It all began in early February in El Paso, when investigators from the Texas Attorney General’s Office arrived at Annunciation House, a Catholic nonprofit, which has provided services in the region for nearly 50 years. The investigators demanded that, in 24 hours, the nonprofit hand over its operational records, including medical records, names, dates of birth, and other personal information about migrants staying at the shelters. After the nonprofit filed a lawsuit, asking a judge to determine whether it needed to provide the documents, Paxton then countersued to close Annunciation House, calling it a “stash house.”
Paxton’s legal harassment campaign then moved east to the Rio Grande Valley to target other organizations that work with migrants. Along with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the think tank that spearheaded the authoritarian Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” guide, Paxton’s campaign is part of an election-year plan to stoke “great replacement” and “border invasion” conspiracies, which are then circulated by MAGA elected officials and MAGA media outlets such as Fox News. This is being done to undermine Americans’ beliefs in the electoral system and swing the vote to Trump and authoritarianism.
For several years, Trump and allies, including Paxton, Texas governor Greg Abbott, and his lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, have repeated the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that brown and black border crossers are coming illegally to vote in U.S. elections at the bidding of President Biden and the Democrats. But the U.S.-Mexico border is anything but “open,” as MAGA followers often allege. Each year there are thousands of migration-related deaths, and the United States spends billions on border militarization. Cases of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections are incredibly rare, and noncitizens have been banned from voting in federal elections for at least 100 years. Despite these facts, Paxton has embarked on a propaganda and lawfare campaign against nonprofits along the U.S-Mexico border, and even into Guatemala, accusing them of everything from “human smuggling” to operating “stash houses.”
In a press release, Paxton said his lawsuit to close Annunciation House was necessary because “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.”
As global migration has increased in many parts of the world, including the U.S.-Mexico border region, Annunciation House and its shelters have played an important role in helping El Paso cope with the number of people arriving. Ruben Garcia, the founder and director of Annunciation House, denounced the AG’s actions in a press release:
“Annunciation House has kept hundreds of thousands of refugees coming through our city off the streets and given them food. The work helps serve our local businesses, our city, and immigration officials to keep people off the streets and give them shelter while they come through our community. If the work that Annunciation House conducts is illegal, so too is the work of our local hospitals, schools, and food banks.”
In July, State District Judge Francisco X. Dominguez ruled that Paxton’s subpoena for records and his attempt to close Annunciation House was unconstitutional and called his actions “outrageous and intolerable.”
In a blistering ruling, he wrote that Paxton, “as the top law enforcement officer of the State of Texas … has a duty to uphold all laws, not just selectively interpret or misuse those that can be manipulated to advance his own personal beliefs or political agenda.”
Since Paxton’s unsuccessful foray into El Paso, his office has targeted other border nonprofits, including Team Brownsville, Angeles Sin Fronteras in Mission, and Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which has been repeatedly harassed over the years by far-right characters, including Alex Jones. Paxton’s effort is being led by assistant attorney general Levi Fuller, who was part of Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit until September 2023, when he moved to special litigation and nonprofit enforcement. In a recent article, Fuller cast doubt on the 2020 election result. Alluding to the upcoming November election, he said, “You should never be afraid to question the results of an election.”
I spoke with members of two of the organizations targeted, both of whom asked to speak anonymously because of the ongoing legal proceedings with the AG’s office. Attention seemed to turn to the Rio Grande Valley, they said, after two brothers, who call themselves “the muckrakers” and who are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, falsely accused an organization in neighboring Matamoros, Mexico, of distributing a flyer encouraging migrants to vote for Joe Biden. A post on X about the fake flyer went viral and was shared widely by MAGA legislators, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Not long after, Fuller from the AG’s office contacted them, they said, asking about their connections to the organization in Mexico and requesting documents. “Ultimately, what they want to do is shut us down,” a member of one of the border organizations told me. “Back in 2022, Governor Abbott said he wanted to shut down NGOs who he said were facilitating illegal immigration, but we’re not doing that. We’re helping vulnerable people after they’ve already been processed by Border Patrol.”
Heidi Beirich, cofounder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said that Paxton’s tactics in Texas mirror those of Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, who has become a model of authoritarianism, or “illiberal democracy,” for the MAGA movement in the United States. In Hungary, Beirich said, Orbán used the government to harass and close nonprofits, universities, and independent news outlets. And he specifically targeted groups serving or representing immigrants, women, and LGBTQ people. “The basic principle for an authoritarian leader is that you have populations that you demonize and scapegoat because it instills fear in their followers and builds their support,” she says. “People react to fear, and they respond to it politically.”
Project 2025 is copying Orbán’s playbook, she says, and globally far-right leaders and groups are meeting more often to trade tactics, ideas and to network. “The international far-right conference circuit is growing,” she said. “CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) is just one example. They’re now holding it in Brazil, Mexico, and they’ve brought Orbán to Texas. So, you end up getting people like Bolsonaro in the room with [Mexican right-wing politician Eduardo] Verástegui, Orbán, Trump, Paxton, and Bannon. And they’re all sharing these playbooks now on a transnational level.”
In at least one case, authoritarians have gone beyond sharing playbooks to directly collaborating across borders. Around the same time that the Heritage Foundation targeted the Matamoros resource center in Mexico, Guatemala’s Public Ministry office sought help from Paxton in investigating nonprofits in Guatemala and Texas for “child trafficking.” Two weeks later, the ministry’s prosecutor’s office raided the office of a British charity, Save the Children, in Guatemala City, saying it was investigating a complaint about the trafficking of Guatemalan children to Texas. “The Public Prosecutor received a complaint referencing and highlighting incidents regarding Guatemalan children and teenagers being subject to vulnerabilities in shelters in Texas, connected with a network which [involves] NGOs that operate in the United States and Guatemala,” a spokesperson for the public prosecutor’s office, Juan Luis Pantaleon, told CNN after the raid on April 25.
I filed public information requests with both Paxton’s and Abbott’s offices, requesting a copy of the complaint filed against Save the Children. Both offices replied with a copy of the letter from the Guatemalan prosecutor, but said they had no other responsive documents. Requests for comment on the complaint, or a copy of the complaint, to their press offices were ignored.
Save the Children, which has provided food assistance and educational services since 1976 in Guatemala, declined to be interviewed but sent a statement to The Border Chronicle regarding the raid. “The Guatemalan Public Ministry did not find any evidence of misconduct in their search, nor did they remove any documents or electronic files from our building,” the statement reads. “Our commitment will always be to protect the rights of children. We do not—and we have never—facilitated the movement of children out of Guatemala.”
The architect of the raid, Rafael Curruchiche, who leads Guatemala’s public ministry, was placed in 2022 on a list of corrupt officials by the U.S. government for “disrupting high-profile corruption cases,” and he also attempted to illegally overturn Guatemala’s 2023 presidential election. Paxton has been fighting allegations of corruption and fraud—some of those allegations lodged by his own former employees—for the last decade. He also filed a controversial brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; as a result, he was sued by the Texas State Bar for professional misconduct.
Paxton and Governor Abbott targeting organizations that work with migrants is part of the authoritarian playbook many anti-democratic officials are adopting globally to gain power, said Beirich. “Talking about ‘invasion’ and “immigrant crime” is demonizing the immigrant population, and now they’re going after those who work with migrants in various ways,” she said. “It’s not just about propaganda. It’s about making people’s lives unbearable, increasing the climate of hostility toward immigrants, and instilling fear.”
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