Experts are expressing concern over the broader implications if Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton successfully sues charities that criticize Donald Trump.
Paxton is going after FIEL Houston because he didn't like a tweet the immigrant rights group posted on the social media site X, the Houston Chronicle reported Friday. Paxton argued that if any nonprofit engages in activities that he thinks violate nonprofit status, he can sue to shut it down.
The new lawsuit from Paxton points to social media posts in which the group calls Donald Trump "El Hijo Del Diablo," or "son of the Devil," and called Gov. Greg Abbott "a violent racist Fascist man."
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While those kinds of posts don't violate specific charity tax status, the report said some posts advocated against SB4, the migrant deportation law blocked by the courts. In his lawsuit, Paxton demands that Harris County Judge Ravi Sandill "dissolve its existence."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the senior fellow at the Immigrant Council, explained, "If judges accept that argument (and so far it seems they're not), it would put every nonprofit in the state at risk."
He also pointed out that the Houston group is a defendant in two federal lawsuits against Texas.
