Illegal Aliens Returning as Smugglers
And: Schulman vs. Students, Explaining the Austin Legal Community's Latest Fixation
Good Morning friends.
Ordinarily, we try to avoid cannibalizing too much of what we're producing in the form of news releases to the Kinney County Post, on behalf of the Sheriff's Office.
But, it appears that the Sheriff spent a portion of the holiday period compiling statistics, and some of his discoveries may deserve sharing more widely.
"We're seeing more illegals working as drivers," said Sheriff Coe. In this case, drivers already safely in the country are returning to the border area, trying to bring more in. This leads to speculation that the cartels are offering debtors the opportunity to work off what they owe as part of their smuggling network. This is nothing new-- debtors in the past have had to move drugs. It's no stretch to assume they're also having to move people.
--From a news release, scheduled for Publication this week in the Kinney County Post
Other information from the release sheds additional light on some of what we reported in yesterday's newsletter, about the temporary Border Patrol checkpoints North of Brackettville, giving Deputies a 4 day break in what's been an exceedingly busy month of November. Readers may recall, the checkpoints intercepted almost all of the illegal alien traffic passing through the county during that period.
Deputies have arrested 90 smugglers for the month, and impounded 74 vehicles. 95 vehicles are the single month record so far, putting November at #2.
Looking back at the totals for arrests and charges filed over the last year, it is very clear that numbers are spiking as we reach the month of December, which one can only expect will also set records as title 42 goes away.
It is as if smugglers and the cartels are trying to make their money in time for Christmas shopping.
Year to date, the Sheriff says Kinney County has filed 2,883 felony charges. One smuggler can rack up multiple charges, depending on how many illegals are with them. Meanwhile county has arrested and released 154 female smugglers this year-- letting them go for lack of jail space to hold them in the region. They're all given notices to appear in court at a later date. They basically skip having to post bond.
Pick up a copy of the paper for more end of the month stats. To our minds here at the Dispatch, the standout piece of information is the apparent increase in use of illegal aliens to smuggle more in.
Now's a good time to call to your attention a fresh new article from the Houston Chronicle, by a reporter named Neena Satija, delving into more of the background behind appellate court attorney David Schulman, happenings in Austin, and his work on behalf of Kinney County.
Some of what she relays is previously unknown to us personally, and helps illuminate why Mr. Schulman's tale is perhaps so captivating for the Austin legal crowd. Indeed, if one were the sort to base their worldview on Disney and Star Wars, one could start spinning yarns about students now facing the master. But we're a classy operation here at the Dispatch. We read Shakespeare. Sometimes. Occasionally. Once while in college. This is much more of a Hamlet or Othello situation. Maybe even the Tempest. Totally. Dibs on Yorick, fools, and don't make us have to speculate on who to cast as Prospero.
Joking aside, sorry, we couldn't resist-- Ms. Satija delivers a quality presentation of history and the facts, delving into Mr. Schulman's background as a legal scholar who has helped educate at least some of the attorneys that are presently trying to litigate against Operation Lone Star.
She successfully communicates what seems like a sense of befuddlement on the parts of some of the Austin legal community-- befuddlement, and perhaps shock, at seeing Mr. Schulman arguing on behalf of Kinney County and Operation Lone Star.
It may be that it's a sign of the times-- a sign that the legal community has grown large enough to form orthodoxies and fraternities that are threatening to harden and calcify.
We feel aged-- having to express the fact that time was in the past, one could expect to see attorneys arguing both sides of an issue on various occasions over the course of years, and see them hailed as being principled advocates willing to do their best on behalf of their clients, and no more need be said. Now, it's almost as if that's never been the case, and attorneys are expected to be true-believers or die.
To us here at the dispatch-- while the appellate court matters Mr. Schulman is involved with are indeed serious, they do not seem as central to Operation Lone Star as some might think. We freely confess our bias, but we find some of the arguments we've heard against the cases and how they were filed in Travis County to be very compelling. It seems unlikely to us that higher courts will be willing to allow a precedent that could see attorneys filing in Lubbock County, for rulings on cases under way in Tarrant County and vice versa, for example.
But as always, we are not attorneys here at the Dispatch, and now more than ever, the law appears to be a funny-shaped football-- liable to bounce in all kinds of strange directions.
We found Mr. Schulman a likeable sort in our one phone call with him to date. He seemed to share a similar bemusement with the situation. We are not shocked he didn't want to speak with reporters and be singled out even further as some kind of essential wheel in the Operation Lone Star apparatus, when truthfully, he probably isn't.
Before Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in 2021, two people worked in the Kinney County Attorney’s office: Smith, who was an oil and gas lawyer before getting elected to the post, and a secretary. Now a handful of national guardsmen work in his office as paralegals. Prosecutors based in El Paso and Pecos are pitching in, too.
Then there is Schulman, a veteran appellate attorney who Smith hired to handle a flood of more complex legal challenges that have been filed against his office in recent months.
Schulman’s qualifications for the job are unquestionable, but his dedication to the mission of the border crackdown is not. In a recent court appearance on behalf of Smith, he called the operation “a waste of time and money.”
Adding to the irony of his new job, Schulman has also helped train the skilled defense attorneys now waging a fierce counterattack against Operation Lone Star. They’ve been flabbergasted to see Schulman on the other side.
“I was shocked,” said Angelica Cogliano, a lawyer based in Austin who represents a handful of migrants that Kinney County is prosecuting. “David was a mentor to me. We had generally, before now, been aligned on what’s right and wrong.”
Becoming one of ‘them’
Many defense attorneys also consult for prosecutors, especially in smaller counties. But Schulman's work for Smith feels different to Cogliano and many of her colleagues, because Kinney County is the chief participant in the border arrests.
--Reporter Neena Satija in the Houston Chronicle
This sort of speaks to what we were saying earlier-- about how this all has the whiff of some kind of orthodoxy about it. As if matters of right and wrong may be clearly defined. One must envy the youth-- for surely that is what they must be, to so confidently think they can diagnose right and wrong along the border in so straightforward a fashion.
One of the things we've been saying since the very beginning here at the Dispatch, is that the Border is a murky place. Right and wrong somehow become very complicated matters-- and how could they not be? In this case-- what some of these attorneys deem "right," puts them on the same side of the issue as the hardened criminal element running the Mexican Narco cartels. And what they deem "wrong," puts them in direct opposition to small town folk who are trying to grapple with the out-of-control situation here on the Texas-Mexico border.
This is complicated stuff of course. And one imagines they would take issue with our assessment, saying they are on the side of the cartels. But that's the border for you. Motivations, history, and behaviors all take on a strange protean sort of flexibility that defies most attempts at simple explanations, and makes it possible for people like ourselves to feel empathy for many of those attempting to cross, while also believing in the need to truly secure the border.
It is tempting, perhaps, to just throw one's hands up in the air and say "both sides are right!"
But no-- sadly, that is not the case. There is a right and wrong. And it is not easily arrived at. No matter the sympathy one might feel for the various individuals caught in the teeth of the Government's dysfunction here on the border, one has to recognize that the current chaotic free-for-all that has been fostered and foisted upon these communities is of no service to them, the migrants hoping to cross, or the street-level Border Patrolmen and other law-enforcement that are being overwhelmed while trying to maintain some semblance of sanity in the region.
Right now, the only clear beneficiaries of the chaos are the cartels, and whatever business or other interests that are presently in favor of the current situation, secretly or otherwise.
And advocating brainlessly on behalf of the cartels and calling those in opposition to them "racist" or "cruel" is incredibly sophomoric, and deserves to be singled out as so.
Attorneys merely trying to help individuals caught in the teeth of this dysfunction deserve an ounce or two of credit and respect for those efforts on behalf of the poor, but one finds the elementary bleating of shock about Mr. Schulman's activities as an advocate, calling him "one of the bad guys" or whatever, to be positively gross and pedestrian.
Kinney County officials would not say how much they are paying Schulman, but by all accounts, the work hasn’t made him rich. He drives a 2010 white Ford minivan and is known across the state for being generous with his time and advice, often for free.
“I’ve never heard of an attorney that he’s turned down,” said Mark Jones, an attorney in Houston who has been friends with Schulman for more than 20 years. “He’s one of the few people that could make a lot more money than he does, but he just likes helping.”
Schulman became a lawyer at age 38 after working for years in the Las Vegas casino industry. He moved to Austin in 1991 to work for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which, as Texas’ highest criminal court, publishes hundreds of opinions each year that affect criminal law across the state.
The work piqued Schulman’s interest in appellate law, and he began publishing newsletters and organizing seminars around the topic. Thus “Dave’s Bar Association” was born in 1997 with about 50 members and dues of $85 a year. Membership soon swelled to over 200 people, with a few dozen attending annual conferences in Hawaii.
Schulman even managed to convince Sharon Keller, the longtime presiding judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals, to award the group $200,000 in state funds in 2002. The grant did not continue after more established attorneys’ groups complained, but the conference continued to grow, attracting Keller herself one year. Prosecutors also attended.
Along with helping defense attorneys and representing criminal defendants, Schulman began to consult for a number of small-town prosecutors in appellate court proceedings, records show. Though Kinney County was not a client of his at the time, several of those prosecutors he worked for are now involved in Operation Lone Star.
--Satija, again
Some might be tempted to single out this section of the article as grounds to boo and hiss at Ms. Satija's reporting. We disagree. If one is predisposed to think the worst of Operation Lone Star, and Mr. Schulman's involvement, pecuniary matters would seem to be of concern, and worth pointing out, even if it’s to say there don’t appear to be any concerns. It would seem to be due diligence.
We feel confident in saying that when considering the state’s spending on the courtroom side of things, the majority of it has gone to the various indigent defense organizations that are representing those arrested.
Indeed, while Kinney County has seen a widely publicized 3-million dollars in additional state funding for OLS, more than 10-million dollars have been steered to the Lubbock Private Defenders Office and Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid.
We have brought this element of the reporting forward to make that point-- and underline Ms. Satija's assessment that Mr. Schulman is not getting rich.
Don't mind admitting, finding out that he's driving a 12-year-old minivan and has been so generous with his advice and knowledge over the years makes us like him even more.
If his colleagues cannot wrap their simple minds around what he's doing as a professional-- as part of the process, no different from any other officer of the courts-- then perhaps they need to go back to attorney ethics remedial school. And we can't believe we're typing that phrase. But there it is-- and by their own actions and behaviors be it.
We may be reading too much into their comments. It’s possible these attorneys meant them in a lighter fashion than we are interpreting them as. Sincere and awkward apologies if so.
In the end, kudos to Ms. Satija for an informative piece that we are glad to see did not get lost in the pre-Thanksgiving week shuffle.
We had more in the quiver for this morning-- apologies to our good friend Mr. Local Wag. We told him we'd be talking about another thing, but we're already up over 2-thousand words.
Have a great morning-- and we'll be back again soon in our next edition to explore what Mr. Wag is calling the "Reverse Coyote" culture, along with whatever else is both major and timely.
Until then, we want to remind everyone that this newsletter is an independent work product, that we do our best to keep separate from our day job at the Kinney County Sheriff's Office, and no one should mistake our words here for any sort of official communication. Indeed, any errors or other misdeeds are entirely our own, as the newsletter is produced solely by us, without any input or oversight from Kinney County officials.