Texas Governor Greg Abbott has made it official: a third special legislative session starts October 9.
In a letter to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan and obtained by several media entities over the weekend, Gov. Greg Abbott warned he will bring lawmakers into a 30-day special legislative session starting the afternoon of Monday, Oct. 9, 2023.
Abbott has teased for months that he would call the session to address school choice. That concept has proved popular with voters and even passed the Senate but has been thwarted by the Texas House. Recently, Abbott has indicated the agenda would also include matters related to the Colony Ridge housing development outside Houston that targets illegal aliens.
School choice is an expected topic, one all Texas GOP leaders agree is a priority save the foot-dragging, Democrat-backed Speaker Phelan. After strong-arming Republican House members into an unpopular and ultimately futile impeachment vote against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, it remains to be seen how much juice Phelan has left to thwart school choice, though certainly his Democratic backers (and the teacher’s unions backing them) will make it a top priority.
But the wild card here is Colony Ridge, a news story that’s been bubbling on the back burner for a while, and one I’ve been grappling to find out enough about to report on fairly.
Colony Ridge is allegedly a high crime neighborhood in the Houston exurbs populated mostly by illegal aliens, some of whom have cartel ties, sold using questionable loan practices.
As the crisis at the southern border continues, rural Texas is allegedly being settled by unlawful migrants through a system backed by drug cartels, leading to an increase in criminal activity.
Nestled in a previously undeveloped area of Liberty County, northeast of Houston, the Colony Ridge development represents the largest “colonia” in the United States, home to anywhere from 50,000 to 75,000 unlawful migrants.
Todd Bensman, the senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, has been documenting the colonia and highlighting the scope of the issue.
“A vast jumble of single- and double-wide trailers on low stilts, hand-hewn shacks made of leftover construction material, and parked motor homes has quickly overtaken tens of thousands of Liberty County acres and eradicated its rural way of life,” Bensman wrote.
“Upwards of 50,000 mostly Spanish-speaking Latinos, maybe more — nobody knows, really — are living on some 30,000 homestead lots they purchased in recent years over some 35 square miles from ‘Houston Terrenos,’” Bensman continued.
The migrants are able to settle in Colony Ridge using Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) loans, which do not require applicants to have a legal residence or Social Security number.
In recent testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, Bensman claimed that the crime wave followed the mass migration.
“Legacy residents are increasingly alarmed by criminal atrocities never seen before,” Bensman alleged.
Pointing to an incident that occurred in April, he told the representatives about how “a five-time deported Mexican national who owned a home in neighboring San Jacinto County allegedly murdered five members of a Honduran family that lived next door after they complained that his firing of a semi-automatic assault-style rifle at 11 p.m. was keeping the baby awake.”
Good times, good times.
Bensman testified that the Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels invested resources into the Colony Ridge development early on, financing safe houses used to smuggle drugs and people into the interior of the United States.
“Liberty County reflects a microcosm of what unnecessary crime can look like anywhere large numbers of foreign nationals who are only thinly vetted settle,” Bensman added.
The first question is: Where exactly is it? If you enter Colony Ridge in Google maps, you get a location just southeast of New Caney that’s in Montgomery County, not adjoining Liberty. I believe this is the sales office for Houston Terrenos. This appears to be the actual extent of Colony Ridge:
It’s not a new problem, though I only became aware of it this year. This TPPF PDF report dates from 2020, states Colony Ridge has been in development since 2011. Some quotes:
Cleveland ISD’s elementary, middle, and high schools are bursting at the seams with students, growing by over 100 new enrollments per month. To finance the multiple new schools that are needed at all levels, the district’s residents are on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds issued and are experiencing crushing, double-digit growth in their property tax bills…The initial, unrestricted development undertaken by the area’s largest housing land sales company, Colony Ridge Land, LLC, caused considerable consternation and foreboding among residents and local government officials alike. More recently, a number of measures have been taken to better manage the population boom, including the creation of a Municipal Management District for a core 5,000-acre section under development. Moreover, the Houston El Norte Property Owners Association has begun to aggressively enforce covenants…
Because thousands of unauthorized immigrants are among the new residents, however, more needs to be done. Collaboration in enforcement of U.S. immigration laws should be maximized by federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities through initiatives such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) and Warrant Service Officer programs…These programs enable common-sense cooperation across jurisdictions and effectively prevent communities from becoming sanctuaries for criminal aliens.
Fast forward to this year, and Cleveland ISD’s population has doubled in three years.
A housing development outside Cleveland, Texas, just north of Houston, is populated primarily by illegal aliens and putting strain on the local school district.
“Colony Ridge Communities” is a land development project that markets land to illegal aliens through loan loopholes and is one of the largest settlements of illegal aliens in the country.
In the 2019-2020 school year, Cleveland Independent School District only had 6,584 students. As the current school year begins, the number of students has nearly doubled to more than 12,400.
At the district’s back-to-school convocation, Superintendent Stephen McCanless said the district has enrolled 1,092 new students in the past weeks and more students are expected to be registered in the next few weeks.
The district has hired 1,498 staff members since the 2021-2022 school year, and due to the limited capacity of the Cleveland High School gym, the district almost did not hold the back-to-school convocation. To accommodate these students, the district built six new schools.
The Colony Ridge settlements are believed to have a population of 22,000, according to the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.
Then there’s the Abbott donor connection: “Colony Ridge is partially funded by William Harris, a major donor of Gov. Greg Abbott, who gives yearly contributions of $300,000 to Abbott’s campaign.”
And those aren’t the only controversies surrounding Colony Ridge. There’s an active lawsuit against Terrenos Houston and Colony Ridge on a variety of allegations:
Payments Being Stolen: There are clients who are making their payments and yet the Colony Ridge company claims that they have not done so and proceeds to repossess their land to keep it or sell it to others. Flooding: Lack of drainage planning has caused flooding for residents and flood problems for surrounding communities that have been in that territory for generations. Intimidating: They have intimidated the surrounding communities with lawsuits and other practices when they have tried to resolve the situation of the waters with garbage that have reached their homes. Inhumane Conditions: Many in the community have complained about poor garbage management, lack of potable water in cases, high crime rates, and roads in very poor condition.
Here are the figures the lawsuit alleges are behind Colony Ridge:
As with all lawsuits, keep the “allegedly” in mind.
What sort of remedies are available? Well, the Biden Administration could always control the border and enforce laws against illegal aliens, but they seem very loath to do that, very recent statements otherwise not withstanding.
At the state level, Texas could implement E-Verify for all employment, which would severely curtail the attractiveness of Texas as a settling spot for illegal aliens. And the legislature could require either citizenship or legal immigration status as a requirement for a home loan in Texas.
It should prove to be an interesting session, as both school choice and illegal aliens have proven powerful issues with black and Hispanic voters, much to the chagrin of the Democratic Party establishment.
It should be an interesting session…