Why Texas’s raids on Latina grandmas will backfire

Inside Ken Paxton’s folly

Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.

I’m writing this introduction on Thursday, from the back-row steerage of a flight to Denver, where I’ll be visiting family and drinking a lot of water for the next five days. All (non-hiking) recommendations for things to do or see are appreciated!

The last time I was on a plane, I was flying from Denver, squirming in my seat and contemplating an emergency exit into the starless black night as a viable alternative to watching more of Joe Biden’s debate meltdown. Tonight, it was VP Kamala Harris on CNN, giving her first sitdown interview since becoming the Democratic nominee for president five weeks earlier. New polls confirm that Harris has officially eliminated and in some cases reversed the ugly deficits that Biden faced in major swing states, too. Life comes at you fast.

Of course, public opinion only matters if the public has the freedom to vote, and as today’s urgent story indicates, that is becoming increasingly dicey.

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Last Friday, police raided the homes of several elderly Latino community leaders in southern Texas, conducting hostile early morning searches under the direction of state Attorney General Ken Paxton. The raids were connected to an investigation into alleged voter fraud, Paxton told reporters, a vague accusation that Latino activists reject as an attempt to scapegoat and silence them.

“We are concerned that the Attorney General of Texas has been going after Latino nonprofits that are advocates for immigrant rights and for voting rights,” Domingo Garcia, the chairman of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), told Progress Report.

The women targeted by last week’s raid were all members of LULAC, a century-old organization that advocates for the civil, economic, and voting rights of Hispanic people in the United States. The organization has already asked the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Paxton’s raids, which have impacted other Latino organizations in the state as well, and is considering further legal action.

“We're also looking at filing a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the victims plus LULAC in federal court under the KKK Act, Section 1985, which concerns a conspiracy to deprive a group of their voting rights, and a Section 1983 action, which abolishes denying civil rights ‘under the color of law,’” Garcia said, referring to two critical provisions of a law that was passed in 1871 yet remains painfully relevant.

“We're looking to get an injunction against the Attorney General from conducting other raids, or trying to suppress the Latino vote and have a chilling effect on our voters and volunteers,” he added.

LULAC was just the most recent in a growing list of Latino organizations that Paxton has targeted with raids, subpoenas, and other forms of harassment.

“He filed a lawsuit against Annunciation House in El Paso, then he filed suit against Catholic Charities in McAllen, then he filed suit against a Latino organization in Houston called FIEL, all in the last month, and then he did the raids on our members,” Garcia said. “So it's clearly a pattern and practice of trying to go after Latino organizations to speak up for immigrants and for voting rights.”

Annunciation House, Catholic Charities, and FIEL are all charities that provide shelter and/or services to migrants. Paxton accused the first two of human smuggling and other serious crimes, but has failed to produce any evidence to substantiate the allegations. Judges have blocked efforts to compel the organizations to hand over documents or testify in court.

Paxton’s lawsuit against FIEL is more nakedly political, citing occasional social media posts in support of pro-immigrant policies as “carrying on propaganda” egregious enough to have the nonprofit legally dissolved.

Catholic Charities is run by Sister Norma Pimentel, a community leader who has been outspoken in her opposition to the anti-immigrant policies of former President Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott. And earlier this month, LULAC’s political arm made the first presidential endorsement in the organization’s century-long history.

“We couldn't stand by while we saw signs that said ‘Mass Deportation Now’ at the Republican National Convention, and we continue to hear the race-baiting and the fear-mongering of immigrants by the Trump campaign and other Republicans,” Garcia said. “We just said we have to put a stop to it and put a stop to it this year. And then a week later, we got retaliatory raids, in our opinion, by the Attorney General of Texas.”

“You don’t do this to our grandmas”

Compounding the speciousness of the allegations against LULAC members were the identities of those who received the chilling house calls from Paxton’s highly armed agents.

“We're talking about Lidia Martinez, who's an 87-year-old great-grandmother in San Antonio,” Garcia said. “Her house was raided at six in the morning by nine armed Attorney General officers in tactical gear. They ransacked her home. They put her outside in her nightgown, they wouldn't let her get dressed, wouldn't let her get a bathrobe. This was just disrespectful and mean-spirited.”

Martinez works with other seniors, helping them with navigating the absentee ballot process, which somehow merited three hours of intense questioning by nine armed agents. Her innocuous work mirrors that of the other other victims, which include the 80-year-old mayor of a small area town, who was threatened into handing over her phone and other documents.

The raid also targeted well as the head of the Tejano Democrats and Cecilia Castellano, the Democratic candidate for state Senate in District 80, around Uvalde.

“She said they showed up to her place, they had guns drawn, and they put a gun on a 14-year-old son,” Garcia said. “She was terrified. She was thinking about dropping out.”

Castellanos is sticking in the race, despite the trauma of the raid, but the experience of having armed officers raid your home under phony pretense is hardly an endorsement of running for office.

“I really, really do believe that because the district attorney is a Republican in Atascosa County. That’s where I’m from,” Castellano told CNN. “And I believe she is doing this for political gain and to help her Republican Party.”

Paxton claimed that the investigation was meant to address allegations of “vote harvesting” during the 2022 election.

“I call it the Big Lie — there's this big lie that illegal immigrants are coming to the United States and the Democrats are registering them to vote and there's illegal voting going on,” Garcia said, clearly exasperated. “There's no evidence. There's no proof. After years of spending millions of dollars, they have no they have no criminal conventions in Texas or in most other states. It's just a fig leaf to cover up voter suppression.”

“I think this is gonna backfire”

The raids received national attention, with coverage offering little credibility to Paxton’s claims about vote harvesting, human smuggling, or any other right-wing bogeyman. In a state where Latino voters have trended to the right, Garcia says that this kind of move is liable to prove to be a self-defeating political stunt, suggesting that it will backfire in November.

“Republicans have been making some inroads, primarily among Latino men, but you don't go after somebody's grandmother and great-grandmother,” he said. “That's just very dirty politics. I think that the Latino communities fired up here.”

Donations to the organization and prospective volunteers have surged over the past week, Garcia said. Donald Trump still leads the polls in Texas and is very unlikely to lose the state in November, shifting Latinos a few percentage points left could prove decisive in close legislative and Congressional elections in the state. The anger in reaction to the raids have given Garcia him further confidence that this will be a galvanizing moment.

“Lidia Martinez said her family told her to stop helping seniors vote because they didn't want to see their great-grandma in prison. Bt she said she wasn't going to let [Paxton] stop her.”

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