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ICE claimed thirty-two lives in 2025, the agency's highest death toll in over twenty years. Seven days into 2026, another civilian is dead. A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot a 37-year-old woman in the head Wednesday morning in south Minneapolis. She died hours later at a local hospital. The woman has been identified by family as Renee Nicole Good. Federal officials claim self-defense. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara says otherwise. That discrepancy i

Nobody agrees with everything. Not a spouse. Not a best friend. Not even the version of themselves from five years ago. Yet people wear political parties like team jerseys and defend every play, even the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones. The reaction feels automatic. It sounds trained. Political identity now behaves like a personality. I’m a Democrat. I am a Republican. I am a liberal. Then there’s I am MAGA. Labels replace thinking. Allegiance replaces scrutiny. Once some

People treat kindness like a loan shark treats money. Everything comes with interest, invisible repayment plans, and the nagging suspicion that someone's keeping score. Accept a compliment and watch the mental gymnastics begin. Someone says your hair looks great, and suddenly you're offering detailed credit to your stylist, the humidity levels, and possibly divine intervention. This isn't etiquette. It's a pathology masquerading as good manners. Decades of transactional think

Guillermo del Toro recently articulated what should be obvious to anyone paying attention. At the Palm Springs International Film Festival, he asked, "When they tell you it doesn't matter, when they tell you a fucking app can do art, you say, 'Well, if it's that easy and if it's that unimportant, why the fuck do they want it so bad?'" He answered his own question: "The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human."

Before Televisa packaged melodrama for screens, Mexican families leaned toward radios and built entire worlds inside their heads. One voice. Sound effects. Music. Everything else came from imagination. That was how Porfirio Cadena entered homes. Not as an image, but as a presence. “¿Por qué se hizo criminal el ojo de vidrio?” The question crackled through speakers starting in the 1950s, crossing Mexico and pushing deep into the United States. The line landed in kitchens, pati

The gallows were real. So were the zip ties, the bear spray, the broken windows, and the politicians cowering under desks while their constituents hunted them through the Capitol. But five years after January 6, 2021, half of America remembers an insurrection while the other half sees a protest that got out of hand. That disconnect might be more dangerous than the riot itself. Donald Trump spent two months after losing the 2020 election telling his supporters the victory had

U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz announced Monday she would meet with the Department of Labor to explore legal pathways for migrant construction workers after the South Texas Builders Association voiced concerns about how immigration arrests were decimating their workforce. This represents a fascinating pivot for someone who campaigned on finishing the border wall and reinstating policies forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico. De La Cruz won her seat in 2022 promising voters "a

The news keep rolling in and everyone seems to think that America invaded Venezuela for oil. Oil. Always oil. Nothing but oil. Sure. And Putin annexed Crimea for the beaches. Venezuela sits on the largest proven oil reserves on Earth, 13% more than Saudi Arabia. But Venezuelan crude emerges thick as tar, heavy with sulfur, demanding specialized infrastructure that barely exists outside U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. Saudi petroleum flows light and sweet. The difference matters b

"This is Ada Cuellar." No preamble. No political polish. Just a doctor's voice, clear and direct. "Last November, I was upset when we lost the election. Like many people, I wanted to run away." She didn't. She stayed and committed to battle. Dr. Ada Cuellar, 44, is an emergency room physician in Weslaco who decided that abandoning the Valley wasn't an option. Instead, she's mounting a congressional challenge against Monica De La Cruz, the incumbent who's been representing Tex

Let me say this slowly for the people in the back: I can despise Nicolás Maduro's authoritarian regime AND think Trump's invasion of Venezuela is imperialist bullshit. Both things. At the same time. I know that breaks some people's brains because apparently we all live in a Marvel movie now where you pick Team Iron Man or Team Thanos, but real life doesn't work like that. Real life is messier. Real life is multiple villains and millions of innocent people stuck dealing with t

My mother died in March. Everything else that happened this year exists in the shadow of that fact. We love to rank suffering. We love to throw around superlatives about pain. Somehow we equate pain to resilience. I split my head open at five. Had a boil the size of an egg under my armpit at eighteen. Childbirth at twenty-four. C-section at forty-one. I've built up pain tolerance. None of it prepared me for losing my mother. That absence operates on a different frequency enti

As this year closes, one truth rises above the noise for me: I believe FRONTeras exists because people keep showing up. Showing up to read. Showing up to argue. Showing up to see themselves reflected honestly—without translation, without watering down, without permission. This year, the stories I've written for FRONTeras did not aim to make anyone comfortable. They aimed to be real. I moved through border politics without the lazy narratives that flatten us into talking point

Bexar County authorities released dashcam footage Monday showing what appears to be the final confirmed sighting of Camila Mendoza Olmos, a 19-year-old college student who vanished on Christmas Eve morning. The grainy video captures a solitary figure walking along Wildhorse Parkway, dressed in clothing matching what Mendoza Olmos wore when she left her family's home in pajamas. The footage came from a neighbor's dashboard camera, recorded during their morning commute to work.

Twenty-four Buddhist monks left Fort Worth on October 26 with a plan to walk 2,300 miles to Washington, D.C. in 120 days. They're covering roughly nineteen miles daily through ten states. Sixty-six days in, they're crossing Georgia with a dog named Aloka. The Huong Dao Vipassana Bhavana Center organized the pilgrimage to promote peace, kindness, and mindfulness. The monks characterize their walk as spiritual rather than political. Communities along the route receive invitatio

Starr County has spent the last decade clawing its way toward stability and growth, and that makes what is happening with State Loop 195 around Roma even more infuriating. Starr is finally seeing rising GDP, higher property values, and new public investment, while Roma is being positioned as collateral damage in someone else’s version of “progress.” Over roughly the last decade, Starr County has seen measurable economic growth, even if it still lags the state overall. County

Eric Flores' LinkedIn profile is genuinely impressive. But professional credentials don't erase the infrastructure of nepotism that launched his career. Who is Eric Flores. Let's start here. The Flores family political machine runs generations deep. Eric's maternal grandfather, Jorge G. Garcia, served as mayor of Palmview for nearly 20 years. His paternal grandfather, Gumaro "Maro" Flores, was the first mayor of Sullivan City. Eric worked as city attorney for Palmview, the ci

Every December, South Texas transforms into a retail battleground where American holiday shoppers face friendly rivals: Mexican nationals armed with shopping lists and crossing permits. Paisano season officially kicks off on Black Friday. Late November, early December is when families from across Mexico descend upon border cities like Laredo, Roma, Rio Grande City, McAllen, and Brownsville. They come bearing cash, dragging empty suitcases, and wielding determination that woul

Let's operate under the assumption that hell exists. That fire and brimstone wait somewhere in the cosmic basement for humanity's worst offenders. That every Sunday school teacher warning kids about eternal damnation wasn't just engaged in elaborate fearmongering. Fine. Hell is real. Except according to the Bible itself, it's currently empty. A vacant torture chamber waiting for opening day. God apparently runs damnation like a delayed construction project, postponing the gra

Let's go back to November 4, 2024. Let's close our eyes and imagine... what if. Kamala Harris would have inched those 1.5 percentage points in the popular vote. Kamala Harris would gotten those 230,000 votes across three states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. She would have flipped just 229,726 votes in the right combination across those three states, she would have won the Electoral College. What if Kamala Harris would have been our 47th President of the United State

Many Americans claim that when they see Barack Obama, they remember "a time in America where there was unity." That's adorable. It's also complete bullshit. Is Obama cute? Sure. Charming? Always. Articulate and smart? Funny and witty? You get the point. Obama is everything, but the portrait of unity he is not. The president dubbed the Deporter-in-Chief might as well be called the Divider-in-Chief too. The last time America had anything resembling presidential unity, George H.