“Officials say at least 100 people still missing after July Fourth floods; recovery efforts could take months” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

More than 10 days after catastrophic July Fourth floods along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, the official death toll across six Hill Country counties has risen to 132 people, while an estimated 101 remain missing, state officials said Monday.

Local and state officials said the exact number of people still missing, though, is difficult to determine. The figure presented Monday was the first time state and local officials had publicly disclosed an updated estimate since Tuesday, when that figure was 161 people.

At a press conference Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott said that 97 people were missing from the area around Kerrville, the Kerr County seat. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said the larger estimate of 101 people includes people missing from other counties.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said during a commissioners court meeting Monday that the search for missing people could take up to six months, but setting a time estimate is also difficult.

“How long is it going to take? I mean, who knows?” Leitha said.

Abbott said Monday most of those still considered missing were people who did not check into hotels or campsites. Abbott said many of those people were added to the list of people who haven’t been located after friends and family reported them missing.

“Those who are missing on this list, most of them, were more difficult to identify because there was no record of them logging in anywhere,” Abbott said.

Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top official, said during a county commissioners court meeting earlier Monday that local officials don’t know the exact number of how many visitors who traveled to the Guadalupe for the holiday weekend had been caught in the flood.

“We don’t know how many of them there are,” Kelly said. “Don’t be discouraged when you hear that number, we’re doing the very best we can, but it is an unknown at this point.”

Both Kelly and Abbott said officials had a grasp of how many county residents and people at camps along the river are missing.

Before Monday’s updates, local and state officials had provided little public information about the number of people missing after Abbott first put the figure at 161 people from Kerr County. An update to the Kerr County website page providing updates about the number of confirmed deaths and people believed to be missing removed any mentions of both figures when it was updated Friday.

When The Texas Tribune asked spokespeople for Abbott’s office, Texas’ Department of Public Safety and Texas Division of Emergency Management questions last week about how the number of missing people was estimated, they directed reporters to Kerr County officials. The Joint Information Center, a team of county and state employees and volunteers which has been running public communications for the county since the disaster, did not respond to multiple requests last week to clarify how the number was found, but provided the previous, higher number Abbott provided Tuesday.

Recovery teams are thoroughly scouring large debris piles for any people who were swept into the Guadalupe after it swelled in the pre-dawn hours July 4 following heavy rain. Those efforts have been hindered further by continued rain and flooding in areas already impacted by the initial floods, pausing searches across the Hill Country.

The devastating flood is already one of the deadliest natural disasters in recent Texas history. The 1900 hurricane in Galveston claimed over 8,000 lives and the 1921 San Antonio floods killed 215 people. If official estimates that 97 people are still missing is not an overcount, then the final death toll of the Hill Country floods would surpass those of the 1921 floods, potentially making it the second most catastrophic natural disaster in Texas.

An increase in the number of people confirmed dead could partially — but not completely — account for the drop in the number of people missing. A lower estimate in the number of people missing is not uncommon after mass casualty events. In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, officials try to nail down who was near scenes of disaster, identify found remains and communicate across agencies. In the wake of intense wildfires in Hawaii in 2023, the estimated number of missing people at one point peaked at 3,000 people, however ultimately the number of those killed was 102.

Initial post-disaster lags in communication have already affected flood search efforts: Travis County officials whittled down their missing persons count from 10 people to four after they realized some people were on both the lists of those missing and those who had been confirmed dead, according to a county spokesperson.

As time goes on a clearer idea of who is unaccounted for should begin to appear, said Lucy Easthope, an international adviser on disaster recovery efforts.

“Certainly, by the end of the first month, you’ve got a good idea of what you’re looking for,” Easthope said. “And sometimes in flooding, we’ve seen the Earth only yield its final death toll some months, and maybe even years, later.”

The high number of visitors to the river for the July 4 holiday may also prove another obstacle in nailing down an accurate number, as people along the river in RVs or who didn’t check in to hotels may be unaccounted for. President Donald Trump cast doubt on the true number of those still missing during his visit in Kerrville on Friday.

“They’re getting that count, but the count that they don’t have is how many are still missing, with a lot of lives, a lot of young angels,” Trump said.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/14/texas-flood-missing-update/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The post Texas officials say flood victim recovery could last months appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This article presents a straightforward, factual report on the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in Texas, focusing on official statements and updates about casualties and missing persons. The tone is neutral, providing information from multiple local and state officials without showing support or criticism for any political figure or policy. References to Governor Greg Abbott and former President Donald Trump are informative and context-based, rather than opinionated, maintaining an objective stance typical of centrist news coverage.

SUMMARY: Gov. Greg Abbott is resisting the release of months of emails exchanged with Elon Musk and representatives from Musk’s companies, claiming the communications are private, confidential, and potentially embarrassing. Abbott’s office argues the records involve sensitive policy discussions and business incentives, invoking “common-law privacy” to withhold them. This claim drew criticism from public records experts who say it’s unusual to treat communications between a governor and a billionaire as private. A recent Texas Supreme Court ruling limits enforcement of public records laws against top officials like Abbott. SpaceX also seeks secrecy, citing competitive harm if emails are disclosed. The attorney general will decide on the release within 45 business days.

Read the full article

The post Why Greg Abbott refuses to release his emails with Elon Musk appeared first on www.kxan.com

I’ll admit: Having grown addicted to the treats of literary nonfiction, I don’t make it through too many academic histories these days. If I’m going to, there’d better at least be a decent lede—and the Marxian opening to a new history of the eugenics movement in Texas fits the bill.

“Monsters haunted the imaginations of some of the most educated white Texans from the 1850s to the dawn of World War II,” tees off The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas, a 300-page (endnotes included) work by husband-wife historians Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf. 

Philips, who recently retired from a teaching position at the University of North Texas in Denton, previously authored White Metropolis, a well-regarded history of race in Dallas.

The new book, out June 3 from University of Oklahoma Press, unearths a cast of unsavory Texas characters who pushed eugenics—the discredited pseudoscientific belief that the human species should be improved through practices such as forced sterilization—from the mid-19th century through the 1930s. In the latter decades of that period, the majority of U.S. states enacted forced-sterilization laws that targeted the non-white and the disabled, leading to more than 60,000 coerced operations. But Texas, perhaps surprisingly, never passed such a law. 

“Although a violent and white supremacist place, Texas remained on the sideline during this particular American carnage,” the authors write. The reasons why are the book’s most interesting subject.

Though the Lone Star State ultimately resisted eugenics, it was home to early pioneers. A Georgia-Texas transplant, Gideon Lincecum was a botanist and surgeon who “one day in the 1850s took it upon himself to castrate an alcohol-dependent patient in Texas, an assault he said cured his involuntary test subject’s addiction.” Lincecum did so before the term eugenics had even been coined, and he became one of the earliest advocates of treating humans more like a breeder treats horses or dogs. Lincecum managed to get the nation’s first forced-sterilization bill put before the Texas Legislature in 1853. But Lincecum, much too far ahead of his time, saw the bill fizzle amid “copious mockery.” 

F.E. Daniel, another physician and editor of the Texas Medical Journal from the 1880s until the 1910s, pushed for forced vasectomy and hysterectomy to assure Anglo-Saxon dominance, the book’s authors report. Daniel “embodied the values of the southern Progressive movement,” a particular turn-of-the-century brew that mixed scientific rationalism with rank racism. Eugenicists also made inroads at Texas universities, particularly UT-Austin and Rice. 

But Progressives and egghead professors were poor messengers in a state where politicians like “Pa” and “Ma” Ferguson stoked right-wing populist prejudice against government and academic elites—and where religious fundamentalism was a rising political power. Eugenicist proposals, whether focused on sterilization or restricting who could marry, continued to fail. 

“Attacks on colleges and universities, therefore, provided the unintentional benefit of shielding the poor and politically powerless in Texas from a horrifying, widely shared elite agenda that prevailed elsewhere,” the authors write. In fact, liberal California was the nation’s eugenic epicenter, where deference to academic expertise helped fuel the largest number of forced sterilizations among states—a practice continued through 1980. 

Further frustrating the Texas eugenicists, a large portion of the state’s capitalists depended on cheap Mexican labor and weren’t going to forsake their bottom lines over abstract concerns about race-mixing. John Box, an East Texas Congressman, attempted to overcome these employers when federal lawmakers passed the deeply racist Immigration Act of 1924, which sought to halt immigration from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe. Box pushed for a cap on Mexican immigration, too, but the Western Hemisphere was ultimately exempted.

“To the wealthy landowners exploiting migrant labor, the threat of paying higher wages proved far more frightening than any dysgenic nightmare that Box and his allies could conjure,” the authors write.

Ultimately, the combination of greedy capitalists, right-wing anti-intellectualism, and solidifying religious opposition (Catholics grew rapidly in Texas during these decades, and the Vatican explicitly opposed forced sterilization in 1930) doomed eugenicist legislation that was considered in Austin between the 1850s and the 1930s. In an email to the Observer, Philips called this “a unique alignment that led one set of bad ideas … to defeat another malign worldview.” Soon, the eugenics movement began its fall from grace nationwide as the discovery of Hitler’s concentration camps generally tarnished proposals for racial engineering.

The history laid out in this book could tempt one to reassess today’s right-wing populist attacks on academia. Perhaps these, too, could end up being right for the wrong reasons. But Philips doesn’t think so.

He attributes universities’ erstwhile embrace of eugenics to higher education’s status as “almost universally white, straight, American-born, male, and wealthy.” More diverse scholarly bodies would have likely eschewed such ideas; a Jewish anthropologist, Franz Boas, eventually did help puncture the movement’s pseudoscience, for example. “That’s why the attacks [today] on diversity, equity, and inclusion today are so dangerous,” Philips wrote the Observer. “It threatens to make universities more like they were at the time eugenics became widely accepted wisdom.”

The book takes a pass through more recent figures trying to revive race science in America, like Charles Murray and Richard Spencer, and the authors also highlight the eugenics-adjacent rhetoric of today’s rabidly xenophobic politicians—namely the U.S. president and the governor of Texas. A bit more provocatively, they tie threads between eugenics and the current fight over abortion. While some on the right make hay of the historic ties between eugenics and early advocates for reproductive rights, the authors take another tack by focusing on the power allowed or disallowed to the state.

“The battle over the right of the state to control reproduction once centered on preventing children labeled as dysgenic from being born. By 2023, the state decided it could force women to give birth even when the child had no chance of survival,” they write. “The two great battles in Texas over government power and bodily integrity since the 1850s, eugenics and abortion, had very dif­ferent outcomes.”

The post The History of Eugenics in Texas Isn’t What You Think appeared first on www.texasobserver.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content critically examines historical and contemporary issues linked to eugenics, racial discrimination, and right-wing populism, emphasizing the negative impact of these ideologies and highlighting progressive critiques such as the dangers of attacks on diversity and inclusion. While it acknowledges complexities within politics and history, the article leans toward a center-left perspective by focusing on social justice, systemic racism, and the defense of academic and reproductive freedoms.