The “Countering Threats and Attacks On Our Judges Act” passed the Senate back in June.

It comes as the number of threats and attacks on judges has soared in recent years, including on Judge Julie Kocurek in 2015. “In November of 2015, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was severely wounded in an assassination attempt on my life,” she said.

Nine years ago, Kocurek was shot in her own driveway.

On Thursday, the judge and her son, Will Kocurek, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, recounted those terrifying moments.

“I was face to face with the masked gunman, and I started yelling at him and tried to block him from my mom,” Will Kocurek said. “I remember her looking at me kind of like, you know, putting her hands up trying to figure out what was going on. Then the gunman shot her through the driver’s side window four times from just four feet away.”

Cornyn is the sponsor of the bill. “We can’t have judges and court personnel living in fear, and as you heard, not just fear for themselves, but fear for the safety of their families as well,” he told reporters.

The U.S. Marshals Service says in 2021, there were more than 4,500 threats to federal judges and other court personnel. “400% higher than in 2015 — the year Kocurek was shot — and it does not include judges at the state and local levels,” the service reported.

“There’s a lot of division in society right now, and we know that there’s a lot of distrust of institutions,” Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht said.

In Kocurek’s case, her attacker had been a defendant in her courtroom on other charges, and she says he was trying to avoid justice.

“I soon realized that although my attack seemed very personal, it was not about me. This was an attack on our justice system and on the rule of law,” she said.

Cornyn says Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was working on the bill in the House before she died this year, and he hopes her colleagues will take it up soon.

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A GoFundMe account set up for him raised more than $500,000 in just one day. As of Friday night, the total surpassed $730,000.

It was supposed to be an exciting day for the Arvind family, as they were moving their 17-year-old daughter, Andril, to the University of Texas at Dallas.

That all changed in an instant when, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, a blown tire caused a vehicle to skid into their lane and hit their car in Lampasas on Wednesday.

Andril and her parents, Mani and Pradeepa, were all killed, along with 31-year-old Jacinto Gudino Duran, who was driving the car, and his 23-year-old passenger.

The Arvinds’ 14-year-old son, Adiryan, was reportedly starting high school in Leander and couldn’t join his family on the trip.

Majeida Harvey-Guyton, who lives in Texas, said she believes that fact that everyone is rallying around the teen says a lot about their community.

“We’re all here from the same community, and we need to work together and support each other because it takes a village,” Harvey-Guyton said.

Andril was a recent graduate of Rouse High School. In a letter to parents, Principal Vincent Hawkins said the “news has brought great sorrow to our campus and has impacted many in our community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Andril’s family and friends.”

Harvey-Guyton said her own children graduated from Rouse, adding that the news is painful.

“I’m a mother of seven. I have seven children, and I couldn’t imagine losing one,” Harvey-Guyton said.

Petro Haida is new to Leander, but said he’s seen a lot of kindness in the few years he’s been here.

“I think that’s a very great example of the community of Leander, how they treat people, how they want to support,” Haida said.

He hopes the support for Adiryan continues not just financially, but in the holistic way he needs to heal.

“They are with him. The new family for him is the community,” Haida said.

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A deepfake is an image, video, or audio recording that has been edited to replace a person with someone else that makes it look authentic — like placing someone’s face on another person’s body.

This content often results in a spike of anxiety in high schoolers, and victims who have had content made of themselves.

A new bill is providing possible solutions to help stop the spread of this sexually exploitative content.

“It’s incredibly hard to be a teenager right now,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. “To be a parent of a teenager, you often feel powerless, helpless to help your kids because they face so many challenges.”

Kids are now facing many challenges their parents did not deal with when they were in school.

“There’s a pattern we’re seeing of nonconsensual explicit imagery,” said Sen. Cruz.

According to Sen. Cruz, 90% of people targeted for these deepfakes online are women or teenage girls.

“More and more we’re seeing kids who are the victims of one ninth-grader deciding to bully another ninth-grader, and putting out explicit images to all the other kids in the class,” said Sen. Cruz.

He is trying to change that, with his “Take It Down Act.” The bill would do two things: make it a felony to post nonconsensual explicit imagery online, and give big tech companies 48 hours to take down explicit content once they receive a victim’s complaint.

“There is a little bit of fear, the fear of the unknown,” said San Marcos CISD Superintendent Michael Cardona.

According to Cardona, his district has not had a case of AI bullying that he is aware of.

He told CBS Austin he has sat in on hearings where the topic was discussed to set precautions.

“I think for us, it’s getting a policy in front of our school board members so they can approve it,” he said. “Then getting that message out to the community as to why we’re doing certain things.”

Cardona said he is going to let students have a voice on the topic when school starts.

“How would you solve it? This is your campus, so you tell us,” he said.

Sen. Cruz met with two high school girls who experienced this type of bullying firsthand in June.

“They both had almost the exact same thing happen to them,” he said. “Boys in their classes took pictures from social media and used deepfake technology to create naked, explicit images of them and then sent them to all of their classmates at school.”

One high schooler was from New Jersey, the other from a town just outside of Dallas.

“I always will have a fear of this happening again or resurfacing just because it can so easily happen to anybody, which is what happened to me,” said Elliston Berry, who was just 14 when she discovered deepfake nude images of herself circulating on social media.

The state of Texas has some laws in place to protect children from the dangers of AI. Lawmakers are planning on creating more in the next legislative session.

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Hawes has been closely monitoring the new curriculum proposed by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), which would merge new elementary reading lessons with Bible teachings.

“It is not in the best interest academically,” said Hawes.

On Monday, the House Public Education Committee discussed the new curriculum.

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath testified that new teaching materials are based on research to help improve student test scores. The purpose is to build vocabulary and not background knowledge,” he said.

But criticism sparked when the teaching materials released included biblical principles like the “Sermon on the Mount,” the life of Jesus Christ from birth to resurrection and Bible prophecies.

“It sure reads like a Bible class that you might get at a traditional Christian church,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University.

After an overview of the curriculum, Stein spotted two ways it could be in violation of the Constitution.

“The Constitution doesn’t allow for the establishment of an official religion, and with this particular curriculum, looks like may not violate just the Separation Clause, but the Establishment Clause,” Stein added.

The Establishment Clause, being part of the First Amendment, prevents the government from favoring one religion over another.

“The Bible is the only subject in this curriculum,” said Stein, “It’s not diverse — the Koran is not part of those lesson plans.”

Austin-area state Rep. James Talarico said the lack of diversity is a major point of contention for him regarding the curriculum. He accused the TEA of scrapping large bulks of Muslim teachings from the new curriculum.

“Half a million Texans are practicing Muslims, and this new state curriculum went through and deleted every mention of Islam’s prophet Mohammed,” Talarico said.

The new curriculum is part of House Bill 1605, which also includes an immunity clause for teachers who are accused of violating the Constitution.

“Are you worried that if Texas public school teachers use this new curriculum, those teachers will violate the Establishment Clause by teaching Bible stories in public schools?” asked Talarico to Commissioner Morath during the hearing.

Morath replied, “No.”

Talarico went on to ask Morath if they didn’t suspect a constitutional violation from teachers, what was the purpose of the immunity clause?

Morath replied that there could have been a number of reasons the immunity clause was included in the bill.

Stein said it was to protect teachers and the TEA from legal challenges, which he suspected, were certainly coming.

“The authors of it immediately knew it would be challenged,” said Stein, noting that the clause ensures “the TEA won’t dismiss teachers, or say that they violated the Constitution if they’re faithful to the curriculum.”

Talarico has now accused the TEA of prioritizing Christianity in the classroom. “If you’re a Muslim student, a Jewish student, a Hindu student in Texas public schools, you already stick out,” he said.

He added that students are “going to have teachers at the front of classrooms preaching Christianity as the one true and only religion.”

Brian Phillips with the Texas Public Policy Foundation disagreed and said some biblical parables are crucial to developmental learning.

“Teaching the story of the ‘Good Samaritan’ as a way to understand how to be a good neighbor — I don’t see how that could be divisive or negative at all,” said Phillips.

The new curriculum has not yet been voted on or rolled out to public schools.

Parents like Hawes said these new teachings ride along the lines of indoctrination.

“We cannot look at the history of America through a singular religious lens, we are a pluralistic nation and this is anti-pluralism,” she said.

The TEA has made the proposed curriculum public so community members can offer feedback until Aug. 16.

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