The Texas Report 6/6

What’s Happening:

• Florida flew asylum seekers from the Texas border to Sacramento (More here)

• Texas Legislative News

• Leaders of election integrity group accused of using donations for personal gain (More here)

• Texas Leads Nation with most Fortune 500 Headquarters (More here)

• Austin Police, Texas DPS partnership could come back soon (More here)

Today’s report covers recent reports that Florida has been using taxpayer funds to send immigrants from the Texas border to California via private jet. And we look at the current state of the Texas special session, where things appear to have ground to a halt in the negotiations for delivering billions in property tax relief for Texans. I’m traveling back to Austin tomorrow, so I imagine Wednesday’s may be a little shorter.

Florida flew asylum seekers from Texas Border to Sacramento

California officials said that Florida picked up asylum-seekers on the Texas border Monday and took them by private jet to California's capital with taxpayer money for the second time in four days.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other state officials have yet to acknowledge the flights, similar to how they responded last year when they flew 49 Venezuelan migrants to Martha's Vineyard via private jet.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is investigating the migrant's transportation, and local officials have provided housing and other resources to the nearly three dozen new arrivals.

Most immigrants are from Colombia and Venezuela, and California was not their intended destination.

Why this matters:

• Texas and Arizona have sent thousands of migrants on buses across the country; however, rarely have migrants been given charter flights.

• Migrants must agree on the busing destination and can't be forced to go. However, there's concern that they may be lied to.

• The two groups sent to Sacramento never went through Florida. Instead, they were approached in El Paso by people with Florida-linked paperwork, sent to New Mexico, and put on private flights to California's capital.

• DeSantis made immigration and migrant relocation a significant part of his legislative priorities and signed a law that allowed the state to transport migrants from locations anywhere in the country.

On Monday, the Bexar County Sheriff (San Antonio) announced that it had filed a criminal case with the district attorney's office over the flights from San Antonio to Martha's Vineyard last September.

"The charge filed is Unlawful Restraint, and several accounts were filed both misdemeanor and felony," said Adelina Simpson, a spokesperson for the Bexar County Sheriff's Office, in an emailed statement Monday evening. (More here)

The case is being reviewed by the Bexar County District Attorney's Office.

More context:

Texas Legislative News

We are still in the first-called special session, by Governor Greg Abbott to address:

• PROPERTY TAXES: Legislation to cut property-tax rates solely by reducing the school district maximum compressed tax rate in order to provide lasting property-tax relief for Texas taxpayers.

• BORDER SECURITY: Legislation solely for the purpose of increasing or enhancing the penalties for certain criminal conduct involving the smuggling of persons or the operation of a stash house.

The House has passed it’s priority property tax and border security legislation in-line with what the Governor wants. However, there’s disagreement between the other chamber as the Texas Senate and Lieutenant Governor want to add homestead exemptions into the bill, which has caused negations to stall. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is holding a press conference today at 1:30 p.m. likely to address the current state of negations on property taxes.

When it comes to border security legislation the Senate Committee on Border Security is meeting today on a variety of proposals including:

• H.B. 2 by Representative Ryan Guillen (R-) which increases criminal penalties and establishing 10-year mandatory minimum sentences for certain criminal conduct involving smuggling, the operation of a stash house and more.

• S.B. 2 by Senator Brian Birdwell (R-Waco) adds a new state crime for illegally entering the state of Texas. Authorizes a felony for illegally entering Texas if previously convicted for the same offense.

Thus far 383 bills have been singed by the Governor. Full list

Some of the major bills signed include H.B. 109 by Representative Julie Johnson (D-Dallas), which prohibits health benefit plans from denying an enrollee’s claim for a hearing aid solely on the basis that the price of the hearing aid is more than the benefit available under the health benefit plan.

H.B. 446 by Representative Tom Craddick (R-Midland) which removes terminology of mental retardation and replaces it with "intellectual disability." Secondly, the bill eliminates references to outdated and nonexistent health and human services agencies.

Leaders of election integrity group accused of using donations for personal gain

According to a complaint filed with the IRS “election integrity” activists Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips used the nonprofit True the Vote to enrich themselves.

On Monday, nonprofit watchdog Campaign for Accountability called for an investigation into True the Vote, which has made repeated false claims about voter fraud in elections. The complaint said True the Vote may have violated state and federal law when the charity used donations to issue loans to Engelbrecht, its founder, and lucrative contracts to Phillips, a longtime director. The organization also failed to disclose the payments to insiders in its tax returns, including excessive legal bills paid to its general counsel at the time, who filed election-related lawsuits in four states, the complaint said.

True the Vote began in 2010 and Engelbrecht has used probes into voter fraud as a major fundraising effort for over a decade. The organization rose to prominence following conservative voice Dinesh D’Souza’s election integrity film “2,000” mules which highlighted the organization (and was regularly disproven by numerous other outlets) in theaters across the country.

D’Souza, Engelbrecht, and Philips face a lawsuit from a Georgia voter who sued the pair for defamation claiming he was wrongfully accused of committing voter fraud. Additionally, Former Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office asked federal authorities to investigate True the Vote’s finances after Engelbrecht and Phillips did not produce purported evidence on voter fraud to investigators in 2022.

Engelbrecht and Philips had previously been held in contempt of court for refusing to release the name of a person on interest in a defamation case against them, who they further claimed without proof is a confidential FBI information.

The defamation case was between Konnech, an election management software company and TRUE the Vote.

More on that case here

Essentially, Phillips alleged he was involved in a meeting which revealed hard evidence of Konnech’s alleged influence on the 2020 election. Phillips revealed that evidence was offered on Konnech, showing the company had stored American poll worker data on a server in China. From my research, the organization was never able to submit any verifiable data actually proving any of these claims.

In January, ProPublica and The Dallas Morning News reported Engelbrecht and Phillips created another charity, the Freedom Hospital.

• It aimed to help children and elderly people affected by the war in Ukraine with medical care.

• Its website, which has since been taken down, said it raised halfway to $25 million for a mobile hospital. ProPublica and the News found the effort never materialized. Attorneys for Engelbrecht and Phillips said that it was a good-faith effort and that his clients only raised $268 for the project through PayPal. Lawyers said donations were returned “at Mr. Phillips’ direction.”

Despite Texas law stating directors of nonprofits can’t receive loans from their own organizations, Engelbrecht — who was a director and an employee at the time — regularly received loans from the nonprofit, ranging from about $40,000 to $113,000, according to tax filings. She also earned a salary.

ProPublica has done a very detailed job of covering the various scandals and claims against the organization more of which can be found here:

Texas Leads Nation with most Fortune 500 Head Quarters

Governor Greg Abbott today celebrated Texas again leading the nation with the most Fortune 500 headquarters, growing to 55 and ranking ahead of all states on the just-released 2023 Fortune 500 list.

"Texas is the headquarters of headquarters," said Governor Abbott. “With our strong and growing workforce and welcoming business climate, Texas is where businesses find the freedom to flourish and people find opportunities to prosper. ‘Made in Texas’ is already a powerful global brand. With significant, continuing investments in education and training, workforce development, infrastructure and innovation, we are building an even brighter Texas of tomorrow for generations to come."

The greater Houston metro area is No. 2 in the nation with 25 Fortune 500 headquarters, and the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area is No. 3 with 24.

The 2023 Fortune 500 list ranks the largest U.S. corporations based on 2022 fiscal year revenue.

Austin police, Texas DPS partnership could come back soon

At yesterday's Austin Public Safety Commission meeting, Austin Assistant Police Chief James Mason gave an update on the partnership and said that per the "latest information, I was given tonight, it was probably a couple of weeks out."

The Texas DPS initially came on board in late March in a partnership with the Austin Police Department to tackle crime in the middle of a historic staffing shortage.

On May 13th, the DPS halted operations in Austin, so troopers could be deployed at the border following the end of Title 42.

Assistant Chief Mason touted the success of the partnership, in that "It did reduce our calls for service. It reduced our response times."

Mason highlighted data showing a reduction in crashes and decreases in violent crime when troopers were deployed to certain hotspots. Now, Mason says, crime is back up.

Some activists spoke and believed the partnership made certain communities unsafe because in their opinion DPS targeted black and brown people. Mason addressed some of those concerns and said, "When you really look at the data, 97 of those are warrants, they have warrants. We don't have discretion in that. So when an officer comes across somebody with a warrant, they have to take them to jail."

Additionally, APD has previously made the case that DPS was being sent to the areas with the most calls for service, so in reality, these communities were the ones calling the police the most.

Activists and advocates still said that DPS is the wrong way to go even to address short-term staffing shortages.

Austin is headed into budget discussions where city council members decide what approach to take to address growing public safety concerns. (More here)