News & Commentary

I had my first child in the custody of a county jail. I was arrested for possession of a controlled substance just after learning I was pregnant. When my son was born, I was able to spend two days with my baby in the hospital. Leaving him to go back to jail was the hardest day of my life.

Visit our Legislation Tracker to learn more about the bills that will make a huge impact on Texas during the 2019 Texas Legislature.  

This piece originally appeared at The New York Times. 

The president of the United States is once again spreading unsubstantiated claims about rampant voter fraud and undermining faith in the integrity of our democracy. This time, he’s claiming that 95,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in Texas and more than half have actually voted. These numbers, he concluded, are “just the tip of the iceberg.”

If you are accused of a crime and arrested in Galveston County, Texas, you better hope you can afford to pay the preset bail amount to get out of jail. If not, then you will join hundreds of other people who are incarcerated simply because they cannot afford to buy their freedom. In Galveston and communities across the country, there is one pretrial detention system for the poor and an entirely different one for everyone else.