The nation's immigration courts are choked by the largest backlog of pending deportation and asylum cases in history, more than 18,000 of them in Texas, a Syracuse University-based data research institute reported Thursday.

Sex, money, religion and race. State Board of Education members discussed it all Thursday, delivering a riveting drama as they trudged through another day of debate about social studies curriculum standards.

The U.S. Census forms arriving in Texans' mailboxes next week will start the decennial dance over whether cities such as Houston or San Antonio get new seats in Congress through redistricting.

After getting ripped by the Texas Education Agency, Fox News on Thursday sought to clarify some of its reports on the state's social studies curriculum debate.

A group of elected officials and business leaders from the Texas border today joined Gov. Rick Perry and U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, in calls for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deploy unmanned aerial surveillance drones to monitor the Texas-Mexico border.

For the past six years, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has lorded over a controversial stash of taxpayer money known as the Texas Enterprise Fund, dispensing huge sums—$345 million and counting—to large corporations, ostensibly to spur job growth. Critics call it the governor's slush fund.

State Farm Insurance told the state Thursday that it intends to raise its homeowners rate 4.5 percent statewide starting May 1, only eight months after the company boosted rates 8.8 percent.

Texas' food stamp application backlog is now expected to be cleared by the end of April, Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner Tom Suehs told lawmakers Thursday.

Both political parties are taking tea party activists seriously and are wary of offending them – if they are not already actively wooing them for state races this fall. Just look at the governor’s election in Ohio. Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich openly touts his tea party credentials in his bid to defeat incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland. “I think I was in the tea party before there was a tea party,” Kasich famously told a Columbus crowd earlier this year. “This is a real movement with a real message about people’s frustrations by broken promises that leaders on both sides of the aisle would be foolish to ignore,” he went on to write in a blog posting.