Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) unveiled a Faith Advisory Council this week for his Senate runoff campaign against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, but three of its five pastors are signatories of a pro-amnesty evangelical organization that has received funding from George and Alex Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Breitbart News reports.
Cornyn’s council includes Max Lucado of Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Dr. Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, and Dr. Gus Reyes of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission in Dallas. All three are listed as signatories on the Evangelical Immigration Table’s “Principles for Immigration Reform,” a document that calls for establishing “a path toward legal status and/or citizenship” for illegal aliens.
The Evangelical Immigration Table is a project of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-mass migration organization that has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, according to financial records.
In 2013, the group spent $250,000 lobbying Congress to support the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill, which would have granted legal status to as many as 22 million illegal aliens in the United States. The Evangelical Immigration Table took its campaign directly to Capitol Hill, urging Republicans to back the legislation.
World Relief, listed as one of the Evangelical Immigration Table’s leadership organizations, has continued pushing against Trump administration immigration enforcement. The organization condemned a Department of Homeland Security rule preventing migrants from obtaining work permits before completing the asylum process. It also delivered a letter to President Trump, border czar Tom Homan, and members of Congress demanding an end to the re-vetting of refugees who have not yet secured green cards.
Cornyn rejected the criticism after Paxton’s campaign raised the issue. “Attacking pastors who have spent decades bringing people to Christ, defending the unborn, and ministering to families in their hardest moments says far more about Ken Paxton’s campaign than it does about them,” Cornyn said in a statement. “Texas respects its pastors.”
The Faith Advisory Council rollout comes as Cornyn faces a primary runoff against Paxton, who is running to the right of the incumbent senator on immigration and other issues.
