I’ve begun working on my next piece for the Observer, a short (very short) profile of border attorney Israel Reyna, who works with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation to poor residents of the Laredo area.
I’m not exactly sure yet what form the story will take—at 400-500 words, there’s not much room for … well … anything. But at this point, I’d like to pick a single cause (i.e., workers trying to claim workers comp benefits and being denied, day laborers being harassed by border patrol agents, etc.) and chronicle the obstacles it faced and how TRLA helped them overcome those obstacles.
One such cause that I am considering is the effort to improve the quality of life in Texas’ more than 2.000 colonias—border communities in which an estimated 400,000 Texans live without access to running water or sewage service. From the accounts of people I have talked to so far, Reyna has played a critical (and behind-the-scenes) role in organizing and providing legal guidance to burgeoning municipal governments in several of these communities.
Since 1999, there has been a state initiative to connect the colonias to running water and sewage service—a legislative push of then-Governor George W. Bush. While the state intiative has yet to accomplish much of what it set out to, it nonetheless has its heart in the right place. On the home page of the Colonias Ombudsman Program is a quote:
One of government’s chief responsibilities is to help Texans with the greatest needs. The Secretary of State’s Ombudsman Program is a central part of our initiatives to assist needy Texans living in colonias. The program is helping to provide better roads, bring water and wastewater infrastructure to areas that lack these basic services, and improve the quality of life for some of Texas’ neediest citizens.
-Governor Rick Perry
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