Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

High in the hills of Guatemala, shut inside the one-room house where he spends day and night on a twin bed beneath a seriously outdated calendar, Luis Alberto Jiménez has no idea of the legal battle that swirls around him in the lowlands of Florida.

This border city, once the thriving commercial hub of the U.S. Southwest, is reviving its moribund downtown with the help of some native benefactors.

A federal court ruling has intensified the debate over how best to educate this state's growing number of students with limited English language skills.

Questions and answers about the Hope for Homeowners Act of 2008, passed by Congress last weekend to try to steer as many as 400,000 struggling homeowners away from foreclosure

Some 16 months after Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed boldly declared that she wouldn't tolerate undocumented people “illegally voting in my county,” a lengthy voter fraud investigation has concluded with the filing of low-level charges.

The Texas comptroller's office estimates that shoppers will save $54 million this weekend during Texas' annual tax-free shopping holiday, when consumers will not be charged local or state sales taxes on selected items that cost up to $100.

Texas residents pay a smaller percentage of their incomes for state and local taxes than 42 of the 50 states, according to a new study released Thursday by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

Despite efforts to add Border Patrol agents to areas where immigrant traffic is high and drug violence is flaring, officers assigned to the 2,000-mile boundary with Mexico are bunched up near the California coast. And some critics see politics at play.

Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.

Last week, U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice said the Texas Education Agency has failed to provide necessary bilingual education to Spanish-speaking students.

The House Select Committee on Property Tax Relief and Appraisal Reform has heard plenty of suggestions on how to improve the current system of collecting property taxes which finance public schools.

With legislative leaders pushing for more community-based programs, Texas Youth Commission officials are considering opening a string of new lockups and halfway houses across the state.

A leading state teacher group filed suit Tuesday against the Texas Education Agency, seeking to block the distribution of state funds to three nonprofit corporations selected to run student dropout programs.

Lawmakers recently fired the starter's pistol, encouraging the state's emerging universities to compete against each other in devising persuasive pitches that would prove to lawmakers why they deserve a boost in state funding that could elevate them to the status of Texas' two nationally competitive public universities: the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M.

No citizen needs consular support more than one who faces the terrifying ordeal of arrest and imprisonment under a foreign legal system. Immediate access to a consular representative provides trustworthy guidance through the bewildering judicial process. In some regions, consular assistance is all that stands between foreign prisoners and abuse or even death.

Texas is headed for big problems if state lawmakers don't fix serious inequities in teacher quality and experience between rich and poor schools, a noted education researcher warned Monday.

University of Texas regents are setting a new course for the state's flagship school, a bolder approach more familiar to hard-charging investment firms than staid public university boards.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a report Tuesday detailing the pervasiveness of food marketing to children, and a coalition of food companies responded with its own report arguing they had made progress on the issue by self-policing.

The Health and Human Services Commission has maintained a consistent approach toward spending the money allocated by lawmakers last year to settle the 15-year-old Frew v. Hawkins lawsuit.

Child Protective Services doesn't regularly run criminal background checks on most of its employees, including at least 90 percent of workers who perform sensitive tasks involving abused and neglected youngsters.