Leaders of one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations are asking the U.S. Department of Justice to help shut down what it sees as a politically motivated investigation into Democratic campaign workers, volunteers and a South Texas state House candidate.
Last week, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office said it executed multiple search warrants in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties related to “allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting” during the 2022 midterm.
Since then, several Democratic political activists, including former Bexar County Democratic Party Chairman Manuel Medina, have come forward saying law enforcement officials raided their homes as part of that investigation, which alleges that Medina was recorded discussing a scheme to collect votes for a state House race with a Frio County political operator, according to the Texas Tribune.
Medina, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Antonio in 2017, has been working as the chief of staff for state House Rep. Liz Campos (D-San Antonio) and most recently, consulting for the campaign of Cecilia Castellano, a Democrat running for state House District 80 — the campaign at the center of Paxton’s probe.
No one has been charged in the investigation.
On Monday, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) President Roman Palomares told reporters that his group is asking the Biden Administration for help stopping Paxton’s investigation.
Specifically, they’ve asked Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, Kristen Clarke, to investigate Paxton’s efforts.
“This is point-blank voter intimidation,” Palomares said at a press conference in San Antonio.
“Attorney General Paxton is working to suppress the Latino vote, using a call for election integrity as a veil,” he said. “[His] tactics will create a chilling effect that will stifle the Latino vote this election cycle.”
Paxton operates an Election Integrity Unit with its own dedicated staff to track down tips about alleged voter fraud, which they said they received from the 81st Judicial District Attorney Audrey Louis regarding the three south Texas counties.
But Texas’ own criminal appellate court has already said in 2021 that Paxton doesn’t have unilateral authority to prosecute election crimes. Due to frustration with that decision, Paxton campaigned against three incumbent Republican judges on that court who all lost their primaries earlier this year.
A DOJ spokesperson said Monday that the department “is aware of the matter and declines further comment.”
Texas LULAC’s state director Gabriel Rosales said the group was teaming up with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights groups to fight Paxton’s investigation.
“We’re going to be working with many other different organizations because an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” said Rosales, who was also a staffer on Medina’s 2017 mayoral campaign.
Paxton’s investigation
Medina’s time as party chair was marked by complaints from fellow Democrats that his political consulting business and party chair work overlapped, causing a conflict of interest.
He was defeated by current Bexar County Democratic chair Monica Ramirez Alcántara in 2018.
On Monday, Lydia Martinez, a LULAC member whose home was raided as part of the investigation, said law enforcement officers knocked on her door at 6 a.m. last Tuesday and questioned her for two hours before making her wait outside in her pajamas while they confiscated her laptop, appointment book and cell phone.
Martinez helps seniors register to vote, and says she had filled out a complaint saying that some older residents were not receiving the mail ballots they’d requested.
“I said, ‘So what do you want out of me? I’m an old woman,'” Martinez recalled Monday. “I said, ‘I help the seniors.'”
But Martinez said she’s convinced Paxton went after Medina, the former Bexar County Democratic Party chair, because of his political prowess.
“He is the smartest person that I know in politics,” she said of Medina.
