, an eyebrow quirked. “What brought this on?”

Katara blushed, looking away with a shy smile. “Well, I thought I’d take a page out of your book. Meditating always works for you, so I just figured why not try it? And these I’ve actually been sewing together for the last week or so. I found a pattern in one of the crates we brought over from the Southern Air Temple, and they’re a lot looser and comfier than my normal clothes. I, um, I hope that’s okay?”

“More than okay. The fact that you even cared enough to use the pattern, not to mention how you took my breath away- it’s concerning as an airbender, you know,” Aang grinned as Katara giggled at the last bit.

Suddenly, a frigid gust swept by them, cooling the already chilly morning air and causing the waterbender to shiver as she scooted closer to Aang, seeking his natural body heat.

“Spirits, it’s cold,” she muttered, rubbing her hands up and down the sides of her torso. “I’ve been out of the South Pole too long.”

Aang quickly trotted over to the entrance of the little den where he had set down the blankets and fruits he brought. “I have just the thing.”

He quickly grabbed two of them, one made of polar leopard skins from the Southern Water Tribe and another he had managed to sew using Appa’s shedded fur last spring, and snugly wrapped them around Katara, handing her a moon peach as well as her body warmed back up.

“You really didn’t have to, Aang,” she mumbled, biting into her moon peach and humming contentedly when she tasted its sweetness.

Fruit still in hand, she gave him a slightly awkward side embrace, enveloping him in the blankets with her while he returned the hug and kissed the top of her head, as well as her growing belly.

“Of course I did,” he said looking down at her. “You always work yourself to the bone doing stuff for everyone else, Katara. It’s high time you let someone do the same for you. Especially when you’re carrying such precious cargo.”

Katara rolled her eyes, the pink tint in her cheeks and upturned corners of her mouth giving her true thoughts away.

“Quite the role swap today, eh?” she teased. “Me in airbender robes and meditating while you start to mother everyone?”

“Not everyone,” Aang chuckled. “Just you. You take care of our baby, so I take care of you. Simple as that.”

“And I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Katara sighed. “Can we stay here for a bit?” she asked, leaning into the airbender a little more. “This is nice.”

“It would be my pleasure,” the airbender responded.

The couple did, in fact, end up spending the entire morning at the secluded creek simply relaxing, meditating, and enjoying each other’s company. It wasn’t until Katara’s stomach growled that Aang insisted they head back (“You’re eating for two now, sweetie, c’mon- I’ll even make you some mini fruit pies.”) and have a proper breakfast.

Time quickly flew, and the sun made its way across the cloud-streaked sky as the minutes turned to hours and the afternoon was spent taking a stroll across the island grounds. The training arena and meditation pavilion had been coming along quite nicely, and soon some Acolytes would be able to move in from the other temples, Aang remarked at some point.

Alas, eventually duties called, and by dinner time, the airbender was holed up in his office, back hunched over a stack of documents illuminated by a small candle on his desk.

Though he certainly didn't regret the day's adventures, they had put him back significantly. The council had been assigning more paperwork lately with even tighter deadlines in preparation for the unveiling of new city infrastructure, like the ferry to the island, and it was driving Aang crazy. He barely got any time away from his Avatar duties as it was, and this just added to the pressure.

Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring!

Aang snapped out of his thoughts, startled by the chimes of the bell tower on the mainland and quickly counted how many he heard.

“12?! ” he thought to himself. “ How is it already midnight? I’m barely halfway through! ”

The airbender groaned, dropping his head onto the desk with a loud thump. All he wanted was to be next to his wife in their bed right now, and he couldn't even have that!

As if telepathically summoned by that last thought, Aang suddenly felt her soft hands on his shoulders, massaging them as they both sighed softly.

"You need a break," she whispered as she alleviated some of the stress held in his back. "You're so tense."

"Believe me, I know," the airbender muttered. "I wish I could just leave this all and take a break from work already."

"Well, why don't you?"

Aang turned his head to look at her as if she had just grown a third arm. "I'm the Avatar. I can't. This needs to be done."

She rolled her eyes, gaze still focused on kneading the knots in his shoulder blades. "Please, the world managed to go an entire century without the Avatar. I'm sure the council members can stand to wait a day without some lousy paperwork."

"But-"

"No buts," Katara harrumphed. "You're the Avatar! You're the one fighting for workers to have shorter work weeks and less hours so that they can be home with their families! Why not apply the same to yourself?"

Aang frowned. She did have a point. Technically speaking, he could easily skive off the paperwork and the council wouldn't be able to do anything. After all, he was the Avatar. Avatar Kuruk certainly had no problem with it (though that was a frequent point of contention between him and the other Avatars).

"People are relying on me to get this done, Tara. I can't disappoint them."

Abruptly stopping her movements on his back, Katara grabbed the documents and held them out of reach of the airbender.

"I'm going to tell you exactly what's going to happen now,” she huffed. “You are going to forget about these documents tonight. Tomorrow, if and when the council asks, you are going to tell them that everyone is taking the next week off because of how overworked they are. But for right now, you are coming with me for some nice, relaxing midnight waterbending. No sparring, just an orb of water back and forth.”

Aang opened his mouth to argue but faltered, seeing the determined look on Katara’s face. Instead, he just shook his head and chuckled.

“My wife, the epitome of responsibility and good work ethic, is not only encouraging, but actively telling me to blow off work and waterbend with her? Who are you and what have you done with Katara?”

The waterbender blushed, but the fire in her eyes did not die down one bit. “Maybe it’s this baby, maybe it’s the full moon, but you were the one who showed me how to have fun when I needed it, Aang. Now it’s my turn to return the favor.”

Aang sighed and set down his pen as he stood up.

“Lead the way.”

Katara eagerly took his outstretched arm and pulled him in the direction of the cove. On the southern tip of the island, surrounded by rocky cliffs on either side, there was a small lagoon, heated by the same source as that of the hot springs along the stream they had visited earlier. As a result, the water was comfortably warm all year round, and was incredibly effective for relaxing the mind, body, and soul.

The two arrived in mere minutes and the heat immediately had its desired effect. Tension evaporated away like water on hot coals as the two entered the steam and began to strip into their waterbending clothes, Katara in her bindings, slightly modified to accommodate her growing bump, and Aang in his undergarments.

The full moon reflected brightly off the surface of the water, creating an almost halo-like effect around the two benders as they entered the shallow end and began passing around a ball of water.

They easily settled into a consistent rhythm, moving back and forth in time with the ocean tide pushing and pulling around their feet. It was almost hypnotic in a way, and the monotonous motion calmed Aang’s erratic thoughts.

His head now far clearer, the airbender flicked his wrist, splashing a bit of water in Katara’s face.

“Did you just-” she asked in shock

He gave her a cheesy grin. “Maybe.”

“Oh, it is on.”

Instead of passing the ball of water back to Aang, Katara held it over his head, smiling devilishly.

“You wouldn’t,” Aang gasped.

“Wouldn’t I?” she smirked.

Without another word, Katara released her hold, and the sphere splashed down onto Aang, leaving the airbender soaked and spluttering.

“Two can play at that game.”

Aang swept his hands from side to side in a large motion that caused the water around Katara to rise higher and higher, soaking her from the hips down.

The waterbender began to form her counter to it, a large wave building behind Aang out of his line of sight, without realizing that the water around her had suddenly receded as he had the same idea.

The two simultaneously released their grips, and their waves swept over both of them, submerging them for all of a few seconds before the water settled and they came up for air. They were left sitting on their butts, completely soaked with their knees and torso mostly submerged, and burst into laughter.

“So much for some peaceful waterbending,” Katara chuckled.

“It may not have been peaceful, but it was exactly what I needed,” the airbender smiled. “Thank you, sweetie.”

“Of course,” she yawned, making Aang yawn as well.

“Looks like it’s time for bed,” he murmured, eyes bleary.

“It’s a warm night,” Katara said as she stood up. “Maybe we could sleep out here?”

Aang quickly strode through the water onto shore, Katara right behind him, and turned towards her, kissing her forehead.

“Cuddling and sleeping under the stars with my beautiful wife? Sounds absolutely perfect. Let me just get some pillows from the temple.”

“Oh, no, Aang, you’re already tired and worked so much today, you don’t have to do that-”

“Ah,” he interrupted. “My job to take care of you. Besides, the jog will help me sleep faster,” he winked, running off towards the spire.

Within a few minutes, he had gone and returned, pillows and blankets in tow, and the two quickly set up a little sleeping area on the beach so that they could finally settle down for the night.

“Ah,” Aang sighed as the two lay down on their sides and began to close their eyes. “The council might be mad, but you know what? Screw it, I’d take waterbending with you over boring paperwork any day."

“Well, I should hope so. I’d like to think I’m more exciting than paperwork,” she smiled, giving him a soft nudge. “You know, it’s not every day we get a whole day like this and it means a lot. You mean a lot. I love you, Aang. I hope you know that.”

“I do,” he smiled and leaned down to press a kiss to her stomach. “I love you too, Katara. You and our precious baby. Sweet dreams, love.”

“Sweet dreams.”

[raincloudcolors]

The mindlessly learned helplessness like the water that falls through the cracks between rocks. Though it somewhat feels like I should get up and storm out of the room to try and resist all the the things that represent frustration, those pointed fingers that say to just stay -- stay where I am. Tried reading books and read some more, tried those unfamiliar things starting with 'untact.' Even tried working out at home. Tried delivery food too. Wasn't it a year in which we tried everything we could do in our small rooms? Though we are still going on like this.

.... Will spring really come this time, will a real spring-like spring come? Although I'm not going to expect anything because I don't want to be disappointed, I think -- after all, those who hold on tight, even to fragments of, to the last ray of hope to be able to wake from sleep again -- isn't that what people are? I engrave in my heart once again the fact that I'm receiving the loving and affectionate eyes of lots of people amidst all this, even in this cold winter, and I determinedly say to myself: I won't break easily. Even if there is no one around, I'm listening.

Even though I said to myself, let's write something a bit short and simple while sending off this year, seeing the overflowing train of words, I think there's still a long way to go until I become a large, beautiful tree. Even if I prune every day, the clear and faint words and imaginations climb up the back of my head and grow. The thought that I get of not being able to live on without reaching my hand out and waving it around, even in an empty void, is probably just how I originally am. Adults around me said that, "you're the type of person who has to calm down, let your anger out a bit." Not even anger, but anger.

...

The sunset is hanging from the ends of the eaves. To the many specks of dust like me who try hard to float in order to remain in any form within this blue dot [the Earth], and also to those familiar cold smiles and rules on the outside that threaten and try to swallow us whole, I write a letter. That this one year wasn't in vain. In the end, I can't think of anything but the word 'love', but I write again liek this, searching aimlessly for somewhat better words that have not been worn out. Within these days of exhaustion, thank you for willingly being with us on this tiring journey. ... Do remember, they can't cancel the spring.

-Kim Namjoon (January 1, 2021)

[I swear I tried to only type out the important bits.... but it was all so gosh darn beautiful it was hard to make any cuts.]

[nikolai-novak]

Nikolai’s Travel Timeline

Nikolai graduated from high school in 2018, shortly before his 18th birthday in August. Given his family circumstances at the time, he really needed to get away so he took advantage of the fact that he had a full drivers licence and more than enough money to fund his travels.

June 2018 - December 2018

Nikolai was inspired by a photographer that he really liked -- Brian DeFrees -- when it came to mapping out his road trip around the state. In 2011, Brian travelled through 30-odd states in 53 days to see all the major landmarks. Nikolai followed a similar pathway by catching a flight to Virginia, bought a Kombi van, and started the road trip. Nikolai, however, took a full six months to complete the trip. Nikolai visited the following states and explored significantly in each:

Virginia

South Carolina 

Georgia 

Florida 

Louisiana 

Texas

New Mexico 

Arizona

Nevada (in which he caught up with old friends from high school)

California (in which he briefly stopped in and visited his parents to ease their nagging)

Oregon 

Washington (in which he met August Bright for the first time and his intended short stay in Washington was extended considerably. This is a major contributing reason as to why a trip that could have been completed in two months ended up blowing out to six months in duration. (@augustbright)

Idaho 

Montana 

Wyoming

Utah

Colorado 

Nebraska 

South Dakota 

North Dakota 

Minnesota 

Wisconsin 

Iowa

Illinois 

Ohio 

New York 

Nikolai then sold his Kombi van in New York and booked the cheapest round the world ticket that he could find. The ticket included flights from New York --> London --> Bangkok --> Singapore --> Sydney. 

December 2018 - September 2019 

After booking his flight to London, Nikolai spent the next nine and a half months backpacking around Europe. Now this was genuine backpacking, with Nikolai relying on various forms of transport -- including trains, buses, and even hitchhiking at times. His adventures were as follows: 

Great Britain leg -  England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland 

Central Europe, primarily via train - Netherlands, Germany, Czechia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland, France

Balkans leg - Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo 

Iberian leg - Spain and Portugal 

Transylvanian leg - Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania 

Baltics leg - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Russia 

Scandinavia leg - Denmark, Sweden, Norway 

South Caucasus leg - Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan 

Greek Islands leg 

Note: It was in London that he first met Hannah Callaghan. The two met in a bar, hit it off, and fell into bed together. Nikolai didn’t stay in London for long, however he and Hannah have remained in sporadic contact ever since and will always hook-up again when they’re in the same place at the same time. @hannahcallaghanmu

October 2019 - November 2019

After finishing in Europe, Nikolai booked the next flight on his round the world trip and headed to Bangkok. He spent the next two months backpacking around Thailand, both north and south: 

Thailand - Bangkok, Ayutthaya, Kanchanaburi, Hua Hin, Ko Tao, Ko Pha Ngan, Ko Samui, Khao Sok National Park, Krabi, Rai Leh, Ko Phi Phi, Ko Lanta

December 2019

After finishing his travels in Thailand, Nikolai used the next part of his round the world the world ticket to head to Singapore. 

Singapore - exhausted from all the backpacking, Nikolai just spent a week in a resort in Singapore. Whilst he did explore the city, he was mainly focused on relaxing and recuperating in a 5-star hotel after primarily sleeping in vans, backpacker hostels, and even tents in some places since first beginning his travels.

December 2019 - July 2020

After Singapore, Nikolai booked the last leg of his round the world ticket and headed to Australia. After landing in Sydney, Nikolai scoured local car dealerships and bought himself another second hand Kombi van and commenced a backpacking trip around Australia. Starting from Sydney, Nikolai’s journey was as follows:

New South Wales - The Blue Mountains, Hunter Valley, Port Stephens, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour, Yamba, Byron Bay

Queensland - Gold Coast, Brisbane, Noosa, Fraser Island, Hervey Bay, Agnes Water, Lady Musgrave Island, Lady Elliot Island, Airlie Beach, Hamilton Island, Townsville, Magnetic Island, Mission Beach, Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef

He sold the Kombi van after finishing in Cairns so that he could fly over to Western Australia. After spending about a week on Rottnest Island, he managed to buy a second hand van that the owners had renovated for their own past long distance road trips. From there, the adventure continued: 

Western Australia - Margaret River, Denmark, Albany, Esperance, Perth, Kalbarri, Monkey Mia, Coral Bay, Exmouth, Ningaloo Reef, Karijini National Park, Broome, the Kimberley

Northern Territory - Darwin, Litchfield, Kakadu, Katherine, Alice Springs, Uluru, The Red Centre

South Australia - Adelaide, Grampians National Park, then the Great Ocean Road into Victoria 

Victoria - Melbourne, Carlton, St Kilda, Brighton, Collingwood, Fitzroy

Nikolai then sold the van, took a flight over to Tasmania, and rented a vehicle as he knew that he would only be there for a few weeks: 

Tasmania - Hobart, Wild West Coast, Cradle Mountain, Launceston, Bay of Fires, Wineglass Bay, Port Arthur

Nikolai then took a flight to Australian Capital Territory, where he spent a few last days in Australia before having to fly back to start at MU:

Australian Capital Territory - Canberra, Jervis Bay

July 2020

After finishing his mammoth Australian adventure, Nikolai received the ultimatum from his parents: either come back to California and get a university degree or they would be cutting off his access to his trust fund. Nikolai requested a couple of weeks to think about it and immediately booked a flight to Bali, Indonesia. Nikolai spent the two weeks in Bali thinking about the offer, before reluctantly booking a flight back to California. 

August 2020 - December 2020 

It was during this period that Nikolai was a student at Monarch University, having enrolled to study Exercise Science and Physiology. Nikolai really didn’t want to be at university and certainly wasn’t passionate about his chosen major. Struggling to adjust to life at MU, Nikolai crunched the numbers and he realised he could continue funding his travel expenses through his travel and photography blog. With that realisation, he called his parents bluff and left campus. His parents didn’t fully cut off his access to the trust fund but did restrict it (meaning that he was able to withdraw less money than usual each month) but between that and his blog, he was able to make it work. 

January 2021 - April 2021

After leaving MU, Nikolai impulsively booked a flight to Florida. He intended to just stay for a couple of weeks to party and blow off steam but ended up meeting Este Castillo (@estecastillo) in Miami. The couple of weeks turned into a few months whilst the two of them casually dated -- which is the most commitment that Nikolai has given to anyone since the whole mess with Lily. Whilst in Florida, his blog really started to take off. Despite the fact that he wasn’t travelling as extensively as he had in the past, people really loved his photos of Florida; and he had plenty of unseen pictures and stories from his previous adventures that he finally had the time to fully share. Este and Nikolai eventually had an amicable breakup as Nikolai was itching to hop on a flight. 

May 2021 - June 2021

Hopping on a flight led Nikolai to another backpacking adventure, this time in Brazil. Nikolai really hit a sweet spot with his photography and travel blog -- when he had first started the account after finishing high school, he had posted a photo a day; which really was only the briefest snapshot of his adventures as he would take countless photos each and every day. Each photo was accompanied with a brief caption to explain where said photo was taken. Having had some time to fully fleshed things out in Florida, Nikolai started posting more and more of the photos that he had taken over the last few years and accompanied them with detailed stories. The combination of his photography and genuine passion for travel was a recipe for success and this only continued as he backpacked through Brazil for two months.

July 2021 - current

Nikolai is back at MU and studying Business and Photography because he wants to figure out a way to make his blog into a sustainable career. Nikolai still has thousands of photos in his back catalogue that he can share, along with countless stories. Still, he’s making sure to supplement the blog by fully exploring everything that California has to offer; and whenever he can, he will take short weekend trips away or make the most of semester breaks to ensure that people get a good combination of both old and new content. 

[x-raysspex]

LBWMF: Glasnow dominant in final tuneup of the Spring

LBWMF: Glasnow dominant in final tuneup of the Spring

Tyler Glasnow was fantastic in his final Spring outing on Saturday. (Photo Credit: Will Vragovic/Tampa Bay Rays) Tyler Glasnow was fantastic in his final tuneup ahead of Opening Day, while the Tampa Bay Rays offense did just enough to eke out a win against the Twins on Saturday. Glasnow fanned 10 across five shutout innings, scattering three hits (all singles) while walking a pair on 79…