Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing a Catholic organization, alleging that it is encouraging illegal immigration.
Annunciation House, a non-governmental organization (NGO) said on its website, “In a Gospel spirit of service and solidarity, we accompany the migrant, refugee, and economically vulnerable peoples of the border region through hospitality, advocacy, and education. We place ourselves among these poor so as to live our faith and transform our understanding of what constitutes more just relationships between peoples, countries, and economies.”
Paxton announced the lawsuit in a statement on X. “Today, I’m suing to end NGO’s operations in Texas. The chaos at the southern border has created an environment where NGOs, funded with taxpayer money from the Biden Administration, facilitate astonishing horrors including human smuggling,” he wrote on February 20. “While the federal government perpetuates the lawlessness destroying this country, my office works day in and day out to hold these organizations responsible for worsening illegal immigration.”
The lawsuit says that Annunciation House “appears to be engaged in the business of human smuggling,” noting that “at least some of the aliens it provides services to are present illegally and are trying to avoid Border Patrol.”
“When Annunciation House shelters aliens whom it knows entered illegally, it is necessarily ‘concealing or ‘harboring’ them from ‘detection,'” the lawsuit alleges. “And Annunciation House’s publication of the fact that it actively performs this service for illegal aliens logically ‘encourages or induces’ others to come, all in violation of Texas Penal Code.”
Paxton’s office filed the suit after requesting records from the NGO. Annunciation House then sued the Attorney General’s office.
“OAG seeks to revoke Annunciation House’s registration on the grounds that it has violated the law and failed to permit OAG to inspect, examine, and make copies of Annunciation House’s records in response to a valid Request to Examine,” the lawsuit states.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Annunciation House said, “This is no different from the work of schools who enroll migrant children, the clinics and hospitals who care for the needs of their ill, the churches, synagogues, and mosques who welcome their families to join in worship. For the Attorney General to suddenly attack Annunciation House after forty-six years of service to the poor is simply shameful.”
Border Patrol agents have encountered more than one million migrants since the beginning of fiscal year 2024. The number is about 100,000 greater than the same period last year.
