SUMMARY: The Climate Prediction Center now gives a 51% chance of an ENSO Neutral winter for 2025–2026, marking the first time this phase leads the forecast with over 50% confidence. La Niña odds are at 37%, and El Niño at just 12%, making El Niño winters effectively ruled out. ENSO Neutral means Pacific Ocean temperatures won’t drive winter patterns, making other, less predictable systems more influential. While La Niña could still occur, bringing drier, warmer weather to the South and wetter conditions to the Pacific Northwest, ENSO forecasts are only becoming reliable now, post-spring, as prediction accuracy improves through summer.

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“Texas made sweeping changes to bail and parole, along with increasing penalties for stolen goods” 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.

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Texas made sweeping changes to bail reform, parole and reentry programs this past legislative session as part of its goal to keep violent repeat offenders behind bars.

Texas lawmakers proposed at least 121 bills that sought to increase criminal penalties by either creating mandatory minimum sentences or elevating punishments, according to the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. However, very few made it to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

Criminal justice reform and a bill that provides air conditioning in all Texas prisons also failed to gain traction.

Here’s what to know about what passed.

Stricter bail requirements 

Texas lawmakers approved a sweeping package to overhaul the state’s bail system, a longtime Abbott priority that had repeatedly failed in the House. Senate Joint Resolution 5, which voters will have the final say on in November, would amend the state constitution to require judges, in certain cases, to deny bail to individuals accused of committing specific violent felonies. Senate Bill 9 will limit who is eligible for a cashless bond.

But the House rejected two other constitutional amendments that Abbott had pushed for: Senate Joint Resolution 1, which would have automatically denied bail to any unauthorized migrant accused of certain crimes, and Senate Joint Resolution 87, which would have automatically denied bail to anyone charged with certain felonies if they had previously been convicted of a felony or were out on bond at the time of the alleged offense.

Under the Texas Constitution, almost everyone who is arrested has the right to be released on bail. The limited exceptions are people charged with capital murder and those accused of certain repeat felonies or bail violations. According to the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court, bail cannot be excessive, and pretrial detention should not be considered the default unless the defendant is a flight or safety risk, as criminal defendants are legally presumed innocent.

Jail reforms left on the table

Texas jails have been facing several issues over the years, including overcrowding, cooling problems during the summer, suicides and violence. Lawmakers passed a few bills to address some of these problems while ignoring others.

House Bill 3006, which would have required the installation of climate control in phases by the end of 2032, passed the House in early May. However, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the leader of the Texas Senate, never assigned it to a committee in the upper chamber, allowing the bill to miss a key deadline to advance.

This is the third consecutive time that a bill to install air conditioning in all Texas prisons has failed to gain approval from lawmakers.

House Bill 1826, which would have required jails and prisons across the state to screen each woman who is pregnant or has given birth in the past year for depression, never made it out of the House committee. House Bill 3725 would have reformed the use of solitary confinement by eliminating indefinite time in restricted housing for individuals solely based on their classification as a gang member, but the proposal wasn’t heard in a committee.

However, lawmakers did pass House Bill 413, which prohibits the pretrial detention of a defendant for longer than the maximum sentences they could receive if convicted. The bill doesn’t apply to defendants being held for mental health evaluations. The law will take effect in September.

Harsher punishments for some crimes 

Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1300 this session, which aims to address the $422 million in stolen goods and approximately $21 million in sales tax revenue that Texas lost to organized retail crime in 2022.

The bill increases the penalty for such crimes based on the value of the property stolen. Current law designates organized retail theft as a Class C misdemeanor, which does not permit jail time when the property taken is valued at less than $100. The bill will increase that to a Class B misdemeanor. As the value of property stolen increases, the punishment would rise, up to a first-degree felony punishable by life in prison if the total value of goods stolen exceeds $300,000.

Senate Bill 1281, which creates a specific offense for stealing mail receptacle keys or locks, with more substantial penalties for those who target elderly communities, also received approval from lawmakers.

However, House Bill 727, which would have heightened the punishment for burglarizing a vehicle when the person carrying it out has a firearm, burglarizes two or more vehicles, or uses a stolen vehicle to carry out the offense, was never brought to a vote in the House. House Bill 268, which would increase the criminal penalty for making specific false reports, such as hoax calls threatening a call for mass violence against schools, also didn’t make it out of committee.

Law enforcement salaries and collaborations with ICE

Texas lawmakers have made several changes to the way law enforcement operates within the state.

One of the more hotly debated bills this session was Senate Bill 8. The legislation would require sheriffs who run or contract out the operations of a jail to request and enter into agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which extend limited immigration authority to local law enforcement officers. The bill would cover approximately 234 of the state’s 254 counties, according to the bill’s author. This bill currently awaits Abbott’s signature.

Abbott also strongly supported and signed Senate Bill 2570, which establishes that a correctional facility guard or a peace officer has the right to use less-lethal force when necessary to control a situation. The governor said on social media that the bill was a response to protests occurring around the country and within the state over ICE raids.

Senate Bill 1321, by state Sen. Brent Hagenbuch, R-Denton, aims to increase the salaries of certain Texas Commission on Law Enforcement positions, such as peace officers, to align with those of comparable law enforcement positions, in hopes of improving retention. Abbott has already signed the bill, which will take effect in September.

However, House Bill 5228, by state Rep. Charlene Ward Johnson, D-Houston, which would have made the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, along with other law enforcement institutions in the state, develop policies to ensure the quality and accuracy of incident-based traffic stop data, failed to make it out of a Senate committee.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/17/texas-bail-criminal-justice-reform-parole/.

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 lawmakers reformed bail, parole to punish reoffenders 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: Center-Left

The article from *The Texas Tribune* provides detailed, policy-focused reporting on Texas criminal justice legislation with a largely neutral tone. However, it subtly emphasizes stalled reforms—like prison air conditioning, mental health screening for incarcerated women, and restrictions on solitary confinement—highlighting the social consequences of legislative inaction. These framing choices, while factual, reflect a modest left-leaning perspective by focusing on civil rights and humanitarian concerns. Still, the article presents Republican-backed measures fairly and without overt criticism, maintaining a primarily informative style. This balanced yet reform-conscious framing suggests a Center-Left bias overall.

““They’re taking Shirly”: An Army sergeant in Houston thought his family was safe, then ICE deported his wife” 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.

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This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

Army Sgt. Ayssac Correa had just started his day at the 103rd Quartermaster Company outside of Houston on the morning of March 13 when he got a phone call from his sister-in-law.

She worked at the same company as Correa’s wife and had just pulled into the parking lot to see three ICE agents handcuffing her.

“They’re taking Shirly away!” she told him.

This month, as protesters clash with law enforcement amid immigration raids in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump has ordered 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 active-duty Marines to respond. The move injected the military into the highly contentious debate over immigration. For the tens of thousands of service members whose spouses or parents are undocumented, the issue was already personal, pitting service against citizenship.

In his first week in office, President Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reshaping the country’s immigration policy, calling border crossings in recent years an “invasion” and arguing that many undocumented migrants have committed “vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans.”

But Correa and his wife weren’t too worried. After they got married in 2022, the couple had filed paperwork to start Shirly Guardado on the path to citizenship, and Correa assumed that, as an active-duty soldier, his family wouldn’t be impacted.

“Me being in the military — I felt bad that it was happening, because I’m also married to somebody who’s going through the [immigration] process. But I was like, ‘Oh, there’s no way this is going to happen to us,’” he said.

That misconception is common, immigration attorneys and advocates told The War Horse. But in reality, there is no guaranteed path to citizenship for undocumented military family members — and no guaranteed protections against deportation.

There are no reliable statistics on how many service members marry citizens of other countries, but it’s not uncommon, says Margaret Stock, a leading expert on immigration law and the military. The progressive group Fwd.us has estimated that up to 80,000 undocumented spouses or parents of military members are living in the U.S.

“You can imagine what happens when you’re deployed in more than 120 countries around the world,” Stock said.

Service members are often hesitant to speak out about their family members’ immigration status.

“It’s taboo,” says Marino Branes, an immigration attorney and former Marine who first came to the U.S. from Peru without documentation. “It’s not like you’re announcing it to the world.”

But he and other immigration attorneys told The War Horse they are working with active-duty clients who are scrambling to get their spouses or parents paperwork as immigration enforcement actions ramp up, and it becomes clear that military families are not immune.

In April, ICE arrested the Argentinian wife of an active-duty Coast Guardsman after her immigration status was flagged during a routine security screening as the couple moved into Navy base housing in South Florida. Last month, the Australian wife of an Army lieutenant was detained by border officials at an airport in Hawaii during a trip to visit her husband. She was sent back to Australia.

As the debate over illegal immigration roils the country, recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows that about a third of Americans think that all undocumented immigrants living in the country should be deported. Fifty-one percent believe that some undocumented immigrants should be deported, depending on their situation. For instance, nearly all those respondents agree that undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes should be deported. But just 5% think that spouses of American citizens should be.

Lawmakers have reintroduced several bills in Congress that would make it easier for spouses and parents of troops and veterans to get their green card.

“The anxiety of separation during deployment, the uncertainty of potentially serving in a conflict zone — these challenges weren’t just mine. They were my family’s as well,” Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Democrat from California, said at a news conference last month. He came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and served in the Marine Corps.

“I find it unconscionable that someone could step up to serve, voluntarily, in our military and be willing to sacrifice their life for our country only to have their families torn apart.”

“I didn’t hear from her for three days”

The morning that ICE took Shirly Guardado into custody had started like any other. She and Correa had woken early to prepare their 10-month-old son for the day and then taken him to Guardado’s mother to watch him while they worked — Correa as a logistics specialist, handling the training for part-time Army reservists at his unit, and Guardado as a secretary at an air conditioning manufacturing company.

Guardado had gotten a work permit and an order of supervision from ICE, meaning she needed to check in regularly with immigration officials, after she was apprehended crossing the border about 10 years earlier, her lawyer, Martin Reza, told The War Horse. Her last check-in had been in February, just a month before.

“She reported as normal,” Reza said. “Nothing happened.”

But on that morning in March, Guardado got a strange phone call at work. Some sort of public safety officer had dialed her office and wanted her to come outside to talk. In the parking lot, three men in plain clothes identified themselves as Department of Public Safety officers, Correa told The War Horse. As Shirly approached, they said her car had been involved in an accident. But when she got close, they grabbed her and handcuffed her, telling her they were ICE agents.

That’s when Guardado’s sister-in-law called Correa.

He said the ICE agents refused to tell him where they were taking his wife. By the time he got to her office, they were gone.

“I didn’t hear from her for like three days,” he said. When she was finally able to call him, from an ICE facility in Conroe, he told her there must have been some mistake.

“They’re gonna realize you got your stuff in order, and they’re gonna let you go,” he told her.

“I kept thinking, ‘Oh, she’s gonna get out tomorrow. She’s gonna get out tomorrow.’ And then that turned into almost three months,” he said.

On May 30, ICE deported her to Honduras. It was her 28th birthday.

Protection through military parole in place

Correa had met Guardado in a coffee shop in Houston in 2020 — “the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said. After they got married, Reza helped the couple file paperwork for Correa to sponsor Guardado to get her green card.

Because Correa was in the military, the couple also put in an application for military parole in place, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services program that can help military and veteran family members temporarily stay in the U.S. legally while they work to get a more permanent status.

The program grew out of the experiences of Yaderlin Hiraldo Jimenez, an undocumented Army wife whose husband, Staff Sgt. Alex Jimenez, went missing in Iraq in 2007 after his unit came under insurgent fire.

Alex Jimenez had petitioned for a green card for his wife before he deployed, but while the Army searched for him, the Department of Homeland Security worked to deport her. After the case gained national attention, the department changed course and allowed her to stay in the U.S. temporarily. She was awarded a green card in July of 2007. Almost a year later, the Army found her husband’s remains.

“After that case, the bureaucracy realized that they could go ahead and do this for everybody,” Stock said. “It would solve a lot of problems for military families, and it would contribute to readiness, and the troops are going to be a lot happier, because there’s a lot of troops that have this problem.”

But not everyone is granted parole, and filing can be complicated. Historically, all of the military branches have offered legal assistance to military family members applying, as long as legal resources were available. But the Coast Guard recently “discontinued” its legal assistance to undocumented Coast Guard family members looking to apply for a military parole in place, a spokesperson said in an email to The War Horse.

In response to follow-up questions, the Coast Guard called it a “pause” that resulted from a “recent review of assistance with immigration services available to dependents.” The War Horse has confirmed multiple examples of Coast Guard families being denied this legal assistance, although USCIS says the program is still active and military families are still eligible to apply. The other military branches say they have not made any changes to the legal immigration assistance they provide military families under the new administration.

But even for families who are able to apply for parole in place, approval isn’t guaranteed. There are certain disqualifying factors, like having a criminal record, and USCIS offices have discretion over granting parole.

“All of these field offices have a captain, a chief there,” says Branes. “They dictate policy there.”

USCIS denied Guardado and Correa’s application for military parole in place. Even though ICE had released her to work in the U.S. with check-ins a decade earlier, and she had no criminal record, she was technically under an expedited deportation order, which USCIS told her was disqualifying. They told her to file her application for military parole in place with ICE instead.

That’s not uncommon, Stock said. “But ICE doesn’t have a program to give parole in place.”

When ICE agents arrested Guardado, Reza said, her request for a military parole in place had been sitting with the agency for over a year with no response.

“Families serve too”

Correa is planning to fly down to Honduras shortly to bring their son, Kylian, to reunite with his mother. He’s put in a request to transfer to Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras in hopes of being stationed closer to them. He said his wife has been bouncing from hotel to hotel since landing in the country. Her brother, who is a legal resident, flew to Honduras to meet her there, since she has no family in the country, having come to the U.S. more than a decade earlier.

He wants to continue serving in the Army, which he joined in 2018. Shortly afterward, he deployed to Syria.

“This is what I want to do,” Correa said. But if his transfer request isn’t approved, he said he won’t renew his enlistment when his contract is up next year. He’s looking at selling all his possessions and moving to Honduras — anything that will make it possible to bring his family together again.

“You recruit the service member [but] you retain the family,” says Stephanie Torres, who was undocumented when her husband, Sgt. Jorge Torres, who had served in Afghanistan, died in a car crash in 2013. “You retain the family by letting them know, ‘You belong here. You serve too.’”

She and other advocates say that targeting military family members for deportation can harm military readiness by taking away a focus on the mission. Some service members may be scared or unable to enroll their family members for military benefits or support programs.

Today, Torres is working with the group Repatriate Our Patriots, which advocates on behalf of deported veterans, to build up a program to support military and veteran family members who are deported or are facing deportation.

One of the people she is working with is Alejandra Juarez, who became a face of military family separation during the first Trump administration when she was deported to Mexico as the wife of a decorated combat Marine veteran, leaving behind her husband and two school-age daughters.

In 2021, after multiple lawmakers wrote letters on her behalf, then-President Biden granted her a humanitarian parole to reenter the United States and reunite with her family.

Juarez crossed into the U.S. from Mexico when she was a teenager and said she signed a document she didn’t understand at the time that permanently prevented her from gaining legal status.

“When my husband was called into active duty and put his life on the line, it didn’t matter if I had documents,” she told The War Horse. “I was a military wife.

“We should be able to get a second chance.”

Earlier this month, Juarez’s parole expired, and she has no path to citizenship. She sees the administration ramping up its immigration enforcement and ending many of its parole programs. She doesn’t want to spend money or time on what she assumes will be a dead end.

When her parole expired, she said, her immigration officer extended her a grace period to stay in the United States for one more month, to celebrate her younger daughter’s birthday. She’s turning 16.

Then, on the 4th of July, Juarez must leave the country.

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Big news: 20 more speakers join the TribFest lineup! New additions include Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center; Michael Curry, former presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church; Beto O’Rourke, former U.S. Representative, D-El Paso; Joe Lonsdale, entrepreneur, founder and managing partner at 8VC; and Katie Phang, journalist and trial lawyer.

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TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/16/texas-army-sergeant-wife-deported-honduras-ice-undocumented/.

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 Army sergeant’s wife deported to Honduras 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: Center-Left

This article, published by The Texas Tribune in partnership with The War Horse, takes a human-centered approach to reporting on immigration enforcement’s effects on military families. The focus is empathetic, highlighting emotional and logistical hardships faced by service members with undocumented spouses. While it includes quotes from policymakers across the spectrum, the framing strongly emphasizes the failures and perceived injustices of current enforcement policies, particularly under Republican administrations. The narrative prioritizes personal stories over policy defense and critiques systemic gaps without equal weight to counterarguments, suggesting a Center-Left lean that is sympathetic to immigration reform and critical of strict enforcement.