SOUTH ASIAN CHRONICLE

Houston / Texas Politics

Who Cares About Our Youth? With Representative Penny Morales Shaw

An Interview Series with our Texas Legislators — In the closing session of Houston Community Media’s series, Rep. Penny Morales Shaw details how underfunded classrooms, over-policing, and state-level immigration directives are converging to affect immigrant families across Greater Houston’s South Asian communities.

HOUSTON — Across Greater Houston’s Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali and Sri Lankan communities, the concerns raised in a recent legislative briefing will sound familiar: underfunded schools, immigration paperwork stuck in limbo, and children who feel like “a number” in an overcrowded, under-resourced classroom.

Those were among the themes Texas State Rep. Penny Morales Shaw (D-Houston, District 148) raised on July 10 during the third and final session of Houston Community Media’s interview series “Who Cares About Our Youth?” The half-hour conversation, moderated by Nakia Cooper, brought together questions from ethnic media reporters, including Indo-American News, on the state of children and teenagers across Texas, a state home to one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing South Asian populations.

Morales Shaw, an attorney who has represented District 148 since 2021, said her own experience raising four children as a single mother while running a multi-state law practice shapes how she approaches policy. “I do have a special place in my priority list for families and youth,” she said. “And it’s reflected in the bills that I file, the bills that I co-sponsor, that I support, and the ones that I don’t support.”

A Funding Fight With Direct Consequences for Immigrant Families

Much of the conversation centered on Texas school funding, an issue with outsized consequences for South Asian immigrant communities, many of whose children rely on public school wraparound services such as English language support, free and reduced lunch, and after-school tutoring, resources that are often the first to shrink when budgets tighten.

Morales Shaw said Texas withheld public education funding for roughly two years amid a legislative standoff over private school vouchers, a delay she compared to “not being paid for two years and expecting to continue sustaining your family, your home, your vehicle.” Twenty-four Republican lawmakers, she noted, joined Democrats in resisting the voucher bill because of opposition from their own constituents.

She said last session’s roughly $8 billion in new school funding sounded significant but, once adjusted for the two years of shortfall and rising costs, worked out closer to $4 billion, still short of the roughly $1,000 per-student increase she said schools needed simply to break even on basics: supplies, teacher pay, maintenance, air conditioning and meals.

Over 100 Texas public schools are currently closing statewide, Morales Shaw said, along with cuts to after-school programs, pre-K offerings and tutoring, changes that fall hardest on communities without the fundraising networks that wealthier school districts rely on. She singled out reductions to special education and dual-language programs as particularly damaging for immigrant and multilingual families, noting that shrinking these programs forces schools to treat diverse classrooms as “one homogenous, no-one-is-different unit, when in fact that’s not the case.”

Immigration Enforcement’s Ripple Effect on South Asian Households

Asked directly how federal immigration enforcement has affected immigrant youth, Morales Shaw described a pattern in which Texas state agencies have quietly mirrored federal crackdowns without legislative debate, changes that reach deep into professional and mixed-status South Asian households across the state. She pointed to more than 40 professions, including many in healthcare, engineering and skilled trades where South Asian workers are heavily represented, where the state now requires proof of lawful presence to renew a license, a change she said has directly affected DACA recipients whose federal renewal paperwork is often delayed by roughly two years, leaving them unable to prove status even when they remain eligible.

She also cited a new state housing directive requiring landlords who receive any government funding, including many affordable housing providers, to screen tenants for lawful presence. Grant funding cuts to nonprofits such as food banks and meal programs, she added, have further strained immigrant families who rely on them to fill gaps between jobs or during hardship.

Morales Shaw said she expects renewed efforts, encouraged by conservative advocacy groups, to challenge Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that guarantees all children, regardless of immigration status, the right to a public education. “If they say, ‘we’re not educating immigrant kids anymore,’ you can imagine the fallout from that on families,” she said.

Policing on Campus and a Path Forward

On school safety, Morales Shaw described a Texas bill from several sessions ago that raised, but did not eliminate, the practice of handcuffing and arresting young children on school grounds. “If you’re allowing a 10-year-old to be handcuffed on school grounds and be put into a punitive system, that’s already just a wrong turn,” she said, calling for policy grounded in political will rather than punitive default settings, including support for raising the minimum age to purchase assault weapons, a measure she said stalled even after the 2022 Uvalde school shooting.

Asked how she has managed to pass legislation in what one reporter described as an “anti-woke” political climate, Morales Shaw pointed to bipartisan relationship-building. She cited a law she authored giving resources to the roughly 40 percent of college students nationally who are also parents, and an expansion of the Texas Compassionate Use Program to cover chronic pain, intended in part to give veterans an alternative to opioids.

She closed by urging ethnic media outlets to keep surfacing stories from immigrant communities that rarely reach the state Capitol. “We need you to tell us what families are experiencing,” she said. “And the other way, we need to keep you informed about these kinds of things that are quietly happening in the background, but very loudly impacting immigrant families.”

About the Speaker

Representative Penny Morales Shaw

Texas House of Representatives, District 148

State Representative Penny Morales Shaw is an attorney in Houston, Texas, where she represents the 148th District in the Texas House of Representatives, which includes parts of Spring Branch, Garden Oaks / Oak Forest, Carverdale, and Cypress-Fairbanks. During the 87th Legislative Session, she served on the House Committee on Environmental Regulation and the House Committee on Urban Affairs, and was named “Freshman of the Year” by the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

She is a member of the House Innovation & Technology Caucus, the House LGBTQ Caucus, the Legislative Study Group, the Mexican-American Legislative Caucus (MALC), the Texas Legislative Ports Caucus, and the Texas Women’s Health Caucus, and is a founding member of both the Democratic Progressive Caucus and the House Caucus on Climate, Environment, and the Energy Industry.

A native Houstonian who attended Houston public schools, Morales Shaw has lived in northwest Houston for the past ten years, where she raised four children as a single mother while managing her multi-state law practice. Her advocacy has been shaped by earlier work as an attorney at NAACP legal clinics, her role in securing passage of the International Violence Against Women Act, and her service as Deputy Chief for Harris County Commissioner, Precinct 2, where she oversaw policy and legislative affairs.

Reporting based on Houston Community Media’s July 10, 2026 interview series “Who Cares About Our Youth?” Event supported by The Houston Endowment.