6 September 4–10, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents handful of cases, Vecinos Unidos has been able to determine a detainee’s identity and notify their family that they won’t be coming home that night. At 2 p.m., as the first round of hearings concludes, Rios and a handful of other vol- unteers begin to document agents moving in their group chat on Signal, a messaging app known for its privacy and security. The four men standing in the same hallway as us have disappeared through the double doors one by one, and two other agents walk through the waiting rooms, towards the elevators, through the maze of gray halls with gray doors that reveal nothing, until Rios has lost track of them. This is what it looks like, Rios said, when they are getting ready to take someone. “My heart is pounding,” she whispers. One agent stands in front of the elevators as a family with four children approaches, and Rios positions herself so the family is in her eyesight — as if by watching, she can keep them from being detained. When the elevator doors close, she breathes a sigh of relief. The agent turns and walks through another set of unmarked doors. By 2:45 p.m., the court is nearly empty, the day’s hearings concluded. Volunteers on the fourth floor give the all clear. Two more laps around the 10th floor, and Rios is con- vinced that ICE has gone. No arrests for the day. A girl who looks to be around 20 is the last to leave the court. She asks Rios in Span- ish how to get to the elevator. Rios points her down the hall and asks if her hearing went well. The girl nods, “Yes,” and smiles. For every time Rios has witnessed the worst moment of a person’s life unfold in the hallways of immigration court, she’s seen good moments, too. “Felicidades, felicidades!” Rios calls as the woman walks away. Congratulations, congratulations. Next week, Rios returns to work. She hopes to still make it to court to ob- serve when she can, but ultimately, she has to trust that her dedication to recruitment and training efforts has paid off. She’s spo- ken in churches of nearly every denomina- tion, activist meetings and impromptu gatherings about the need for more volun- teers and more eyes on the immigration courts and the importance of officials know- ing they’re being watched. She has to figure out how one returns to normalcy after six months of this. She’s been struggling with survivor’s guilt: the feeling that, as a Latina woman, it was nothing more than luck that she was born in the United States. “I’ve had to get comfortable with the feeling of my heart beating in my throat,” she said. ▼ PUBLIC HEALTH DUCKING THE JAB VACCINE HESITANCY IS SKYROCKETING. DALLAS COUNTY IS SEEING IT FIRSTHAND. BY EMMA RUBY A year ago, in the weeks before school returned to session, the Dallas County Health and Human Ser- vices’ immunization clinic on North Stem- mons Freeway would have been packed. Often, an overflowing morning waiting room resulted in families being given a num- ber in line and told to come back that after- noon to get their children vaccinated. That didn’t happen this year, though, said Director Philip Huang. “We do everything we can to make vac- cines easy to get,” Huang said. “We’ve been doing a lot of the back-to-school vaccination [events] … We’re doing one day a week now, and we’re seeing declining numbers.” On one hand, Huang chalks the atten- dance dips up to community concerns sur- rounding federal immigration enforcement. While Dallas County Health and Human Services does not ask about or document immigration status, he worries that, as some communities make a point to avoid govern- ment-adjacent centers, undocumented par- ents are not bringing their children in to be immunized. While back-to-school immunization events have previously drawn a line that wraps around the building, this year, there was “nothing like that,” and lower atten- dance has come even after the health ser- vices department has been forced to pare down its vaccination efforts. Earlier this year, Huang told Dallas County Commissioners that cuts to federal grant funding had forced the department to shutter 50 planned vaccination pop-up events, such as a measles vaccination event at a local school, which were intended to target underserved communities across the county. Twenty-one healthcare workers were also laid off due to the funding cuts. General anti-vaccine sentiment could also be playing a significant role in the dip in immunization demand. In a 2023 survey of more than a thousand local health departments conducted by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO — one of the bet- ter abbreviations we’ve seen), more than 80% reported a post-COVID-19 rise in vac- cine hesitancy, especially on the part of par- ents with young children. For Texas school districts, this has resulted in a growing num- ber of parents asking for their children to be exempt from mandated immunizations. The Texas Tribune reports that between 2018 and 2024, the Texas Department of State Health Services received double the number of requests for vaccine exemption forms for schools. In July 2025, parents of 30,596 Texas students requested that their child not have to get at least one of the man- dated shots before starting the school year. That process is actually about to get eas- ier, thanks to a law passed by the state legis- lature this summer that will allow parents to download the exemption form at home rather than apply for it through the state health department. According to The New York Times, 180 more anti-vaccine bills were filed across state legislatures this year com- pared to last year. While State Rep. Lacey Hull, who au- thored the bill, said the law is about “simpli- fying the process” of declining mandatory vaccinations, experts worry it will help fuel the fire that is more and more parents choosing not to vaccinate their children. The law will go into effect on Sept. 1, and parents will still be required to get their forms notarized and resubmit them every other year. “It’s crazy that we’ve been going through these record measles outbreaks, this situa- tion for Texas, and then still the legislature passes a law that makes it easier for parents to get an exemption from vaccines,” Huang said. The Texas Department of State Health Services announced the end to the West Texas measles outbreak earlier this month, 762 cases later. Two children died from the disease, but even still, new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Texas’ measles vaccination rate amongst kindergarteners is the lowest it’s been since at least 2011 at 93.24%. According to state data, Dallas ISD re- corded 92.11% of kindergarteners vacci- nated against measles last school year. In Fort Worth ISD, only 84.42% of kindergar- teners had been immunized. Data for the 2025-26 school year will not be available for several months. “It’s become so politicized. It’s really con- cerning,” Huang said. “The head of HHS [Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.], his history with anti-vaccine rhetoric and the organization he was associated with is very anti-vaccine; the messaging has become confusing and mixed, and undermines a lot of the efforts to promote vaccines.” ▼ TRANSPORTATION DARTING AWAY DRASTIC DART SERVICE CHANGES DELAYED IN MILLION DOLLAR VOTE. BY ALYSSA FIELDS T he implementation of drastic changes to Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) bus routes and light rail frequency re- mains unknown, as the transportation sys- tem’s board chose to delay a final decision on the proposed changes in a last-minute vote at last week’s committee meeting. The board was scheduled to vote on a package of changes that would amount to the largest service changes in DART’s 40- year history. Some of the initial changes, like nearly doubling the cost of paratransit services and reducing the paratransit ser- vice zones, were scrapped earlier this month. However, the board did approve in- creasing curb-to-curb paratransit fees by 50 cents to $4 per one-way ride and in- creasing the cost of a single-ride standard ticket from $3 to $4. The board gave itself a few more weeks to decide whether to eliminate certain bus routes and limit other fixed-route frequen- cies, delaying the final vote to the next regu- lar board meeting on Sept. 9. According to Rob Smith, vice president of service and planning, the two-week delay will cost DART an estimated $1 million. The changes, if adopted, were slated to launch in January 2026, but implementation has also been de- layed. The delay was approved in an 8-7 vote in order to give member cities more time to as- sess the impacts of service changes. “We have meetings with all of the cities in two days to talk about the budget,” said Di- rector Randall Bryant. “The cost of delayed implementation, for me, it’s not an exclu- sion. It’s a point of consideration.” Earlier this year, in March, while a bill moved through the legislature that would have fundamentally restructured DART’s funding system and created an estimated several billion dollars in annual losses, the board released a new general mobility pro- gram (GMP), which included the proposed changes as a money-saving measure. The bill, which eventually failed, would have al- lowed the transit service’s 13 member cities to elect to reduce their one-cent sales tax contributions by a quarter, fully derailing ongoing and future improvements to DART. “We don’t have enough money to do ev- erything,” said board chair Gary Slagel at Tuesday’s meeting. Increased demands and requests in cities wanting equitable services matching their contributions were part of the inspiration for some of the changes, ac- cording to the DART website. The Lesser Of Two Evils In a series of meetings hosted throughout the summer leading up to a July pub- Adobe Stock In July, parents of more than 30,000 Texas students applied for an exemption to at least one mandated vaccine. Unfair Park from p4 >> p8
