Seven Bills, Three Different Jobs

Seven crime and public-safety bills passed this session with almost nothing in common on the surface, no shared sponsor, no shared committee, no shared bill number pattern. Read them together and they sort cleanly into three different jobs.

HB1403 stops child-placing agencies from demanding an itemized firearm inventory from foster families, while leaving the basic “is there a gun in the home” safety screening untouched. It’s backed by a real civil penalty, up to $5,000 per violation, enforced by the attorney general. HB2217 funds bullet-resistant windshields and door panels for patrol vehicles through a new state grant program, voluntary for agencies, with no dedicated funding stream of its own. The program only works if the Legislature actually appropriates real money to it. SB1349 creates Texas’s first dedicated offense for transnational repression, a foreign government’s agent intimidating a dissident, journalist, or diaspora community member on Texas soil, built carefully around an explicit First Amendment carve-out written directly into the statute’s text.

HB1422 is the largest of the seven: a new first-degree felony for continuous sexual abuse against multiple victims, tighter parole and community-supervision eligibility across a long list of sex offenses, and a genuinely new option letting survivors get rape-kit evidence tested without deciding, in the moment, whether to report to police. HB1871 fixes a real sentencing anomaly: under the old attempt-crime formula, someone who nearly succeeded at murdering a peace officer could be punished a full category below the completed offense. It’s now a first-degree felony, 25 to 99 years or life, no parole. HB210 makes it a crime, escalating from a misdemeanor to a state jail felony, for a vendor to bid on a school district contract while a board member has an undisclosed financial stake in that vendor, with an automatic felony if actual money changed hands.

SB2143 does two things at once. It lets counties commission fire marshals as limited peace officers for four specific fire-and-building-safety functions, nothing broader. And in the same breath, it requires a county to have specific legal authorization before creating any law enforcement agency at all, closing off any argument that counties have some general, inherent power to do that on their own. One bill, narrow grant, tighter limit, both pointed the same direction.

Three of these seven protect someone specific: foster families’ privacy, an officer’s physical safety, a diaspora community’s safety from a foreign government. Three raise the price of misconduct Texas’s own sentencing and procurement rules were letting slide: multi-victim sexual abuse, attempted murder of an officer, corrupt school contracting. One isn’t really about crime at all. It’s about what a county gets to call itself, and Texas tightened that too.

This is our read of the bills. We encourage you to read them yourself and reach your own conclusions.