Welcome to Deceleration In Depth, where we are growing solutions to an overheating world. We highlight the latest global, national, and regional developments in climate and environmental justice to better inform local action. Deceleration is rooted in San Antonio and the South Texas bioregion but our concerns and enthusiasm are broad. Pitch us your story idea at editor@deceleration.news.

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Deceleration is growing back. It's a crouch. A fighting posture? Or a gardener's hunch, perhaps, furiously nurturing. Sweat falls to awaken seed. In spite of being forced to reorient with a single full-time employee, Deceleration has redoubled our attention to our original animating vision from nearly a decade ago to ensure we can step boldly to the needs of 2026. Key to this is a growing team of monthly correspondents launching new newsletters weekly.

My own Water & Power, exposing those profiting off the necessities of our survival, went out three weeks ago. That was followed by Alternative Futures' remarkable meditation on defeating 'Climate Behemoth,' courtesy of climate journalist Syris Valentine. This last week, readers got a taste of what long-time Deceleration contributor Gaige Davila has in mind as our Coastlines/Faultlines correspondent. Anyone who is concerned about the coast and coastal lifeways will benefit from his reflections. And in a few days, our Inaugural ICE Watch will hit your inboxes, delivering the most critical news about the deportation-industrial complex in Texas. We can't speak highly enough about Roxana Rojas, who has taken up that deeply needed task.

I also don't have the words to really describe how much beauty is captured in our latest Creative Review, 'Sea of Creatures,' on the topic of coral reefs and our shared ocean, edited by the positively illuminated Marisol Cortez. If you missed our email blast a few days about it, it is safe to wade into the water now.

But there's a rub in our redoubling. As you may have gathered, journalism is under threat. Independent journalists are arrested by federal agents in the course of doing their jobs and charged with conspiracy and obstruction. Federal agents seize the materials of an investigative reporter out of their home. Owners of some of the leading papers happily bent the knee to the Trump regime without even being asked. And then—whack falls the ax—and 300 journalists at The Washington Post are jobless, including, it sounds like, the entire climate desk.

For nine years, Deceleration has been delivering environmental news and analysis for free to our communities. At first it was at the cost of our savings account. Then for the last few years we were able to raise most of the funds needed from outside South Texas. That took us to two full-time positions and we were were rounding up on a third hire when family health challenges intervened. We recovered, only to find ourselves in an increasingly hostile environment for indie media, politically, funding-wise, and finally when insurance rates for independent workers like us skyrocketed out of reach.

And yet we continue. It's ingrained habit. I can't help but reflect on how in the time we've been showing up, we've seen newsrooms in Texas take shape with pots of investor cash only to evaporate a few years later. Deceleration is a different model. But we're frail in other ways. While we keep scratching into this project, putting our ears to the ground and watching the sky for portents, one thing is clear: We need your support to firm up again.

If ever there was a time where we needed readers and supporters to set up an account and put $5/month down, this is it.

If that's too big of an ask, start with a free membership and then see if it's worth $5 in March. We're sure we can win you over. Subscribe for all the reporting and analysis from our growing roster of correspondents—again, free with our love—but do it today. Until the day we print off some editions on paper to spread around our favorite haunts and drop in the mail, a 1:1 email relationship with you is our only way around the whims of billionaire algorithms on social networks. And those whims aren't good informational security for any of us.

So there may be fewer long-form investigative pieces from freelance writers in coming months (we worked w/ nearly 30 writers and artists last year, stories republished in nearly a dozen other outlets). But the week ahead is still strangely packed already with guest contributors, including one from an active Austin food forest fight, and another revealing how emergency survival kits have become daily necessities in the Rio Grande Valley. And just a personal note that while I've labored to put all I have to advancing this project, I was whalloped by RSV a few days ago, which cut into planned updates on Guajolote Ranch and a few other items, so I'd be remiss not to include here:

💡

San Antonio City Council denies MUD application, development agreement for Guajolote Ranch (KSAT)

Meanwhile, this coming Friday we'll be gathering with Deceleration's Community Advisors after a bit of a hiatus and we're planning to linger for another hour or so for a sort of after-hours editorial meetup, a more freewheeling chat about this project, it's ambitions and limitations. If that sort of access is important to you and you can't afford the $5/month membership level that comes bundled with event invites, write me at editor@deceleration.news for times and location. — Greg Harman

REPORTING

*640,000-square-foot warehouse at 542 SE Loop 410. Image: Google Maps*

ICE Buys Massive San Antonio Warehouse As Detained Population Approaches 75,000

Numerous lawsuits and judge’s orders have dogged ICE detention centers in recent months, with one federal judge comparing a facility outside Chicago to a “concentration camp.”

Greg Harman

The federal government reportedly closed on the purchase of a 640,000-square-foot warehouse on San Antonio’s East Side this week that is expected to be used to house thousands of detained people moving through the growing national deportation-industrial complex. The sale of the property by Oakmont Industrial Group at 542 SE Loop 410 was resisted by local elected leaders and community members.

“ICE detention centers are centers of documented atrocities,” Councilmember Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) said in a recent video.

“Families are torn apart. People are denied medical care. Human dignity is routinely violated. These facilities do not belong anywhere in our communities.”

PODCAST

#40: Liam Ramos Freed, Gaige Davila on Gulf Coast Fights, Defeating 'Climate Behemoth,' More

Deceleration's 40th (!) podcast brings you: Liam Ramos and father are freed from Dilley Detention and back in Minneapolis, but Federal Judge Biery's words that sprung them still need to be heard by those responsible for snatching children off of U.S. streets.

Plus: Extended dialogue with Deceleration correspondent Gaige Davila about his years chronicling Texas Gulf fights over colonial extraction and plans for a new Deceleration newsletter, 'Coastlines & Faultlines.'
And words from Deceleration correspondent Syris Valentine on defeating 'Climate Behemoth' and Sulma Franco speaking on the crimes of immigration detention.
Or: Skip the website and enjoy the Deceleration Podcast now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon Music, Goodpods, or a dozen other platforms.

ARTS & LETTERS

‘Sea of Creatures’—A Deceleration Quarterly Creative Review

In Deceleration's Winter 2026 Creative Review, writers and artists from our bioregion and beyond—from Boca Chica at Texas’s tip to the migratory flyways that link Eagle and Condor—share their love, grief, and rage for the fragility of our oceans and the coral reefs they shelter.

Deceleration publishes our themed Creative Reviews every quarter to invite response to the crises of this moment through the power of visual art, poetry, prose, sound, and other creative forms. 'Sea of Creatures' is our second installment. Our first is here: ‘Vanishing Ice, Melting ICE.’ Our heartfelt gratitude to all who submitted to this most recent call. Look for another in the spring!

Editor: Marisol Cortez

REPORTING

*Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem in New Orleans last week. Image: US Department of Homeland Security*

'Impeach Noem' Demands Growing After Gutting FEMA, Abandoning Disaster Victims

From widespread winter storm deaths, to Hill Country flood response: 'It’s very clear that Secretary Kristi Noem is undermining FEMA’s capabilities and putting the public in harm’s way.'

Truthout

Secretary Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was already facing scrutiny as temperatures plunged and winter storms rolled across much of the United States at the end of January. The expansive winter storms came just after immigration officers ultimately under her command killed two people in Minnesota. The killings heightened public anger against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, both under Noem’s purview, as the agencies continued their spree of occupying Democrat-run cities.

The storms then left tens of thousands without power and claimed at least 100 lives from Texas to Tennessee and across much of the Southeast. Some communities are still waiting for power more than a week later.

Now, a growing chorus of experts, agency whistleblowers, and members of Congress say Noem has left the U.S. unprepared for disasters by gutting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and impeding the dispersal of federal aid.

“It’s very clear that Secretary Kristi Noem is undermining FEMA’s capabilities and putting the public in harm’s way,” said Abby McIlraith, a FEMA disaster aid manager and whistleblower, in press call on February 4.

Deceleration Video

Syris Valentine announces the launch of Alternative Futures newsletter at Deceleration reflecting on the work Climate Leviathan and what it exposes about our new political moment with most of the world living under authoritarian governments. Taking inspiration from historical and contemporary movements from the Paris Commune, to Black radicalism, to the Zapatistas, and the recent General Strike in Minneapolis, we can rebuild a a climate justice movement to ensure autonomy, survival, and thriving for future generations.