Texas

McKINNEY, Texas (AP) — Seven officers involved in the in-custody death of a Black jail inmate in Texas whose family members say may have been suffering a mental health crisis have been fired, a sheriff said.

The detention officers violated sheriff’s office policies and procedures leading up to the death of Marvin Scott III, Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner said in a news release Thursday. An eighth officer resigned. The names and races of the officers haven’t been released.

MISSION, Texas (AP) — Overwhelmed and underprepared, U.S. authorities are releasing migrant families on the Mexican border without notices to appear in immigration court or sometimes without any paperwork at all — a time-saving move that has left migrants confused.

DONNA, Texas (AP) — More than 500 migrant children were packed into plastic-walled rooms built for 32 people, sitting inches apart on mats with foil blankets Tuesday at the largest U.S. Customs and Border Protection holding facility for unaccompanied children.

Overall, CBP’s main child processing center, a compound of white tents in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, held over 4,100 migrants, more than 3,400 of them children who traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border alone. The rest of the migrants being housed were families.

(AP) --- More than a dozen states will open vaccine eligibility to all adults this week in a major expansion of COVID-19 shots for tens of millions of Americans amid a worrisome increase in virus cases and concerns about balancing supply and demand for the vaccines.

HOUSTON (AP) — The Biden administration is not requiring FBI fingerprint background checks of caregivers at its rapidly expanding network of emergency sites to hold thousands of immigrant teenagers, alarming child welfare experts who say the waiver compromises safety.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — As Texas legislators gather in person Friday to consider sweeping changes to who in the nation’s second-largest state can cast a ballot and how, some voters say the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is forcing them to choose between their health and their right to be heard by their government.

So they are staying away from the Capitol.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas officials on Thursday raised the death toll from February’s winter storm and blackouts to at least 111 people — nearly doubling the state’s initial tally following one of the worst power outages in U.S. history.

The frigid weather also was blamed for dozens of more deaths across other Southern states including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama.

(Reuters) - Elon Musk’s SpaceX will be landing its Starship rockets on Mars well before 2030, the billionaire entrepreneur said in a tweet on Tuesday.

The private space company had raised about $850 million in equity financing in February even as a prototype of its Starship rocket exploded during a landing attempt after a high-altitude test launch.

The SN9 prototype was a test model of the heavy-lift rocket being developed by SpaceX to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars.

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The U.S. government has stopped taking immigrant teenagers to a converted camp for oil field workers in West Texas as it faces questions about the safety of emergency sites it is quickly setting up to hold children crossing the southern border.

The Associated Press has learned that the converted camp has faced multiple issues in the four days since the Biden administration opened it amid a scramble to find space for immigrant children. More than 10% of the camp’s population has tested positive for COVID-19 and at least one child had to be hospitalized.

DALLAS (AP) — The U.S. government plans to house up to 3,000 immigrant teenagers at a convention center in downtown Dallas as it struggles to find space for a surge of migrant children at the border who have strained the immigration system just two months into the Biden administration.