• In Rare Legal Move, the City of Amarillo Takes Landowner to Court Over Homeless Camp
   
• Courts: Police Can Shoot and Kill People As Long They Are Across the Border

• Is the Texas Open Meetings Act the Next Target for Transparency-Killing Legislation?
   
• Will Mexico Elect its First Leftist President Since 1934?

The Lede
Fenced In: Brownsville Residents Debate Border Activism

• The people who live and cross the border every day are about to lose the border to people who’ve never seen it or crossed it, author Domingo Martinez posits in this essay from our February issue.
   
• "The message that the border isn’t solved by a wall needs to be voiced more loudly," Martinez writes. "A border deserves to be managed by the people who live immediately on either side of it, not bloviators from a capital who can only relate to nonwhites as antiquated stereotypes from the 1980s.”
   
• On Friday, activists from Brownsville nonprofit media outlet Neta responded: "Brownsville and the RGV aren’t perfect. But neither is the West Coast, Seattle, or any other place in the world. Feedback is welcome, but it matters who it’s coming from and what work they have done toward advancing positive change."

• Without State Aid, Advocates Worry Port Arthur Will Bleed Residents Long After Harvey
   
• ICE Detained a Pregnant Rape Survivor for Six Months, Records Show

• ‘The Natural History of Texas’ Celebrates the State’s Lesser-Known Critters and In-Between Places

From the archives
Every Man a Kingpin

• In this 2001 story, Karen Olsson embeds herself in Wichita Falls, covering the explosion of DIY meth manufacturers in rural North Texas.
   
• From the story: "Mike* learned to cook dope as many do, by helping somebody else make it. He was 22 and a business student at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls when he first tried smoking meth at his older brother’s house. He immediately started smoking it every day-at his brother’s, in the car, or wherever the urge struck. He dropped out of school and broke up with his girlfriend of two years. ... Then he started selling meth to supplement the money he earned working off and on at a mobile home factory and a couple other places. Finally he began stealing anhydrous ammonia from a farmer’s co-op in a neighboring county, and he would trade the ammonia – a common fertilizer, and the one thing his meth supplier needed to make a batch that he couldn’t buy at a Wal-Mart-for finished product. ... The two became partners, bouncing from county to county with their bowls and jars and coffee filters, their ground-up Sudafed pills and lithium strips from Energizer batteries, their salt and sulfuric acid and cans of Prestone antifreeze, looking for some remote, wooded spot out in the country, away from the highway, where no one would see them at work."

What’s Happening at the Observer

• Tickets are now on sale for the 2018 edition of the Observer's MOLLY Prize dinner. The MOLLY Prize is an annual national journalism award presented by the Texas Democracy Foundation and the Texas Observer in memory of Molly Ivins, columnist, author, political commentator, and humorist. This year's event will include a keynote from Joan Walsh, of CNN and The Nation. We'd love to see you there.

• The Observer will have a booth at this year's San Antonio Book Festival. The event is April 7, and features a ton of great stuff. More details here: http://www.saplf.org/festival/

• We hired a new staff writer. Justin Miller will cover politics and the Texas Legislature. He was previously a writing fellow at The American Prospect magazine in Washington, D.C., where he covered the labor beat and wrote broadly about national politics and policy.

• The Texas Observer has been holding powerful interests accountable for more than six decades. If you know something that you think needs to be investigated and made public, contact us.