The State of Texas: May 4, 2016

Quote of the Day

“While I’m at it, I should go ahead and admit yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.”

—Ted Cruz to reporters in Evansville, Indiana on Tuesday before losing the state’s primary and dropping out of the presidential race, according to the Texas Tribune. We’d be lyin’ (Ted) if we said we weren’t going to miss this a little.

Daily Roundup

Defea-Ted—Ted Cruz is done. Finished. Cooked. Zodiacked. Trumped. After losing the Indiana primary to Donald Trump on Tuesday, Cruz announced that he was suspending his campaign. “I said that I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory,” Cruz told his heartbroken supporters in Indiana last night, according to the Texas Tribune. “Tonight I am sorry to say that it appears that path has foreclosed.” Of course, the path had been only barely visible for quite a while now. Cruz hadn’t won a meaningful primary since he took Wisconsin a month earlier, and it was all downhill for Cruz after that—he was recently swept in five Northeastern states, and was about 400 delegate votes in the hole heading up to the Hoosier primary. Cruz funneled all the resources he could into Indiana, but it wasn’t enough to resuscitate his flatlining campaign. So, what the hell does he do now? In case you’ve forgotten, Cruz is actually a U.S. Senator serving our very own state of Texas. Who knew?! Anyway, he probably won’t get a “welcome back” party from his colleagues on Capitol Hill anytime soon, since literally everyone there hates him, as the Tribune notes in softer terms.

Prison Daycare—The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services’s decision to issue a temporary childcare license for an immigrant detention center in Karnes City earlier this week drew immediate blowback from immigrant’s rights organizations. Now, it’s facing a lawsuit. Grassroots Leadership, a non-profit that opposes for-profit prisons, filed suit in Travis County on Tuesday asking for a temporary injunction and a restraining order to prevent the state’s license from going into effect. According to the Texas Tribune, the organization claims the state can’t legally regulate detention centers or prisons. The state license would allow the Karnes facility, which is run by the private prison company GEO Group, to continue to hold the children of undocumented immigrants. “If ever there was lipstick on a pig, this is it,” Jonathan Ryan, the executive director of Raices, told the New York Times about the state issuing the child care license. “If you want a child care facility, you don’t contract with a for-profit prison company.”

Speed Kills—It’s crystal clear that Texas has a very bad methamphetamine problem, and it’s only getting worse. According to new data recently released by the Texas Department of State Health Services, meth has killed more than 2,400 Texans since 1999, with 60 percent of those deaths occurring between 2010 and 2014. The amount of deaths per year have steadily increased since 2008, and the figure topped 400 for the first time in 2014. “The state has an epidemic on its hands and no one is talking about it,” Jane Maxwell, a University of Texas professor and drug expert told the Houston Chronicle. Apparently, meth these days is way more potent than it was when it used to be, and efforts by the state to curtail meth production by banning some over-the-counter drugs used to cook it haven’t been enough to curtail the rising death toll. The drug is a favorite among trafficking organizations because it’s easy to produce year-round, unlike cocaine or marijuana, and the DEA told the Chronicle that meth has become “the No. 1 drug threat in Texas.”