News Roundup: Texan Who Chaired U.S. Consumer Advisory Board Expresses Concerns

Our daily look at Texas headlines.

By Becky FogelJune 11, 2018 1:28 pm

The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.

Last Wednesday, Mick Mulvaney, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, disbanded a group of experts that helps oversee the agency’s policies.

The Consumer Advisory Board was made up of 25 members from across the country, and its former chair, Ann Baddour, is from Texas.

Baddour explains she was worried when she found out she and fellow members of this legally-required advisory board were effectively fired.

“I’m most concerned that our families are going to be left behind,” Baddour says.

In addition to being the chair of the Consumer Advisory Board, Baddour is director of the Fair Financial Services Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed. Her work within Texas focuses on reforming predatory lending practices, especially when it comes to payday and auto title loans.

She says disbanding the board is the latest sign that this federal agency, created in the wake of the Great Recession, is shifting its focus.

“And so we see these kinds of steps where the families on the ground that are struggling the most are being sidelined and left behind in the interest of businesses that sometimes that don’t have the best interest of their customers in mind,” she says.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says it will revamp the Consumer Advisory Board will all new, and fewer, members this fall.




A Honduran man who entered the U.S. illegally died by suicide in a Texas jail last month. Matt Largey with KUT News tells us there are reports he was separated from his wife and young child before he was brought to the jail.

39-year-old Marco Antonio Munoz was in a padded cell, being watched by a camera when he died on May 13 at the Starr County Jail. Border Patrol agents had brought him there after he was arrested while seeking asylum in the U.S. Munoz became ‘combative and non-compliant’ at the jail, according to a report filed with the state this month. He was found dead the next morning. On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that Munoz had crossed into Texas with his wife and 3-year-old son — but that they were separated by the Border Patrol. The Trump Administration has been criticized for its new policy of separating children from their parents when they enter the U.S. illegally.




The U.S. Justice Department will not fight state efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The agency said late Friday it agreed with Texas that DACA should end.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the administration on May 1, arguing the Obama-era program was unconstitutional. Paxton appeared on Fox News Channel a couple of days after filing that lawsuit. He said this case was interesting, since the federal government wants DACA to be terminated too.

“President Trump has tried to rescind this, and three federal judges, we believe, have stepped in unlawfully and stopped it, and this our way of pushing that forward,” Paxton said.

President Trump first announced he was phasing out the program, which shields some young unauthorized immigrants from deportation, last September.