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Todo cambió. Everything changed.

That's how Arturo Monsiváis described life this year for his fifth-grade son, who attends Houston ISD's Raul Martinez Elementary School. Teachers raced through rapid-fire lessons. Students plugged away at daily quizzes. Administrators banned children from chatting in the hallways.

Sitting in the parent pickup line on the last day of school, Monsiváis said his son often complained that the new assignments were too difficult. But Monsiváis, a construction worker, wouldn't accept any excuses: Study hard, he advised.

​​“I tell my son, ‘Look, do you want to be working out here in the sun like me, or do you want to be in an office one day? Think about it,'” Monsiváis said.

The seismic changes seen by Monsiváis' son and the 180,000-plus students throughout HISD this school year are the result of the most dramatic state takeover of a school district in American history, a grand experiment that could reshape public education across Texas and the nation.

In stunningly swift fashion, HISD's state-appointed superintendent and school board have redesigned teaching and learning across the district, sought to tie teacher pay more closely to student test scores, boosted some teacher salaries by tens of thousands of dollars and slashed spending on many non-classroom expenses.

The changes in HISD rival some of the most significant shakeups to a public school system ever, yet they've received minimal national media attention to date.

Still, district leaders, citing private conversations with researchers and superintendents, said education leaders throughout the U.S. are following the HISD efforts to see whether they may be worth replicating. Adding to the intrigue: Texas lawmakers have looked in recent years to policies used by HISD's new superintendent, former Dallas Independent School District chief Mike Miles, as inspiration for statewide legislation.

“I think people are watching and waiting,” HISD Board Secretary Angela Lemond Flowers said. “We're stepping out there big, and it's important because we are a big district and we have lots of students that we need to make sure we're serving better. Not in the next generation. Not in five years. Like, immediately.”

Miles, the chief architect of HISD's new blueprint, has pointed to early successes — including strong improvement in state test scores this year — as evidence that his model works where others have failed. For decades, Black and Latino children in urban school districts like Houston have trailed well behind wealthier and white students in school.

Miles' critics, however, have blasted his approach as an unproven, unwanted siege on the district orchestrated by Texas Republicans. They cite high teacher turnover headed into the next school year and long-term questions about the affordability of Miles' plans as indicators the effort may be doomed.

Regardless of whether the HISD intervention becomes a shining success, a historic failure or something in between, it could help answer one of the most pressing questions in education: Can a large, urban public school district dramatically raise student achievement and shrink decades-old performance gaps, ultimately helping to close America's class divide?

“Back to the future”

The HISD intervention represents “by far the most bizarre state takeover that we've ever seen,” said Jonathan Collins, a Columbia University Teachers College associate professor who has worked with another takeover district, Providence Public Schools.

Typically, states take the reins of districts following major academic or financial scandals. HISD, by comparison, has scored at a “B” level in recent years under Texas' A-through-F rating system and kept its financial house in order.

But in 2019, HISD allowed one campus, Wheatley High School in Greater Fifth Ward, to receive a seventh straight failing grade from the state. Wheatley's scores triggered a Texas law — authored in 2015 by a Houston-area Democrat fed up with years of poor outcomes at some HISD schools — that gave Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath the right to replace the district's school board.

After three years of legal battles with HISD trustees, who tried to halt the takeover, Morath emerged victorious. He appointed Miles and nine local residents to run the district in June 2023.

Rather than focusing on the handful of HISD schools with the most flagrant academic underperformance, Miles overhauled a huge swath of the district — 85 out of roughly 270 schools — in his first year.

In doing so, Miles relied heavily on practices pioneered in the 2000s and 2010s by the so-called “education reform” movement, a loose collection of politicians, charter school organizers and district chiefs.

The group argued that instilling a “no-excuses” attitude toward student achievement and partially tying teacher pay to test score growth could dramatically improve American education. Miles implemented a similar playbook during his three-year stint leading Dallas ISD, an approach that helped improve student test scores but contributed to a near-doubling of the district's teacher turnover rate.

In recent years, the reform movement that inspired Miles' policies has largely fallen out of favor. The changes haven't consistently moved the needle on exam results nationwide, while high-stakes testing has become less popular.

But to Miles, the movement fell short for one main reason: It didn't go big enough.

So Miles required over 1,000 HISD teachers at over two dozen campuses to reapply for their jobs, ultimately replacing about half of them. He rearranged how educators teach students, requiring them to use an approach that mandates students must participate in class roughly every four minutes. And he rolled out new lesson plans for about a third of the district's schools that included short, daily quizzes in nearly all subjects.

Thomas Toch, the director of Georgetown University's FutureEd think tank, said Miles' approach “feels like sort of a ‘back to the future' moment.” The HISD overhaul currently represents “the largest effort to implement school improvement at scale,” Toch said.

While major public school reforms aren't new, the scope and speed of HISD's overhaul stand out.

Former District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee famously fought in the late 2000s to partially tie pay to exam score growth, but she didn't dictate classroom instruction techniques and school staffing models. New Orleans turned its 45,000-student district into an all-charter school system post-Hurricane Katrina, but fewer children saw big changes than in HISD. Even Miles' most ambitious reforms in Dallas targeted a fraction of the students as HISD.

“This is an effort, the largest in the country, to turn around a traditional, urban district,” Miles said. “That's what we're engaged in.”

Wider model?

One year in, Miles' administration has scored some key victories.

The elementary and middle schools Miles targeted for changes saw, on average, a 7 percentage point increase in the share of students scoring at or above grade level on statewide reading and math tests, commonly known as the STAAR exams. Other HISD schools saw a 1 percentage point increase, while state averages slid in math and remained flat in reading.

“I think you can say pretty clearly that [the transformation model] has been working well,” Miles said when the scores came out.

HISD also has made some progress in meeting legal requirements for serving students with disabilities, an area in which the district has struggled for more than a decade, according to state-appointed conservators monitoring the district.

But other indicators could spell trouble for Miles' administration in year two and beyond.

As of early June, four weeks before educators' deadline to resign without penalty, roughly one-quarter of HISD's 11,000-plus teachers had left their positions ahead of the upcoming school year, district administrators said. Historically, HISD's teacher turnover rate has hovered around 15% to 20%.

The departures follow widespread complaints that, under Miles' leadership, district administrators micromanage teachers by frequently observing classroom instruction and providing feedback. David Berry, a former journalism teacher at Wisdom High School, recalled a fall meeting where district administrators scolded teachers for using student engagement strategies too infrequently.

“They proceeded to rip us apart,” said Berry, who plans to teach in a neighboring district next year. “I've never been talked to like that as a teacher, really, as a grownup.”

The financial viability of Miles' plans also remains in question. HISD ran a nearly $200 million deficit on a roughly $2.2 billion budget in Miles' first year, with much of the shortfall tied to dramatic increases in staffing and pay at overhauled schools. The district is budgeting a similar deficit next year, though it plans to use $80 million in unspecified property sales to lessen the blow.

Still, if HISD can continue to post strong test scores, history suggests Miles' model could soon spread beyond Houston.

Texas lawmakers, inspired by Miles' work, passed legislation in 2019 that allocated money to school districts that adopted teacher evaluation systems like the one he used in Dallas. Texas districts received nearly $140 million in 2022-23 under the law.

They also passed a law that allowed long-struggling campuses to skirt closure by replicating a turnaround plan Miles implemented in Dallas. Participating schools have to provide high levels of feedback on instruction, extend school hours and offer incentives for top-rated teachers and principals.

Miles last fall said his Houston work is “not a test case” for statewide policy. More recently, however, he alluded to the possibility of his model being implemented more widely.

“There's a lot of interest across the country, mostly from people who are educators, of what's happening here,” Miles said in a May interview. “This actually could be a proof point for others if it can be done.”

Harvard Graduate School of Education economist Thomas Kane, who has researched students struggling to rebound from the pandemic nationwide, said he believes HISD's overhaul could interest many district leaders.

“If there have been substantial improvements in student achievement gains simultaneously with improvements in student attendance, I think that will grab a lot of attention nationally and will make people curious about the Houston reforms,” Kane said.

Community appetite

Even if HISD produces remarkable gains in the coming years, many elected school boards — which answer directly to local voters, unlike Miles and the state-appointed board — might not stomach upheaval on the level of Houston.

Miles' policies, coupled with his bulldozer style of leadership, have prompted family protests and student walkouts throughout his first year. Typically, more than 100 community members criticize his administration during school board meetings. In one particularly heated exchange from June, a district administrator repeatedly yelled “scoreboard” at a group of jeering audience members while pointing to a screen displaying student test scores.

Even some families that approached Miles' arrival with hopefulness have turned against the district's leadership. Tish Ochoa, the mother of an HISD middle schooler, said she began the school year “cautiously optimistic” but soured on Miles' plans as she heard reports of stressed-out teachers and changes to high-performing schools.

“I wouldn't say that I was like, ‘Rah-rah takeover,' but I was also like, ‘I hope this works.' I was supportive of the new administration coming in,” Ochoa said. “I don't feel that way anymore.”

Miles has argued that many families quietly back his administration. However, few community members have spoken out in support of his efforts, save for a handful of nonprofits and civic groups largely backed by big-dollar philanthropy or business organizations.

At HISD's overhauled schools, many parents said they're open to timers ticking in classroom corners and rapid-fire quizzes — so long as their children aren't left behind.

“I don't care about the changes,” McReynolds Middle School mother Christina Balderas said. “The only thing I care about is when my daughter gets home and she tells me, ‘This is what I learned today, mom.' They can have all the changes in the world that they need.”

In the next few years, Morath likely will begin gradually bringing some of HISD's elected trustees back onto the school board, as outlined in state law. From there, they will decide which Miles policies to keep or dismantle.

Three of HISD's nine elected trustees responded to interview requests for this story: Sue Deigaard, Plácido Gómez and Dani Hernandez. They said they want to see multiple years of data on the impact of Miles' approach before solidifying their impressions.

Most said they would reverse unpopular details of Miles' plan, such as requiring some children to carry a traffic cone to the bathroom as a hall pass, but they found early evidence of the academic impact promising.

“If I had to make a decision right now of whether to continue [the overhaul model], I would,” said Gómez, who represents parts of eastern and central HISD. “There isn't enough data to say, ‘This definitely works,' but there's enough for me to want to continue on this path.”

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As the Texas Legislature considered banning the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatment for trans kids last year, a Houston doctor breached the record system of Texas Children's Hospital in Houston — the largest pediatric hospital in the country.

Dr. Eithan Haim, a former employee of the hospital, retrieved the personal information of underage patients who were not under his care, and illegally leaked them to a conservative activist, court documents allege.

The activist published them, and conservative outrage followed. Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation. The Legislature passed the ban within days.

More than a year later, federal prosecutors have charged Haim with violating patient privacy laws.

Those actions and the indictment that followed have thrust him into the center of one of the most emotional and divisive issues in Texas politics. Prosecutors are accusing him of feeding the public misleading information to damage his old hospital's reputation and “promote his own personal agenda.” The Texas GOP is backing him.

Advocates for trans rights say the case is an example of how often misleading conservative rhetoric has only made it more dangerous for Texas families with trans children. They cast the recent legislation targeting gay and trans people as part of a broader effort in Texas and across many states dominated by conservative politicians to stigmatize and punish queer people in ways that profoundly upend the lives of tens of thousands of families.

Meanwhile, Haim is being hailed as a martyr by conservatives in Texas and beyond who assert he is a victim of political persecution. On the conversative podcast circuit and elsewhere, they call transition-related care for kids child abuse and describe the doctors and parents that provide it as abusers.

Members of Congress have written in support of him. Supporters have raised nearly $1 million for his defense. He's being represented in court by Ryan Patrick, a prominent former U.S. attorney during the Trump administration who is the son of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Haim has pleaded not guilty. He has said that his actions were intended to expose the hospital's transgender care program.

“I maintained from day one that I have done nothing wrong,” Haim said last week outside the courthouse, The Houston Chronicle reported. “We're going to fight this tooth and nail to stand up for whistleblowers everywhere.”

Haim was released on a $10,000 bond and now faces 10 years in federal prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. On his fundraising site, Haim said he did not break the law since the documents were redacted and “no personally identifiable patient health information was disclosed.”

Transition-related care covers a wide range of treatments. It can include such social steps as adopting new pronouns or changing one's style of dress. It can also mean medical interventions such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries, though those are rarer for children. These treatments are for gender dysphoria, the distress that arises when a person's gender identity does not align with their birth-assigned sex. The American Medical Association has defended such care, arguing that such treatments are essential for the well-being of transgender youth.

Concerns about transition-related health care for kids started to gain steam in Texas in February 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate instances of transition-related care for transgender children as child abuse.

In response, Texas Children's Hospital announced that it would pause the prescription of hormone therapies for transgender kids. The hospital said the decision was made to “safeguard our health care professionals and impacted families from potential legal ramifications.”

Months later, a state supreme court ruling stated that while DFPS was allowed to conduct such investigations, the governor's directive was not a legally binding instruction and they did not have to.

Haim said that the hospital continued these practices in secret. In the charges against him, prosecutors noted that Haim received training on health privacy regulations and attended “numerous trainings related to anonymous reporting of any instances of misconduct, ethic violations or child abuse.” But, they said, Haim did not report concerns to any supervisors, anonymous hotlines or Child Protective Services.

Instead, he turned over redacted versions of the medical records to conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, who published an article in May 2023 reporting that the hospital continued administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors and linking to the documents. In the report, Rufo names physicians and details the types of procedures they were conducting. The leaked documents are no longer available though that article. The hospital did not respond to a request for comment, but has said in the past that the care it provides meets legal requirements.

At the time of the leak, such treatments had not yet been made illegal in Texas.

There is no situation in which a doctor should publicly disclose any patient's medical information without consent, said Johnathan Gooch, a spokesperson for an LGBT-rights group, Equality Texas. This release of information puts families at risk, Gooch said.

“In an age where people make a game of figuring out where a random pin is on Google Maps, people are very good at searching the internet,” Gooch said. “Doxxing people has become very popular in radical circles. So it definitely puts the health and well being of these families and their children at risk to be exposed, especially when that exposure is in a hyperpolarized environment.”

But Haim and his supporters argue that he took a brave stand to expose misconduct.

In a letter to the prosecutor, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, denounced what he called “selective prosecution and the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political opponents.”

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland similarly suggesting misuse of law enforcement to ideologically target detractors and requesting information for the House Judiciary Committee. U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, supported Hiam in a news conference last Wednesday where he said that Haim did nothing wrong.

And two Republican state lawmakers, Rep. Brian Harrison of Midlothian and Sen. Mayes Middleton of Galveston, have written to the state Health and Human Services Commission criticizing the alleged use of Medicaid funds to cover these treatments. In their letter, they laud Haim and say that the hospital committed child abuse.

Harrison told The Texas Tribune that the support for Haim is indicative of the ways Texas is “trying to protect children.” Propelled by similar statements about “protecting children,” anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has received significant attention in the Texas legislature over the past few years — a sentiment that has inspired actions like Haim's.

After his indictment, Haim was celebrated by various far-right websites and forums. Rufo described him as a “whistleblower.”

“If Haim prevails, other courageous doctors and medical professionals will follow his lead and speak out,” Rufo wrote in a City Journal article.

However, prosecutors have questioned Haim's motives. The indictment argues, Haim committed “malicious harm” to the hospital and its patients. The hospital faced “financial loss, medical delays … as well as threats and harm to its patients and esteemed physicians.”

And opponents of the state's crackdown on translation-related care are concerned about the politicians backing Haim.

To Gooch, of Equality Texas, the rhetoric and actions of state officials are worrying. He says there is a “direct connection” between the words of Texas politicians and the experiences of trans people in the state.

“We've seen many families moving away in order to keep providing health care to their young people,” Gooch said. “And then those who had to stay in Texas, if they didn't have the means to leave, have been forced to spend massive amounts of money to travel across state lines in order to get regular checkups.“

Disclosure: Equality Texas and Texas Children's Hospital have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Three years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would take the extraordinary step of building a state-funded wall along the Mexico border, he has 34 miles of steel bollards to show for it.

That infrastructure — which has so far run up a price tag of some $25 million per mile — isn't yet a contiguous wall. It has gone up in bits and pieces spread across at least six counties on Texas' 1,254-mile southern border. Progress has been hampered by the state's struggles to secure land access, one of myriad challenges signaling a long and enormously expensive slog ahead for Abbott.

Nonetheless, state contractors have already propped up more wall mileage than former President Donald Trump's administration managed to build in Texas, and Abbott's wall project is plowing ahead at a quickened pace. State officials hope to erect a total of 100 miles by the end of 2026, at a rate of about half a mile per week. The governor frequently shares video of wall construction on social media and has credited the project with helping combat immigration flows. To date, though, steel barriers cover just 4% of the more than 800 miles identified by state officials as “in need of some kind of a barrier.” And at its current rate — assuming officials somehow persuade all private landowners along the way to turn their property over to the state — construction would take around 30 years and upwards of $20 billion to finish.

Under Abbott's direction, state lawmakers have approved more than $3 billion for the wall since 2021, making it one of the biggest items under the GOP governor's $11 billion border crackdown known as Operation Lone Star. The rest of the money is being used for items like flooding the border with state police and National Guard soldiers and transporting migrants to Democrat-controlled cities outside Texas, all of which Abbott and other Republicans say is needed to stem the historic number of migrants trying to enter the country.

Democrats and immigration advocates have cast the wall project as a taxpayer-funded pipe dream that will do nothing to address the root causes driving the immigration crisis. And they say the governor, in reviving what was once a hallmark of Trump's agenda, is using public money to boost his political stock.

Even some immigration-hawk Republicans are showing unease about the mounting costs of the wall.

“I am, too, concerned that we're spending a whole lot of money to give the appearance of doing something rather than taking the problem on to actually solve it, and until we do that, I don't expect to see much happen,” state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, said last fall before voting in committee to spend another $1.5 billion in wall funding.

Abbott's office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Acquiring land

The construction pace has largely hinged on the state's success securing rights to build the wall through privately owned borderland. Early on, the project showed little signs of life as state contractors struggled to obtain the needed easements. But things picked up last year as the state began working out more agreements covering larger tracts. Through mid-June, officials had secured 79 easements covering about 59 miles of the border, according to Mike Novak, executive director of the Texas Facilities Commission, which is overseeing the effort.

At a facilities commission meeting last month, Novak said state officials were in various stages of negotiation with landowners over another 113 miles.

“We knew from the beginning that this was going to be the choke point, you know, one of the most challenging parts of this program,” Novak said of land acquisition. “And it proved true. But we've remained steadfast.”

Officials had built 33.5 miles of wall through June 14, a facilities commission spokesperson said.

The state's ability to secure land rights has also dictated the wall's location, though officials say they have focused on areas pinpointed by the Department of Public Safety as the “highest priority.” TFC officials have declined to share exactly where the wall is being built, citing security concerns, though Novak recently said construction was underway on wall segments in Cameron, Maverick, Starr, Val Verde, Webb and Zapata counties.

Though the Texas-Mexico border spans more than 1,200 miles, Abbott's budget director, Sarah Hicks, told a Senate panel in 2022 that DPS had identified 805 miles “as vulnerable, or [that] is in need of some kind of a barrier.” Another 180 miles are covered by natural barriers, mostly in the Big Bend region of West Texas, while existing barriers already cover another 140 miles, according to state officials.

Novak has said the pace of building about half a mile of wall per week is expected to continue for the “foreseeable future.” At that rate, about 100 miles would go up every four years, with the full 805 miles covered sometime after 2050, when Abbott would be in his 90s.

The earliest wall construction has cost roughly $25 million to $30 million per mile, according to TFC officials. That would amount to $20 billion to $24 billion for the entire 805-mile span, or about three times the cost of paying every Texas public university student's tuition last year. The estimate does not account for the cost of maintaining the wall once it is built, which TFC estimates will cost around $500,000 per mile each year.

Lubbock state Sen. Charles Perry, who last year carried Texas' new immigration law that allows state police to arrest people for illegally crossing the Mexico border, is another Republican who has expressed concern about the wall's cost.

“I am for border security. I am not against a wall. But to me, at least from what I can tell, it is a perpetual circle. We're on the hamster wheel,” Perry said last fall as he prepared to vote for the $1.5 billion wall funding bill. “[At some point] the response has not to be more money for infrastructure. At some point this state must draw the line in the sand.”

Still, no Texas Republican has voted against border wall funding. Lawmakers approved nearly $2.5 billion for the effort in the state's current two-year budget — more than was allotted in state funds to all but a handful of state agencies, and more than twice what Texas spends on its court and juvenile justice systems.

State Rep. Christina Morales, D-Houston, said she doesn't think Texas' GOP leadership “really understands why people are crossing in the first place.”

“Spending billions of dollars on a wall really does not address the root causes of the migration that's happening,” said Morales, who is vice chair of the House's Mexican American Legislative Caucus. “What we should be investing in is our education, our health care, real solutions for problems that are happening right now in Texas.”

Since 2021, federal officials have recorded an average of about 2 million illegal border crossings a year, a record that Abbott has attributed to President Joe Biden for rolling back some of Trump's border policies. The governor has touted the wall construction as a way for Texas to “address the border crisis while President Biden has sat idly by.” Biden and other Democrats have blamed Republicans for shooting down a sweeping bipartisan border deal earlier this year.

The scope of Texas' wall construction — and Abbott's broader border security efforts — are unprecedented in nature, as the federal government is generally responsible for immigration enforcement and the costs associated with it.

Even with the state's improved pace securing easements, Novak has said land access remains the biggest challenge for the project, and “it'll probably remain that way through most of the program.” The Trump administration encountered the same issue after the former president famously said he would build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. Even using the federal government's power to seize some borderland, Trump's administration built just 21 miles of new wall along the Texas-Mexico border.

The painstaking negotiations are required for Texas' wall because lawmakers barred the use of eminent domain to gain land access.

Last year, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, filed legislation to change that, arguing TFC officials could only build a complete wall if they were authorized to use eminent domain powers. The proposal failed to make it through the Senate, though Creighton said he plans to file it again for the session that starts next January.

“Of course, we can continue to negotiate with ranchers, but that is a very slow process,” Creighton said. “And it's an incomplete process, because there will always be holdouts for different reasons.”

Creighton, one of the upper chamber's more conservative members, said he still supports using state funds to build a border wall, even as some of his GOP colleagues have raised objections.

“I say no to waste, inefficiencies, potential fraud and unreasonable spending as much as any member,” Creighton said. “But … there are times, with all of that fiscal conservatism, that we have to use the money that we save efficiently to protect Texans and Texas.”

“A difficult and complex task”

Most border wall advocates acknowledge barriers alone will not deter people from trying to enter the country illegally. But they say a wall would work if paired with more law enforcement officers and technology, arguing it would slow down attempted crossers to give border agents more time to apprehend them and encourage migrants to seek asylum via ports of entry.

But smuggling gangs have used ordinary power tools to saw through parts of Trump's wall and scaled it using disposable ladders. Some immigration experts say border walls fail to solve the underlying factors driving people to migrate, such as the poverty, violence and political upheaval in Central America, Haiti and Venezuela that is driving millions to flee and straining U.S. resources at the border.

“Walls do not achieve the objectives for which they are said to be erected; they have limited effects in stemming insurgencies and do not block unwanted [migrant] flows, but rather lead to a re-routing of migrants to other paths,” wrote Élisabeth Vallet of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in a 2022 report.

Those sorts of objections have done nothing to deter Abbott and GOP lawmakers, who are armed with a huge budget surplus and polling that shows a majority of Texas voters support the state's wall effort and overall border spending. More than 90% of Republican voters support the wall, with 74% voicing “strong” support, according to an April poll by the Texas Politics Project.

With construction plunging ahead, Novak has projected confidence about the wall's status, pointing to the recent progress after an initial slow start, which saw officials build less than 2 miles in the 12 months after Abbott announced the effort.

It's not just land access that complicates wall construction, Novak said at the June TFC meeting, where he ticked off a list of other factors: changing soil conditions that require “complicated engineering solutions”; steering clear of irrigation systems when building on agricultural land; weather; and “sensitivity” to cattle, oil and gas and hunting operations.

“It's a difficult and complex task, at best,” Novak said. “But with that said, we're whipping it. The latest stats reflect what I like to call just steadfast progress.”

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!