Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was dealt a legal blow on Monday when a judge said that his investigation into a decades-old migrant shelter violated "fair play."
Paxton announced a lawsuit on February 20 against the El Paso-based Annunciation House, saying that the Catholic nongovernmental organization (NGO) formed in 1976 should have its operation license in the state revoked for allegedly facilitating illegal entry to the United States, harboring illegal migrants, human smuggling, and operating a stash house.
The allegations, which included the shelter's purported denial of providing documents related to operations and even clientele, were met with surprise from shelter director Ruben Garcia—whose attorney, Jerome Wesevich, questioned whether it was even legally allowed to provide said documents to the state.
"The attorney general's efforts to run roughshod over Annunciation House, without regard to due process or fair play, call into question the true motivation for the attorney general's attempt to prevent Annunciation House from providing the humanitarian and social services that it provides. There is a real and credible concern that the attempt to prevent Annunciation House from conducting business in Texas was predetermined," 205th District Judge Francisco Dominguez said in his ruling on Monday.
Newsweek has reached out to Paxton's office and Annunciation House via email for comment.
The order means that Paxton and associates, should they pursue the collection of documents from the nonprofit shelter, must litigate via the state's court system. However, the judge also denied the shelter's motions for a temporary injunction or to stop the documents request entirely.
"It kind of sends a shiver through all incorporated entities in the state of Texas, because people are going to ask, does this mean that the attorney general feels that they have the authority to arrive at any institution, any business, any entity, and just walk up and say, we are submitting a request to examine. And I think that's a really fundamental question about whether that's a way to function," Garcia told El Paso Matters.
David Stout, a county commissioner in El Paso's Precinct 2 for nearly a decade, told Newsweek via phone that the shelter has worked with NGOs and volunteers for almost five decades—working tirelessly and having "really kept our community safe and secure—have kept the migrants safe, secure and healthy."
Efforts made by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Paxton to demonize Annunciation House are part of "politically charged" rhetoric that Stout claims has become intentionally aimed by Republicans towards migrants.
"They want there to be chaos so that it will play into their rhetoric that there is chaos on the border," Stout, a Democrat, said. "Right now, if you come down to El Paso, come downtown, you will not see chaos. It's not there.
"And in large part that is due to the work that folks like the Annunciation House are doing. They are keeping folks off the streets, feeding them, giving them shelter, and taking care of them. If we did not have the Annunciation house and the NGOs, we probably would see hundreds of migrants on the streets not being taken care of[...]so [Republicans] can feed their hands throughout the immigrant rhetoric and their anti-immigrant push."
Last week, while Paxton was absent from a court hearing, Dominguez scolded Ryan Baasch, chief of the attorney general's Consumer Protection Division, and broadly excoriated Paxton's office as "rude and unprofessional" in how it handled the request from Annunciation House.
Baasch at one point referred to the requested documents as "innocuous material," drawing ire from the judge.
"This is the part where you're starting to offend my intelligence," Dominguez said on Thursday. "You did not offer to negotiate. You did not offer to act in good faith."
Faithful America, a not-for-profit organization composed of more than 200,000 Catholics and Protestants and others not affiliated with any church or denomination, posted a petition March 4 on its website, objecting to the "unfounded, cruel and partisan legal attacks from Texas's far-right attorney general" against Annunciation House.
As of the afternoon of March 11, the petition had 16,168 signatures.
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Nick Mordowanec is a Newsweek reporter based in Michigan. His focus is reporting on Ukraine and Russia, along with social ... Read more
