HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Texas hospitals will soon have to start tracking how many of its patients are in the country illegally.

An executive order signed by Gov. Greg Abbott Thursday afternoon requires hospitals to start tracking that information by Nov. 1. Hospitals will also have to track how much money they spend on care for undocumented immigrants.

The order requires hospitals to report its findings to the state’s Health and Human Services Commission four times a year starting March 1.

“I very much believe this is a political move that vilifies our immigrant communities,” Imelda Mejia, with the immigrant advocacy group Texas Rising, said.

Mejia worries the new law will make people think twice about seeking treatment.

“It’s going to throw patients for a loop, I think, and we know that immigrant families already have a hard time navigating our health care system,” she said.

As noted in the executive order, patients won’t be turned away because of their immigration status. Abbott argues that since the state is paying for treatment through Medicaid funding, it has a right to try to recoup the cost from the federal government.

“It is important to the taxpayers to know how their money is being spent, how much it’s costing them, and where that money is going,” Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform said.

Florida enacted a similar law in 2023. The state reports it’s spending $148 million a year on health care for undocumented immigrants.

While hospitals can ask about immigration status, legal experts say you’re not required to answer.

“Even if people don’t say if they’re in the country illegally, you can make a reasonable deduction here. If people don’t have a valid ID,” Mehlman said.

The executive order doesn’t spell out if that will be an acceptable way for hospitals to gather data.

Harris Health, which operates Ben Taub and LBJ, said it would comply with the law but didn’t provide specifics as to how.

For news updates, follow Luke Jones on Facebook, X and Instagram.

Texas Nationalist Movement leader Daniel Miller said the United States has a “deep-seated sickness,” which means there is a chance “it either blows up or it invites autocratic reign from some tyrannical government.” The warning was delivered in the most recent episode of his Texas News Podcast released on Wednesday.

Miller was speaking in response to comments Phil McGraw, better known as “Dr. Phil,” made when the pair debated Texan independence on his Dr. Phil Primetime show, which was broadcast in late July.

Texan nationalists have scored a series of victories in recent months amid ongoing tensions between local authorities and the federal government, particularly over illegal immigration and LGBTQ+ rights. In May the Republican Party of Texas elected supporters of a referendum on Texan independence as its new chair and vice chair, then the following month included an independence referendum call in its 2024 Legislative Priorities and Platform document.

During the concluding monologue at the end of his show on state secession, McGraw expressed skepticism about the prospect of any state successfully leaving the Union.

“The chances of seceding successfully, with a functional government, infrastructure, medical and educational facilities etc., to me, is just beyond belief,” he said. “Does anybody believe the new country will not be plagued by the same selfish whiney complaining career victims that will squawk even louder for any reason or no reason at all?”

Miller hit back at McGraw: “While he publicly came out and essentially condemned what we’re talking about, talking about, ‘oh it’s going to be too difficult, you’ll have problems and it doesn’t solve anything.’ He gave no real proof, but more than that his solution was essentially for 400 million Americans to wake up tomorrow and observe the golden rule.

“He suggested that 400 million Americans could set aside their differences and work harmoniously overnight, and I’ve got to tell you, this idea is not only unrealistic, perhaps delusional, but it’s also very, very dangerous.”

Describing the tensions he believes exist in American society Miller added: “You see when you have such a deep-seated sickness, this pressure internally, these competing world views, these deep-seated issues and you ignore them. It is a recipe for disaster.

“One of two things happens. It either blows up or it invites autocratic reign from some tyrannical government to keep its hand on those competing realities. That’s the danger in thinking one day everybody’s going to wake up and we’re going to link pinkies and sing Kumbaya. It’s just not the reality. The reality is Texans are suffering.”

Newsweek contacted Phil McGraw for comment via an email to his company Merit Street Media, along with Daniel Miller by direct message on X, formerly Twitter.

A survey conducted for Newsweek earlier this year found that in a hypothetical independence referendum, 23 percent of Texans would back secession, against 67 percent who would vote to remain “a state within the United States.”

By Evan Garcia

GEORGETOWN, Texas (Reuters) – As with any desktop 3D printer, the Vulcan printer pipes layer by layer to build an object – except this printer is more than 45 feet (13.7 m) wide, weighs 4.75 tons and prints residential homes.

This summer, the robotic printer from ICON is finishing the last few of 100 3D-printed houses in Wolf Ranch, a community in Georgetown, Texas, about 30 miles from Austin.

ICON began printing the walls of what it says is the world’s largest 3D-printed community in November 2022. Compared to traditional construction, the company says that 3D printing homes is faster, less expensive, requires fewer workers, and minimizes construction material waste.

“It brings a lot of efficiency to the trade market,” said ICON senior project manager Conner Jenkins. “So, where there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot.”

After concrete powder, water, sand and other additives are mixed together and pumped into the printer, a nozzle squeezes out the concrete mixture like toothpaste onto a brush, building up layer by layer along a pre-programmed path that creates corduroy-effect walls.

The single-story three- to four-bedroom homes take about three weeks to finish printing, with the foundation and metal roofs installed traditionally.

Jenkins said the concrete walls are designed to be resistant to water, mold, termites and extreme weather.

Lawrence Nourzad, a 32-year-old business development director, and his girlfriend Angela Hontas, a 29-year-old creative strategist, purchased a Wolf Ranch home earlier this summer.

“It feels like a fortress,” Nourzad said, adding that he was confident it would be resilient to most tornados.

The walls also provide strong insulation from the Texas heat, the couple said, keeping the interior temperature cool even when the air conditioner wasn’t on full blast.

There was one other thing the 3D-printed walls seemed to protect against, however: a solid wireless internet connection.

“Obviously these are really strong, thick walls. And that’s what provides a lot of value for us as homeowners and keeps this thing really well-insulated in a Texas summer, but signal doesn’t transfer through these walls very well,” Nourzad said.

To alleviate this issue, an ICON spokeswoman said most Wolf Ranch homeowners use mesh internet routers, which broadcast a signal from multiple units placed throughout a home, versus a traditional router which sends a signal from one device.

The 3D-printed homes at Wolf Ranch, called the “Genesis Collection” by developers, range in price from around $450,000 to close to $600,000. Developers said a little more than one quarter of the 100 homes have been sold.

ICON, which 3D-printed its first home in Austin in 2018, hopes to one day take its technology to the Moon. NASA, as part of its Artemis Moon exploration program, has contracted ICON to develop a construction system capable of building landing pads, shelters, and other structures on the lunar surface.

(Reporting by Evan Garcia, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)