Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to close a nonprofit in El Paso near the southern border has been blocked by a local judge.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Paxton sued Annunciation House, a Catholic organization, for violating the law by allegedly facilitating unlawful migration and refusing to submit requested documents that his office previously requested.
“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,” District Judge Francisco Dominguez stated following his ruling, per El Paso Matters. “There is a real and credible concern that the attempt to prevent Annunciation House from conducting business in Texas was predetermined.”
Dominguez suggested that Paxton had “ulterior political motives.”
Paxton alleged in a press release last month that the nongovernmental organization broke the law by “facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house.”
“The chaos at the southern border has created an environment where NGOs, funded with taxpayer money from the Biden Administration, facilitate astonishing horrors, including human smuggling,” Paxton said.
Ruben Garcia, the founder and director of Annunciation House, said he was grateful for the ruling, adding, “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,” he said, as reported by El Paso Matters.
Dominguez’s ruling comes as the southern border continues to see high levels of unlawful migration, with Texas and the federal government locked in multiple legal battles regarding whether the state has the right to secure its own border with Mexico.
