Ken Paxton Annunciation House deadline demand unfair: Judge

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Hilton Anatole on July 11, 2021 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.)

A Texas judge called out the state’s indicted and impeached attorney general Ken Paxton for using the power of his office to unfairly stop a humanitarian organization from rendering aid to migrants.

Annunciation House is a nonprofit organization that provides shelter and other humanitarian aid to migrants, immigrants and refugees in Texas, including assistance with applying for asylum. Paxton and other Texas officials have been aggressively fighting for the Lone Star State to implement its own hard-line immigration laws as a way of securing the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months.

State District Court Judge Francisco Dominguez ruled Monday that when Paxton, a Republican, demanded Annunciation House turn over documents about its operations the day after serving the nonprofit with a subpoena was Paxton’s way of trying “to run roughshod over Annunciation House, without regard to due process or fair play” for the real purpose of preventing it from helping migrants with social services.

Paxton served Annunciation House with an administrative subpoena on Feb. 7, 2024, which contained only the general explanation that it was reviewing the organization “to determine compliance with Texas law.” Annunciation House’s lawyer replied on the same day that his client would provide the documents Paxton requested within 30 days.

Paxton, though, responded by demanding that the documents be turned over by the very next day — Feb. 8, 2024 — and said that if he did not receive them, Annunciation House would be deemed noncompliant.

Instead of producing documents, Annunciation House filed a lawsuit against Paxton on Feb. 8 asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment and restraining order. Although Dominguez temporarily granted the restraining order at first, he ruled on Monday that any request to continue the order, along with any request to quash the subpoena, is moot because the case is now governed by the usual Texas Rules of Civil Procedure discovery rules.

The ruling means that Annunciation House will simply need to comply with the normal timeline for turning over documents requested as part of lawsuit. However, Dominguez’s ruling made it abundantly clear that he understood Paxton’s actions as having been improper.

The judge wrote in the five-page ruling that Annunciation House’s right to exist as a nonprofit entity was what preceded the case.

“The Attorney General’s efforts to run roughshod over Annunciation House, without regard to due process or fair play, call into question the true motivation for the Attorney General’s attempt to prevent Annunciation House from providing the humanitarian and social services that it provides,” the judge wrote. “There is a real and credible concern that the attempt to prevent Annunciation House from conducting business in Texas was predetermined.”

Annunciation House’s attorney Jerome Wesevich said in a statement that he and his client were “very pleased” with the ruling which would ensure a fair and orderly process for providing documents to the attorney general.

“Annunciation House needs to collect sensitive information, including health information, concerning its guests, and it is imperative for the safety and well-being of the community that the releasing of this sensitive information be handled with care and the law in mind,” Wesevich said about the information at stake.

The state court’s ruling came the same day Texas filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court responding to the Biden administration’s emergency filing that challenged Texas’s new border law. The law, Texas S.B. 4, is part of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” — a set of anti-immigration laws that, among other things, gives state law enforcement officers the authority to capture, prosecute, deport, and imprison those suspected of entering the country illegally.

In its filing to the Supreme Court, Texas said that its injury is “even sharper than usual,” because “Texas is the nation’s first-line defense against transnational violence and has been forced to deal with the deadly consequences of the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to protect the border.”

Paxton was impeached in September for his role in an alleged corruption scheme. He was ultimately acquitted after a trial, but is still facing a civil lawsuit for wrongfully termination whistleblowers in the case as well as criminal charges for unrelated securities fraud