‘King of the Hill’, a First Flood Lawsuit, and ICE Showdowns. From The Barbed Wire

Howdy, folks! I’m Brian Gaar, senior editor of The Barbed Wire. The sun is broiling and the Wild Texas Newsletter is back with stories hotter than a fire ant mound that just got kicked by a barefoot Aggie.

This week, I wrote about the excellent “King of the Hill” reboot, which offers a hopeful version of Texas — where disagreements happen over a beer in the alley, and where you can be set in your ways without using that as an excuse to be an asshole (or electing one). The reboot shows Hank rediscovering Texas in a way that’s as sweet as it is funny. It’s “Ted Lasso” for those of us who tried, and failed, to get into soccer. Hank is the relative you have no-go areas of conversation with, but you still love them.

A new lawsuit this week is the first to be filed in response to the July 4 floods that killed 119 people in Central Texas. “She was ...going to make a difference in the lives of people, particularly kids,” said David Floyd, whose daughter Jayda died with her fiancé.

We have a chilling story from Leslie Rangel this morning about the Texas families living in fear as they head back to school this month. About 15% of K-12 students in Texas — or 890,000 children — have at least one undocumented parent, and an estimated 111,000 Texas kids are undocumented.

Even priests couldn’t stop ICE from snatching an asylum seeker in Harlingen last month. His crime? Following every rule for five years while seeking asylum. As one Jesuit priest put it: “Just like that, everything we feared came true.” 

Meanwhile, HBO’s new documentary ‘The Yogurt Shop Murders’ revisits a 1991 Austin crime that left four girls dead, a police department reeling, and a city haunted for decades. Four teenage girls, a police department in over its head, and decades of grief have left the case officially unsolved — though not for lack of wrongful convictions, botched investigations, and political pressure to close the file.And finally, on the same day Texas debated letting people sue over abortion pills, a lawyer filed a shocking wrongful death suit claiming someone secretly laced hot chocolate with abortion drugs.

Nearly a Million Texas Students Have an Undocumented Parent. Who Will Protect Them When ICE Comes?

Jonatan Pech was on his way to college freshman orientation when ICE took his mom. As immigration arrests disappear families, kindergarteners and college freshman alike are heading back to school. Community members have stepped up: “We can’t abandon them.”

By Leslie Rangel

Eighteen-year-old Jonatan Pech sat in the passenger seat of his family’s sedan as their headlights pierced the morning darkness. His older brother, Cristian, gripped the steering wheel. The music shuffled between Houston rap to salsa and then R&B, lullabies for his sister Esme who slept in the backseat while his mom, Teresa, looked out the window, towards her son’s new life chapter. 

The four had left Houston shortly after 4 a.m. that Tuesday for the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Texas A&M’s Corpus Christi campus. Jonatan had to check in by 8 a.m. for his July 8 freshman student orientation, dubbed “Islander Launch” by the university. 

Family vacations weren’t a privilege they often came by, so Jonatan had an idea. “I was like, ‘After orientation, can we stay a little longer so we can, like, explore the city for a bit?’” 

His mother, Ma as Jonatan calls her, said yes. A single mom, she immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala as a teenager, pregnant with Cristian, in search of the illustrious “American Dream.” 

Teresa, 51, has lived in Houston with her family for more than 20 years.

The two brothers had stepped up to take extra jobs and help with bills after they became estranged from their father. Out of the three siblings, Cristian was the first to go to college. Now, it was Jonatan’s turn, with the help of scholarships he received for outstanding grades and leadership. He wanted to celebrate with a visit to the Selena Museum, which is about 20 minutes northwest of campus, and then the beach, to let family stressors float away in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

They were driving through Refugio County, still about an hour away from the university campus, when Jonatan woke up to red, blue, and white lights in the rearview mirror. 

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