Source: LifeSiteNews.com
Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday that he is suing to force the closure of a “Catholic” non-governmental organization (NGO) it contends is helping facilitate illegal immigration.
In a press release, Paxton said he is seeking to end Annunciation House’s Texas operations based on a review of “significant public record information strongly suggesting” it is involved in “facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house.” The NGO “refused to produce a single document” and instead sued to try to keep the state from seeing them, which the AG’s office calls a “flagrant failure to comply” punishable by loss of its right to operate in the state and liquidation of assets.
“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,” Paxton said. “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.”
Fox News reported that Annunciation House declares itself “rooted in Catholic social teaching,” which it takes to mean that “participat(ing) in advocacy and education around immigration issues” and “seek(ing) to be a voice for justice and compassion, especially on behalf of the most marginalized of our society.”
In response to Paxton’s allegations, a spokesperson for the NGO told Fox that its activities are “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.”
As covered by Texas Monthly in 2019, to deal with overcrowded border detention facilities, upon processing immigration officials in the El Paso area release illegals to Annunciation House “while they make travel arrangements to join other family members in the interior of the United States,” supposedly while awaiting hearings before an immigration court. Center for Immigration Studies executive director Mark Krikorian has called NGOs like Annunciation “government contractors posing as religious organizations.”…