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Texas hospitals must ask patients starting Friday whether they are in the U.S. legally and track the cost of treating people without legal status following an order by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott that expands the state’s clash with the Biden administration over immigration. Critics fear the change could scare people away from hospitals in Texas, even though patients are not required to answer the questions to receive medical care. (11/1)

County facilities reported their highest detainee death count in decades in 2022, including multiple suicides that reveal deep institutional problems.‌ (Damien, 10/31)

Three Dade Correctional Institution prisoners, represented by the Florida Justice Institute, said in the class-action suit that the state facility’s heat index surpasses 100 degrees in the summer. Prisoners are “routinely treated” in the infirmary for heat rashes, heat exhaustion and related illnesses, the lawsuit said, before they are returned to the “dangerously hot conditions” that sickened them. Florida Justice Institute attorney Andrew Udelsman told USA TODAY the nonprofit law firm has received a rising number of prison heat complaints over the last decade. (Arshad, 10/31)

Covid was Andrew Cuomo’s calling card. Now it threatens to upend his political comeback. A criminal reckoning awaits the former New York governor over his alleged lies to Congress, stemming from his administration’s reporting of critical nursing home data during the pandemic. (Resiman, 10/31)

The number of people who died of drug overdoses in Ohio was 4,452 in 2023, a 9% decrease from the previous year, according to the state’s latest unintentional drug overdose report. This was the second consecutive year of a decrease in deaths. In 2022, overdose deaths declined by 5%, Gov. Mike DeWine and other state officials said during a Wednesday media event to announce the report. (Hancock, 10/30)

Durham resident Midori Brooks is fighting a decades-long battle to free her family from lead exposure. The 55-year-old’s struggle with this environmental issue traces back to the mid-1990s when she and her family lived in a rental house in west Durham. It was there that her three children came into contact with lead-contaminated dust. (Atwater and Blythe, 11/1)