Paxton's crusade against immigrant-serving groups gets boost from court rulings

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Paxton’s crusade against immigrant-serving groups gets boost from court rulings

Courts have said that the attorney general can use a 100-year-old law to demand entities’ internal records and sue to shut them down if he believes they’re violating the law.


Attorney General Ken Paxton’s recent crusade against nonprofit organizations has been turbocharged by a flurry of favorable court rulings validating his use of a nearly 150-year-old state law to demand a company’s internal documents, and move to shut them down if they don’t comply.

Over the last two years, Paxton has launched investigations into at least a dozen companies, mostly immigrant-serving nonprofits, claiming they were breaking the law, or in some cases, their own corporate charters. None of these allegations have yet been proven in court.

What two key Texas courts and a federal appeals court have said, though, is that Paxton has wide authority to demand internal corporate records and file lawsuits to revoke a company’s right to do business in Texas if he believes they are violating the law. He can bring these legal actions without offering evidence to back up his claims, a Texas appeals court ruled.

While a judge would eventually have to rule on the merits of the allegations, that’s a process that can take months or more, requiring nonprofits to hire expensive lawyers to combat claims that might never be borne out.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/12/09/texas-ken-paxton-nonprofit-immigrant-investigations/