District Court Hearings
And-- a quick correction for our email readers
Good morning friends,
Just a short one today. Things will be busy at the Civic Center and Courthouse in Kinney County as District Court gets underway. We haven’t combed the docket personally, but we feel pretty confident in predicting that most, if not all of the cases involve accused smugglers who have not been willing to take a plea before trial.
In Monday’s Commissioner’s Court meeting, County Attorney Brent Smith estimated that his office has put together around 5,000 Operation Lone Star related prosecutions in total.
He also spoke briefly about the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that we mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, saying he believes it’s a fairly historic thing.
He gave the following statement to reporter Wanda Selby from the Kinney County Post:
“Kinney County is very pleased that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled to uphold the sovereignty of local courts and elections. We believe this decision underlines the importance of local elections and their impact on courts and prosecutors.”
—Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith, in a statement to the Kinney County Post
Readers may recall, the Court’s ruling essentially blocked efforts to take cases from Kinney County, and have Travis County courts handle them.
Now is probably a good time to mention this tweet we saw recently from the Governor of Texas.
Right now, smuggling is already a state felony, calling for a 2 year minimum sentence, and a possible max of 10 years.
Increasing that is technically something that’s up to the legislature but the Governor does tend to help set the agenda for state lawmakers.
Sadly, it’s not unheard of for elected and appointed officials in Starr County and other areas of the Rio Grande Valley to run afoul of the law. Kudos to the DA there for acting quickly, after one of his employees was apparently busted for allegedly smuggling aliens.
Odds are if you turned on the TV yesterday, you saw the video from El Paso— showing a massive stream of humanity, pouring into the country. Roughly 7400 people crossed illegally from Mexico and South and Central America over the weekend.
About 1500 crossed right in front of cameras Monday morning. Awfully convenient, and it’s probably going to lend a little imaginary credence to claims that somehow crossings are being staged for the benefit of video cameras.
As we’ve mentioned in past Dispatches, such critics are probably responding to the overall falseness of the situation— recognizing on some level that there is no way on earth every last one of those individuals is truly a legitimate asylum seeker.
There is no doubt that Border Patrol facilities in the El Paso area are overwhelmed with such numbers— and that many hundreds had to be released into the city, set free and unaccounted for today as reported by Breitbart, Fox News, and others.
We mentioned a need for a correction— we have to amend yesterday’s reporting. It’s been corrected on the website already, but we’re doing it here too, so that our email readers see it.
We were wrong when locating that deadly rollover crash at the Sycamore bridge. It was actually closer to the Pinto Creek bridge. Both spans are very similar, crossing mostly dry creekbeds that lie between Del Rio and Brackettville. The Sycamore is the longer of the two.
And that’s not the only correction, sadly. We referred to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals as the Texas Criminal Appeals Court. The incorrect word order would suggest that the court is made up of a bunch of crooks, or behaves in a criminal fashion. Obviously not our intention— and not a Freudian slip. Honest!
It is probably a good time to restress as always that the newsletter and any errors, misdeeds, or ridiculous takes are entirely our own— that it is produced without input from Kinney County officials and should not be mistaken for any kind of an official local government communication.
Have a great morning, we’ll see you again soon.