For years, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has been waging war on Democratic and Latino-led groups over “election integrity,” leaving a trail of ransacked residences, shellshocked volunteers, struggling organizations and indictments behind him.
But the stakes of the fight with groups determined to mobilize Texas’ fast-growing Hispanic electorate changed significantly last month when he won the Republican Party’s nomination for Senate. Now it is personal and could help determine his own political future — and which party controls the Senate.
“It doesn’t look good for us,” said Gabriel Rosales, the Texas director for the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, which is one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations. “But we are going to keep fighting.”
Long a voice amplifying baseless claims that noncitizens are voting in huge numbers, Mr. Paxton went beyond rhetoric in 2024, using a new restrictive voting law to target left-leaning Latino groups and wielding corporate statutes that allow him to target entire organizations, not individual officers or employees.
In the name of election integrity, the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature criminalized what had been fairly routine tools for civic groups, churches and political campaigns, particularly in Latino communities. The new law made it a felony to pay staff or give volunteers benefits — such as stipends or gas money — or to drop by the homes of voters. The measure also made it illegal for volunteers to help fill in ballots for, say, elderly or bilingual voters, and bring them to polling sites or drop boxes. Volunteers are allowed only to read mail-in ballots to those they would assist.
Lawsuits and investigations followed, along with raids on home offices and private residences. At least 15 Latino Democratic officials and volunteers were indicted last year in Frio County alone, a place with only about 20,000 people. They include a county judge, two city council members and a former county election administrator, charged with contravening the new Texas voting law by illegally “harvesting” ballots that otherwise would not be cast and with tampering with evidence.
“Under my watch, there will be no stolen elections in Texas,” Mr. Paxton said in February.
The groups remain defiant. Four prominent Latino civil rights and political organizations formed a strategic alliance in May, seeking to stem the Republican Party’s gains among Hispanic voters. In a separate initiative, seven national and state-led Latino rights and progressive groups announced on Tuesday that they will coordinate canvassing and voter outreach.
“We are at a critical inflection point,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a voting rights consultant, who said the coalitions would blanket Texas this campaign season, from community centers to quinceañeras.
But they are also exhausted and financially hobbled. Jolt Initiative, the largest Latino youth outreach group in Texas, projected in 2025 that it would raise $2.1 million, including $1 million for civic education and voter registration efforts. Instead, a court declaration showed it had raised only $407,722 for general operations and none for voter registration.
“In a typical year without statewide or federal elections, Jolt usually registers over 12,000 voters,” the organization said in the filing. “In 2025, Jolt has registered only 3,586 voters.”
Requests for comment from the attorney general’s office were not returned. Audrey Gossett Louis, the top prosecutor overseeing many of the election fraud cases, declined comment.
But Chelseay Valenzuela-Cooper, a state field director with Texas Latino Conservatives, said, “Every eligible voter deserves to know their vote counts, and that starts with every organization, regardless of political affiliation, following the law.”
In a Hispanic community already battered by immigration raids, family separations and economic stress, demoralization would be understandable.
Ask Cesar Espinosa.
In summer 2024, he was packing up boxes inside the hurricane-damaged Houston headquarters of Immigrant Families and Students in the Fight, an immigrant rights group he co-founded more than a decade ago that is better known by its Spanish acronym, FIEL.
Then he was served with a state lawsuit seeking to dissolve FIEL because of internet posts that had denounced the immigration policies of the governor, Greg Abbott.
“It felt like we were getting hit by another disaster,” Mr. Espinosa said.
A few weeks later, state agents descended on the South Texas homes of more than a half dozen Latino Democratic officials, political operatives and election volunteers. They roused Cecilia Castellano, a Democratic State House candidate, from bed around 6 a.m., searched her home and took her phone, according to a congressional inquiry letter.
Investigators with semiautomatic weapons broke down the door of Manuel Medina, a former chairman of the Bexar County Democratic Party and the chairman of the Tejano Democrats, the state’s largest Latino Democratic political group, court records show. They took documents, family photographs, almost 65 cellphones, 41 computers and several digital storage devices, according to an affidavit used to seek the search warrant.
Nearby, Lidia Martinez was standing outside in her nightgown as nine officers in tactical gear searched her home. Mary Ann Obregón, the 80-year-old mayor of Dilley, found officers waiting after she returned from a hospital where she had been treated for Covid-19.
The next day, Mr. Paxton announced that his office was investigating whether the nonprofits were unlawfully registering noncitizens to vote.
Jolt’s leaders tried to assure donors and staff that they had done nothing wrong. Leaders said they had carefully vetted their accounting practices and training materials to make sure they were compliance with the state’s new statutes.
“You want to hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” said Jacqueline Bastard, executive director of Jolt Initiative.
To Ms. Martinez, the LULAC organizer raided while in her nightgown, the raids felt familiar.
She remembered her father sending her to school with candy to entice classmates and their parents to attend “tamaladas” at her parents’ grocery stores, where people would fill and steam tamales and register to vote, trying to counter the poll taxes that were disenfranchising Black and Latino voters.
Now, Ms. Martinez argued, Texas is suppressing votes again.
Republicans counter by asking why they would suppress lawful votes when Hispanic voters have moved steadily toward their Party.
Yet Latinos, now a plurality in Texas, still constitute only about 30 percent of the state’s eligible voters, and even fewer typically cast votes.
Voting rights groups say that is the result of the continuing Republican attacks. In September, Mr. Paxton sued Beto O’Rourke — a former Democratic congressman and candidate for Senate — as well as his political organization, Powered by People, for what he called unlawful fund-raising. In April, the attorney general sued ActBlue, the primary digital fund-raising engine for Democratic candidates.
The groups have scored some wins against Mr. Paxton in lower courts.
In January, a federal district judge issued a rare ruling that Mr. Paxton had acted in “bad faith” in issuing his lawsuit against Jolt, finding a lack of credible evidence and concluding that his office’s actions were unconstitutional, retaliatory and designed to intimidate the organization.
Mr. Paxton has had victories too. In February, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’ criminal ban on paid mail-in ballot assistance — or “harvesting” — does not violate the First Amendment. In the fall, the Texas 15th Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Paxton’s office has the jurisdiction to pursue the extraordinary civil proceedings to dissolve groups’ nonprofit charters.
As the next campaign cycle intensifies, the 15 defendants indicted are mounting yet another legal challenge to the state’s restrictive voting law. At a hearing in November, they asked a judge to dismiss their charges, arguing that law enforcement agencies had criminalized routine campaign work. A volunteer receiving gas money or a meal could land behind bars, they said.
Inside a community center on San Antonio’s West Side, days before Mr. Paxton trounced Senator John Cornyn in the primary runoff, Ms. Martinez, now 89, stood before older Latinos in a flower-patterned shirt and comfortable gray sneakers.
“Who can tell me the importance of voting?” she asked the crowd.
But Hispanic voters remain divided. At a San Antonio Spurs viewing party, Armando Tienda, 74, a three-time Trump voter, said he agreed with Mr. Paxton on election integrity.
“Committing voter fraud is so easy these days,” Mr. Tienda said. “If you follow the law, you will not get in trouble.”
Gaby Tijerina, 28, a children’s book illustrator, disagreed, and said the recent moves by the state government had only emboldened her.
“Here, more than anywhere else, it’s harder to vote,” she said. “That only makes me try harder to make sure my vote is counted. But I know that a lot of people are still afraid.”
