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MONAHANS — Low wages and working conditions that truck drivers describe as degrading have sparked an organized labor movement in the Permian Basin, a historic first for the nation's busiest oil field.

About a dozen truckers and local environmental activists descended Monday on three West Texas cities — Kermit, Mohanans and Odessa — and blocked entrances to sand mines with a row of cars to hand out fliers listing their demands to other truckers.

Workers said the one-day demonstration, which slowed production in the nation's largest oil supplier, was a sequel to a similar protest last year that was largely ignored and a warning of the steps they'll take to be heard.

The truckers are demanding to be paid for the long hours they spend waiting to load and unload frac sand — or sand used during fracking to separate the rock, prop it open and prevent it from closing — more restroom facilities near loading areas and the ability to negotiate pay rates based on driving times and cargo weight and, said Billy Randel, a lifelong trucker and organizer with the Truckers Movement for Justice.

“There are no bathrooms for the men and women to keep this economy running out here to use while sitting from two to four to 12 to 36 hours at the wellheads,” Randel said. “There's no facility to go to the bathroom. You know how dehumanizing that is for either a man or a woman to have to use a bucket? This is insanity.”

Federal law mandates that drivers take a ten-hour break before beginning their shifts and may not drive for more than 14 hours straight afterward. After driving for eight uninterrupted hours, they must take a 30-minute break. And truckers may only drive for 70 hours within eight consecutive workdays, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The law says nothing about access to amenities like restrooms.

Randel said there are loopholes in the law that can significantly prolong a driver's shift. Truckers have to wait in hours-long lines at drilling sites to collect frac sand, for example, and the time they spend waiting does not count toward their pay.

Drivers deal with similar wait times when delivering their cargo. Drivers can't abandon their place in line, no matter how long the wait is — if they do they could be fined, suspended or fired.

Many truckers also foot repair costs when their contracts do not include insurance.

“I couldn't afford tires or oil changes,” said Luis Ramirez, one of the protesters Monday. “My family's suffering because of this. The money's not enough.”

Drivers made similar grievances last year in August. Approximately 20 truckers held signs outside sand mines in Kermit and refused to fulfill their deliveries for one day to pressure their employers into improving the terms of their contracts. They wanted pay for every hour they spent on the truck and demanded restroom facilities at every well site requiring sand deliveries.

Two days later, about 30 truckers were fired from their jobs, workers told The Texas Tribune. One of them was Cesar Lopez, a 27-year-old truck driver from El Paso.

In 2022, Lopez saved up $3,500 while working as a forklift operator to obtain a commercial driver's license, which is required for anyone who wants to sit behind the wheel of a truck. Through social media, he came across a sand-hauling job paying handsome wages and was hired for it. He called it a stroke of luck for someone with his experience.

The long wait times in and out of the oil fields eventually dampened his enthusiasm. One shift lasted 18 hours, just waiting to unload sand, Lopez said. He and other truckers use buckets or the open fields as restrooms when there are no facilities.

Most contracts only pay for the delivery, meaning truckers aren't paid for the time they spend driving and waiting in lines. The company paid Lopez $120 for that delivery, he said.

Lopez participated in last year's protest and lost his job two days later. Lopez said the company told him at the time he was fired because business was slow but he believes it was related to his participation in the protest.

Lopez eventually found a new job. Nowadays he calls his belly dump truck home. Parked in a gas station in Pecos near the site of a road construction project, he sleeps in a twin-sized bed squished in the space behind the two front seats of his truck.

He and 18 other truckers who were fired last year filed federal complaints to the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that investigates labor practices. In the complaints, drivers allege several companies retaliated against them for protesting, including 5F-Superhighway Platform, a digital application that matches truckers to third-party carriers, and transportation firms LoHi Logistics, Boomerang Delivery Services Inc., Cegre Trucking, CSM Navarros, J.C. Logistics, Maessa Transportation, Mister M&K Trucking LLC, Petrus and Amus, RBB Transportation and V&F Logistics.

The board has assigned an investigator to interview the workers and companies. If the board finds wrongful labor practices, the complaints will be heard in court.

A representative for 5F declined to comment.

The relationship between truckers and the energy industry is largely indirect. Oil and gas companies don't generally contract drivers. Rather, they rely on providers or third-party carriers to hire drivers, establish work schedules and set pay. One provider can contract hundreds, if not thousands, of truckers.

Currently, the number of licensed truckers isn't enough to fill vacant jobs across the country, a trend truckers said is a consequence of the low wages and working conditions.

Chris Spear, president and chief executive officer of the American Trucking Associations, told Congress in 2023 that the trucking industry faces “an alarming driver shortage.” The number of qualified drivers needed nationwide reached 78,000 last year, a record high. He said that number is likely to double by 2031.

In Texas, trucking accounts for 800,000 jobs, according to the American Transportation Research Institute. One in every 14 jobs in Texas is a trucking position. By the end of the decade, the state will need 160,000 more drivers, said John Esparza, president of the Texas Trucking Association.

“We are losing a generation of drivers, and we aren't replacing them with a generation of potential drivers that is large enough in Texas or in the United States,” Esparza said.

Multiple reasons contribute to the shortage. He said lawmakers have failed to create incentives to attract new drivers. Other factors include “underrepresentation of women and lifestyle preferences that preclude many jobseekers from considering long haul trucking,” he said.

James Beauchamp, president of the Midland Odessa Transportation Alliance, said regional efforts to hire more truckers are in play, including more training programs for aspiring drivers. He said the programs have helped but not enough to keep up with the demand.

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If the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was a boxer, you'd bet on the other guy.

The 5th Circuit, which hears appeals from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, had three rulings upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and eight overturned, more than any other court this term. The conservative circuit court saw its rulings on abortion medication, gun control, administrative power and social media moderation all rejected by the Supreme Court.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh cautioned that the 5th Circuit was taking the judiciary down “an uncharted path.” Chief Justice John Roberts said they were “slaying a straw man.” Justice Clarence Thomas, the most conservative member of the court, authored two opinions rejecting the 5th Circuit's interpretation of the law.

The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit leaned to the right even before President Donald Trump appointed six judges to the bench. The new judges, many of whom trained in Texas' conservative legal circles, have attracted a slew of ideologically-aligned cases.

“One of the most conservative Supreme Courts we've ever had is still repudiating right-leaning decisions from the most conservative appeals courts in the country,” said Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. “But even then, it's doing so in cases that should never have gotten to the Supreme Court in the first place.”

Just because these rulings ultimately got knocked down at the Supreme Court doesn't mean the 5th Circuit is toothless, Vladeck said.

“These rulings have the effect of taking legal theories that were off the wall, and putting them on the wall,” he said. “Even when they're losing, the effect is to make these cases of national import and give credibility to those arguments.”

The Texas two-step

The story of how the 5th Circuit comes to rule on so many conservative cases starts far away from the John Minor Wisdom federal courthouse in New Orleans. It starts in a handful of district courts in remote parts of the three-state region, where, due to geography and population distribution, only one federal judge hears all or nearly all of the cases.

In Amarillo, it's U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. In Lubbock, Judge Wesley Hendrix. In Victoria, Judge Drew Tipton. These judges share something beyond professional isolation — they were all appointed by Trump based on their conservative legal bonafides.

When a group of anti-abortion doctors wanted to revoke the Food and Drug Administration's approval of mifepristone, a common abortion-inducing drug, they filed the case in Amarillo.

Kacsmaryk's ruling, in which he referred to doctors as “abortionists” and the process of a medication abortion as “starv[ing] the unborn human until death,” was unprecedented in revoking a medication's long-standing FDA approval. Kacsmaryk overruled the government's argument that the doctors who brought the lawsuit did not have the legal right to sue, known as standing.

“The associations' members have standing because they allege adverse events from chemical abortion drugs can overwhelm the medical system and place ‘enormous pressure and stress' on doctors during emergencies and complications,” Kacmsaryk wrote.

This ruling would have resulted in mifepristone being removed from the market, throwing abortion and miscarriage care into chaos nationwide. But the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, ruling that the medication could remain on the market while the case moved through the system.

The case then went to the 5th Circuit. The three-judge panel, two Trump appointees and one President George W. Bush appointee, agreed that the plaintiffs did have standing to sue. The appeals court ruling would have allowed mifepristone to remain on the market with significant restrictions.

In its first abortion ruling after overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the 5th Circuit's ruling and found the doctors who sued did not have standing. Justice Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, quoted conservative legal icon Justice Antonin Scalia in authoring the opinion.

“As Justice Scalia memorably said, [standing] requires a plaintiff to first answer a basic question: ‘What's it to you?'” Kavanaugh wrote. “For a plaintiff to get in the federal courthouse door and obtain a judicial determination of what the governing law is, the plaintiff cannot be a mere bystander, but instead must have a ‘personal stake' in the dispute.”

The 5th Circuit was advancing an “unprecedented and limitless approach” to standing, Kavanaugh wrote, which would “seemingly not end until virtually every citizen had standing to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like.”

“Citizens and doctors who object to what the law allows others to do may always take their concerns to the Executive and Legislative Branches and seek greater regulatory or legislative restrictions on certain activities,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another Trump appointee, similarly chided the 5th Circuit for its interpretation of standing on a Louisiana case, Murthy v. Missouri. In that case, the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri and five individuals accused the Biden administration of pressuring social media companies to censor information during COVID. They filed the lawsuit in Monroe, Louisiana, a city of 47,000 people, where Trump-appointed Judge Terry Doughty hears most cases.

Doughty ruled that the plaintiffs had standing, and the 5th Circuit agreed. Barrett, on behalf of the Supreme Court, did not.

“This theory is startlingly broad, as it would grant all social-media users the right to sue over someone else's censorship — at least so long as they claim an interest in that person's speech,” Barrett wrote. “This Court has never accepted such a boundless theory of standing.”

“These are lawsuits that should never have been lawsuits,” Vladeck said. “By holding that these plaintiffs do have standing, the 5th Circuit is allowing the federal courts to decide cases they have no business deciding.”

It's not just standing. In a case concerning whether domestic abusers can be barred from possessing guns, Chief Justice John Roberts overturned the 5th Circuit and noted that “some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases.”

Thomas overturned a 5th Circuit ruling that found the funding structure of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional. And on the last day of the term, the Supreme Court ruled that the 5th Circuit had failed to adequately assess whether a new Texas social media law was constitutional.

Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, said these rulings reflect the simple fact that the 5th Circuit is to the right of the Supreme Court.

“Every judge takes an oath to the Constitution, and I think the judges in the 5th Circuit, and really all the courts, have very strong views on what the Constitution means,” Blackman said. “The Supreme Court disagrees on that. That's their call.”

The Supreme Court did allow the 5th Circuit's rulings to stand in three cases this term, including the overturn of a Trump-era rule that banned bump stocks under the federal machine gun ban. The Supreme Court's conservative majority also upheld the 5th Circuit's ruling in a case involving the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

What does it mean?

By staking out such conservative positions, even ones that get overturned in the end, the 5th Circuit has shifted the nation's jurisprudence to the right.

“Litigants deliberately steer lawsuits that could have been brought anywhere into single judge divisions in the 5th Circuit,” Vladeck said. They get favorable lower court rulings that make for great press. They get fairly favorable 5th Circuit rulings. Maybe they lose in the Supreme Court, but look at how much they've done, look at how much they've accomplished by that point.”

One side effect of this cat-and-mouse game, Vladeck said, is the Supreme Court gaining a reputation as a “profoundly centrist institution” because it blocks the 5th Circuit's most extreme rulings.

This repeated repudiation from the Supreme Court is unlikely to impact how the 5th Circuit rules going forward.

“The judges of the 5th Circuit don't work for the Supreme Court anymore than I work for you,” Blackman said. “It's a myth that the 5th Circuit will say, ‘Oh man, I got reversed. Maybe I should rule differently next time.'”

The job of an appellate judge is not to try to guess what opinions would be upheld by the Supreme Court, Blackman said. But the string of legal losses may still have an impact on how this legal strategy plays out going forward.

“It's not surprising that conservative litigants are getting more aggressive because you have a conservative Supreme Court,” said Blackman “But three years in, there have been a lot of cases that just did not yield success. Do they reevaluate and reassess? Or do they keep bringing these cases even when the Supreme Court keeps saying, ‘Go away. Go away. Go, we don't want these cases.'”

Despite taking a tone in recent rulings, the Supreme Court has not taken steps to more formally express its displeasure with the 5th Circuit.

“There's a sizable cohort of judges on the 5th Circuit whose basic attitude is, you know, ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,'” Vladeck said. “In prior eras, that kind of behavior from a lower court would have elicited not just reversals from the Supreme Court, but a pretty stern lecture, and we haven't had that yet.”

It may be that, in some cases, conservative justices appreciate the chance to engage on legal issues that otherwise wouldn't come before the court. When the Supreme Court heard the mifepristone case, for example, justices Thomas and Alito both raised the specter of the Comstock Act. These 19th century anti-obscenity laws have been essentially defunct for more than 100 years, but conservative lawyers have been trying to revive them to further restrict access to abortion.

Neither the original case, nor the eventual ruling from the Supreme Court, hinged on the Comstock Act. But the hearing offered an opportunity to bring the issue onto the most significant legal stage the country has.

“The cumulative effect of all of this is to exert a whole lot of pressure on the legal system in one direction,” Vladeck said.

Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!

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McALLEN — Hoping to attract more investment into the region, elected officials and business leaders in the Rio Grande Valley are teaming up with their Mexican counterparts to try to rebrand the area under a unified name: the RioPlex.

Hidalgo County officials announced the marketing strategy last month, aiming to highlight the region's assets: four seaports, seven airports, 13 international bridges, more than 100,000 university students and approximately 2.8 to 3.5 million residents in the Valley and northern Tamaulipas.

“We wanted to make sure that we identified ourselves in such a way that we could compete with anybody else in the world,” said Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez.

The effort came from the Hidalgo County Prosperity Task Force, an initiative launched last year to reduce the county's poverty rate by training and educating the workforce for “living wage” jobs. The task force includes a CEO group that gathered for a brainstorming session on how to make the region more attractive to outside investors.

Among the participating business leaders was Joaquin Spamer, founder of Commodities Integrated Logistics, an import and export company with warehouses in the Valley and in Reynosa, Mexico.

Spamer, who leads the CEO group, said cities on both sides of the border have focused on marketing themselves until now. Hidalgo County alone has 22 cities that have previously competed with each other to attract businesses.

“Each one of them, by themselves, is not attractive,” Spamer said. “But when we put our efforts together and we market the region as a whole, then it becomes one of the most attractive places where you can do business.”

The goal of RioPlex is to maximize marketing efforts by presenting a united front to promote the region. But to succeed, the CEO group identified some challenges.

Cortez said they realized that the Rio Grande Valley wasn't well-known internationally and where it was known, it had a negative perception at least partly because of border and immigration issues.

When the Rio Grande Valley finds itself in the news, the subject is often immigration, particularly as Texas leaders cite an ongoing “crisis” at the border as the basis for efforts such as Operation Lone Star — the multibillion-dollar initiative launched by Gov. Greg Abbott in March 2021 that has led to the deployment of thousands of state troopers and National Guard members to patrol the border.

Through RioPlex, Spamer said the task force wants to enhance the positives of the region and leave the negative to cable news.

“We are an economic powerhouse,” Spamer said. “But the problem that we have is that every time that someone wants to talk about McAllen or Reynosa or Brownsville or any other city or any other area in the border, they only like to talk about the bad stuff and that's what we're trying to stay away from.”

But it's not just immigration. Reports of cartel violence have also impacted business along the border.

The U.S. Department of State currently advises citizens against traveling to the state of Tamaulipas, which sits just across the border from the Valley, due to crime and kidnapping.

The advisory prompted a company to nix plans to open up manufacturing plants in McAllen and along the Mexican side of the border, Keith Patridge, president and CEO of the McAllen Economic Development Corporation, told city leaders in April.

The company went to Monterrey instead, Patridge said.

RioPlex echoes the marketing campaign that rebranded the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area as the “metroplex” in the 1970s. For North Texas, it was a way to market the area as a large urban area without the big city prices.

For the Valley, the RioPlex branding will be part of a broader “One Region, One Voice” marketing campaign by the Rio Grande Valley Partnership, a nonprofit that encourages collaboration throughout the Valley for economic development.

During an economic summit during which Valley leaders committed to the “One Region, One Voice” platform, Abbott applauded the initiative.

“The Texas of tomorrow is going to be built right here in the Rio Grande Valley,” Abbott said.

Marketing materials about the region will highlight the area's successes, such as the arrival of a new cancer research center and the opening of a new pediatric hospital. They hope to debunk the narrative that the area is dangerous by inviting legislators and potential investors to visit and see the area for themselves.

“Through local efforts we will try to combat that” negative perception of the Valley, said Daniel Silva, president and CEO of RGV Partnership. But that will take cooperation from officials from all the cities within the region, who will be called upon to celebrate the successes of other cities on social media and other public channels.

Silva said the marketing campaign evolved to include northern Tamaulipas because the Valley's economy is very dependent on maquiladoras — Mexican manufacturing facilities that have a parent company on the U.S. side.

“As RioPlex is said enough, we hope that people can start to correlate it to the Rio Grande Valley and northern Tamaulipas as a whole region,” Silva said.

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!