God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (24 page)

“Wow, you killed a sea lion?” an impressed legislator asked.

“Yeah,” said Bill. “With a surfboard.”

Inside the Senate chamber, a crucial debate was under way concerning Senate Bill 4, known as the sanctuary cities bill—one of the governor’s priorities. It essentially required Texas to join the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. There are about a million in Houston and Dallas alone.

A few days earlier, 450 people had lined up to testify before the Senate Committee on State Affairs in protest of S.B. 4, which they saw as a discriminatory measure that would codify racial profiling. The line snaked around the rotunda and up to the second level. The hearing lasted more than sixteen hours, breaking up well after midnight. The police chiefs from Austin and San Antonio testified that the bill would harm their ability to work with immigrant communities. A young woman spoke about attempting suicide after her father was deported. In the end, the bill passed out of committee, 7–2, on partisan lines. Clearly, no minds had been changed.

Federal immigration authorities often ask local law-enforcement officials to put a hold—called a detainer—on people in their custody until their citizenship status can be verified. Our sheriff in Travis County, Sally Hernandez, a political novice who had been in office for only a month when the legislature convened, had promoted Austin as a “sanctuary city” in her campaign. She declared that she would honor detainers solely for cases in which individuals are charged with violent crime; otherwise, people who posted bond would be released.

It was as if Sheriff Hernandez had just opened the door to a mob of flesh-eating zombies. Perhaps she didn’t fully appreciate what liberal Austin and Travis County represent to the Republican—largely Tea Party—establishment. Governor Abbott abruptly cut off $1.5 million in state grants to the county. He went on Bill O’Reilly’s TV show and said of S.B. 4, “Today we introduced legislation that will put the hammer down on Travis County as well as any sanctuary city policy in the state of Texas.”

“Is Miss Hernandez doing this for political reasons?” O’Reilly asked. “I don’t understand her motivation.”

“She is doing it to pander to the ideology of the left, just like what you see in
California
,” Abbott responded.

S.B. 4 was quickly loaded up with punitive amendments, all of which were endorsed by the entirely white Republican majority. (Of the thirty-one members of the Texas Senate, only eleven are Democrats; seven of them are Latino.) Under one amendment, Sheriff Hernandez—“Sanctuary Sally,” as the governor began calling her—could be jailed for up to a year if she refused to grant a detainer.

He got his first job in television doing sports and weather on the weekends at WNEP in Scranton, Pennsylvania—the same station where Bill O’Reilly got his start. He adopted a new name, Dan Patrick. Along with the name, apparently, came an evolving new persona. Seven months after that first broadcasting job, Patrick was the sports director of a station in Washington, D.C. In October 1979, he moved to Houston, where he became the sports anchor at KHOU, a CBS affiliate. He had a genius for stirring up attention—getting two Houston Oilers cheerleaders to paint his body blue, for instance, or once reciting scores with a cougar in his lap. The funny hats and fake beards he sometimes wore failed to pull the station out of the gutter, though, and it was sold in 1984, to owners who wanted a more sober-minded anchor on the sports desk. “I couldn’t be a phoney so I resigned,” Patrick announced in a newspaper advertisement, in which he invited Houstonians to his latest venture, a sports bar near Rice University. He grew a beard and set a goal of becoming a millionaire in six years. After that, maybe politics. “I see no reason why I couldn’t be president,” he told
Texas Monthly
at the time.

Like so many Texans in the early 1980s, Patrick thought the boom would never end. “Within two years, I had become involved in five establishments,” he wrote in a spiritual memoir,
The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read
, that he published in 2002. “I had hundreds of employees and a huge in-over-my-head nightmare.” In 1986, when the bust hit with full force, he declared bankruptcy.

The psychic cost of that tragedy is not mentioned in
The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read
. In 1989, Patrick gave a deposition in a lawsuit that he had filed against
The
Houston Post
and its gossip writer, Paul Harasim. Patrick asserted that Harasim had libeled him by writing a false story about a physical encounter at his nightclub. Harasim had written that Patrick had provoked a fight with Alvin “Boom Boom” Jackson, a six-foot-four, 250-pound former football player and hammer thrower at Penn State. Patrick denied that it was a fight or a “tussle,” although it ended when he fell over a trash can behind the back door. Patrick objected to the statements in the article saying that he had lost his “cool” and had screamed insults at Jackson that people in the club had heard. Harasim quoted Boom Boom Jackson: “Maybe I could never have set a record for the hammer throw. But I could have thrown a manager out that night.”

Patrick’s suit was dismissed with prejudice in 1993.

In their questioning, the attorneys for Harasim and the
Post
elicited a portrait of a man who had numerous conflicts, both physical and professional. They also gained permission from Patrick to examine his medical records, which revealed his struggle with depression. He had been hospitalized for exhaustion and anxiety in 1982. Then, in 1986, he was hospitalized again. “Last night, I did a foolish thing,” he told his physicians. “I attempted suicide. I took an overdose of medicine and cut my wrist. I was by myself and realized I did not want to die. I hailed a cab and took myself to the emergency room.” It was the second time he had tried to kill himself. He told the doctors: “I have never experienced a state of happiness.”

This was at the nadir of the oil economy. Bars and restaurants were among the most visible victims of the crash. The Saturday night before Patrick’s suicide attempt, he’d had to shut down his nightclub. Three of his four restaurants would fail as well. The admitting physician’s notes describe “feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, hopelessness and a marked decrease of self-esteem.” Those were feelings that many in Texas experienced as their dreams came to a crashing end.

Later, in Patrick’s first race for lieutenant governor, one of his opponents used the medical information against him, but it backfired. Patrick had taken a big risk—that was part of the Texas ethos—but he had also rebounded, and that fed his legend. In 1988, he rented time on a little AM station in Tomball, a bedroom community within the Houston broadcast area. When the shareholders of the station sued the owner, Patrick was able to negotiate a purchase for the debt. Six months later, he got a call from a then-unknown conservative talk-show host named Rush Limbaugh, who had been turned down by other Houston stations. Within a few months of Patrick’s signing Limbaugh, the station had become a success. He bought another. In 1994, he sold controlling interest in his stations for nearly $27 million. That’s a true Texas parable.

Now, as I looked at Patrick on the dais, at the pinnacle of Texas political power, I thought that Dannie Goeb had reinvented himself once again, this time as a happy man.

Senator Hinojosa told me he thought Sheriff Hernandez was naive and inexperienced. “She talked about honoring detainers only in cases of violent crime, but suppose you’ve got somebody who smuggled in a hundred kilos of cocaine? If you got caught committing a burglary—hell, yeah, you ought to be detained.”

Sheriff Hernandez defended herself in an op-ed: “Tasking our community police forces with the job of federal immigration agents creates a strain, which is why the detainer policy on nonviolent criminals is optional.”

As the debate raged, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) began a national dragnet, targeting undocumented criminals and violent offenders, but also picking up undocumented bystanders. Fifty-one people were seized in Austin, fewer than half of whom were criminals—a lower proportion than in any other city in the country—leading residents to believe that the city had been singled out.

Many Mexican Americans in Texas support stricter enforcement of immigration laws. “As long as there is no profiling of Hispanics, we understand the process,” Senator Hinojosa told me. “Since 9/11, the whole culture has changed.” Under the current practice, however, undocumented migrants—especially those from Central America, who cross from Mexico—often simply surrender to the Border Patrol; if they are released into the interior, they are then given a court date, a year or two in the future. Hinojosa said it makes no sense to allow undocumented people into the country, let them go wherever they want, and then conduct raids to root them out. “It’s a real broken system,” he concluded.

In session after session, the Texas legislature has sought to impose strict rules on voter identification, with the putative goal of preventing election fraud. A 2011 law required voters to present a U.S. passport, a military identification card, a state driver’s license, a concealed-weapon permit, or a Texas election identification certificate. The same law excluded federal and state government IDs, as well as student IDs, from being used at polling stations. A federal judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, in the Southern District of Texas, struck down the law, calling it “an unconstitutional poll tax.” Texas appealed, but the appeal was rejected, in part because there was no actual evidence of voter fraud. (The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) The appeals court sent the case back to Judge Ramos, asking her to determine if the law was intentionally discriminatory. If Ramos said yes, it could trigger federal monitoring of the state’s election laws under the Voting Rights Act.

The question of voter fraud became a national issue after the 2016 presidential election. Gregg Phillips, a former official of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, gave Donald Trump the false idea that he would have won the popular vote if illegal votes had been discounted. Phillips, the founder of a group called VoteStand, tweeted that three million unqualified voters cast ballots in the election. He refused to provide proof, though he told CNN that he had developed “algorithms” that could determine citizenship status. Trump demanded a widespread investigation into voter fraud.

In the midst of all this, Rosa Maria Ortega, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four with a sixth-grade education, in Fort Worth, was found to have registered to vote illegally. She had lived in the United States since she was an infant and was a legal resident, entitled to serve in the military and required to pay taxes. She assumed she could also vote, and had done so previously, in 2012 and 2014. The local prosecutor decided to make an example of her. She was sentenced to eight years in prison. When she gets out, she may be deported to Mexico. I suppose it’s an irony that she is a Republican, and actually voted for Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who has made voter fraud a signature issue.

In April, Judge Ramos ruled that the Texas voter ID law was intentionally designed to discriminate against minorities. Almost simultaneously, a panel of federal judges in San Antonio decreed that three of the state’s thirty-six U.S. congressional districts were illegally drawn to disempower minorities.

Evan Smith, a cofounder of
The
Texas Tribune
, has closely followed thirteen legislative sessions. He took note of the attack on sanctuary cities, the persistent unwillingness to adequately fund public education or to expand Medicaid (in a state with the most uninsured citizens in the country), and the $800 million of state funds allocated to expand border security. “White people are scared of change, believing that what they have is being taken away from them by people they consider unworthy,” he told me. “But all they’re doing is poking a bear with a stick. In 2004, the Anglo population in Texas became a minority. The reality is, it’s all over for the Anglos.”