Cecilia Castellano is a small-business owner and a relative political newcomer in South Texas.

A Democratic candidate for the Texas House of Representatives in a toss-up district, Castellano spends her days making the case for sending an outsider to Austin — and against her Republican opponent, Don McLaughlin Jr., who was endorsed by Donald Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton even before his primary election.

Then, two weeks ago, law enforcement agents from Paxton’s office showed up around dawn at Castellano’s home outside San Antonio, armed with a search warrant and a flashlight they shined into her front window. She had answered the door in pajamas, and in the days since, she has found herself constantly checking the door.

“My son’s room was just a few feet away,” Castellano told HuffPost, still shaken two weeks after the visit from law enforcement. “Why, why, why did the peace of my home get disturbed?”

The agents were investigating supposed “vote harvesting” committed by someone else, part of a probe that began months before Castellano had even announced her candidacy. They eventually left, taking her work cell phone with them.

Castellano wasn’t alone. Across the greater San Antonio area, a local mayor, a political consultant and several elderly members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, a century-old civil rights group, were served similar search warrants last month, all the result of what Paxton’s office said is a 2-year-old “election fraud” investigation.

Voting rights advocates and civil rights leaders believe this is the latest chapter in a yearslong pattern of Paxton and other state officials wielding their law enforcement powers to target racial minorities and sideline political rivals. No one has been charged in this latest investigation, but the timing and nature of the search warrant executions — just weeks before Election Day in a key swing district — recall other legal fights statewide, critics said.

Just this week, Paxton sued a large, traditionally Democratic county after it sent out voter registration applications. Last month, just days after a Fox News host with a history of election falsehoods told a thirdhand story about a “massive line of immigrants” registering to vote, Paxton announced a vague investigation into voter registration efforts. He also announced that “undercover operations” were ongoing “throughout major metropolitan areas of Texas.” Paxton’s office has used lawsuits to try to shut down migrant shelters on the border and go after immigrant aid groups, and Abbott’s office recently made the dubious claim that thousands of noncitizens were on Texas voter rolls.

So when word spread of Paxton’s agents knocking on yet another political rival’s door, “the feeling of wanting to go hide under a rock is an understatement,” Castellano said. She was angry with the state, laughing at the absurdity of her situation, and mortified at the thought of another encounter with law enforcement. She can’t afford an attorney, she said, and her son, 14, asked why she would even continue her campaign.

Castellano’s district, which includes Uvalde and touches the U.S.-Mexico border, has been represented by Democrat Tracy King for decades. But Abbott carried it by almost six points in his 2022 reelection, and The Texas Tribune reported that Republicans see the district “as their best potential state House flip in November.”

Now that the dust has settled from the startling raids, Castellano and others subject to the search warrants are fighting back — and loudly.

“The fear has gone away,” she said.

‘An Intimidation Tactic’

Paxton has a history of far-fetched election investigations and lawsuits, including as a leader in the 2020 effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s win. And his Election Integrity Unit has cost Texas millions of dollars, despite handling very few cases and landing even fewer convictions.

Still, the timing and scale of last month’s search warrant executions were remarkable. Agents from the attorney general’s office and other law enforcement officers “forcibly entered” the home of Manuel Medina, a well-known political consultant who counts Castellano as one of his clients. They rummaged around for hours and ultimately seized dozens of phones and computers, Medina’s attorney said in a filing that convinced a judge to temporarily shield the material pending a hearing next week.

Multiple volunteers with LULAC were the subject of similar searches. Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old, decades-long LULAC member who helps register people to vote, said she was confronted at 6 a.m. by armed police officers holding riot shields. Officers also questioned her for hours “about my entire life,” she recalled. At one point, Martinez said, she was also forced to wait outside in view of her neighbors, and she was eventually left without her cell phone, laptop or appointment book.

Imelda Rodriguez, 73, and Mary Ann Obregon, 80, also had their homes searched.

“We did nothing wrong,” Obregon, the mayor of Dilley, a rural town southwest of San Antonio, told The Washington Post. “That’s what’s eating at us. It is an insult.”

Like Castellano, they all experienced an early morning visit from law enforcement, answering the door in their pajamas. LULAC tallied at least a dozen Latinos across three counties whose homes it said were raided during a search warrant execution.

“It’s an intimidation tactic that they’re using on the Latino community,” Gabriel Rosales, LULAC’s Texas state director, told HuffPost. He said he’d heard from some LULAC members who volunteer to help people register to vote that they’re worried “they’d be next.”

According to warrant documents obtained by the Tribune, Paxton’s investigators were looking into whether a Frio County political operator — who HuffPost is not naming as they have not been charged with a crime — had broken ballot collection laws, including by influencing people’s vote, preparing their ballot, “and/or [taking] possession of their carrier envelope to mail their ballot.” Medina, according to the documents, had discussed an effort with the person to collect ballots for Castellano.

Castellano maintained that she’s run an “old-fashioned grassroots campaign,” and Medina told the Tribune, “I’ve been on campaigns for 30 years and never in my life could I have ever imagined anything that I do that would merit them breaking down my door and pointing six assault semi-automatic weapons in my face.”

Republicans made the rules for helping elderly people and others with their mail-in ballots more stringent with the passage of Senate Bill 1 in 2021, parts of which are still being challenged in court. But Rosales said he felt confident no one associated with LULAC intentionally cheated. As things stand, it’s not clear any of the people served search warrants are even subjects of the investigation.

The volunteers caught up in Paxton’s search warrants have been doing their work for decades, Rosales said.

“They just continue to create more obstacles,” he added, referring to state officials.

A Chill Over Texas

Earlier this year, Paxton — who has survived an impeachment trial and a felony securities fraud indictment — gave Annunciation House, a well-known network of migrant shelters around El Paso, a single day to turn over years of paperwork, including sensitive details on migrant guests who’d stayed at the facilities.

The group successfully paused the effort in court, then blocked Paxton’s attempt to shut them down altogether due to his allegations they were operating “stash houses.” (The attorney general is appealing.) A judge called the attorney general’s behavior “outrageous and intolerable,” while Pope Francis said the effort to shutter Annunciation House was “sheer madness.”

But that’s just one of numerous similar examples. In recent weeks, judges have shot down Paxton’s long-running attempts to depose Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley — which runs a migrant shelter and is led by Sister Norma Pimentel, widely seen as a humanitarian leader — and Team Brownsville, which provides humanitarian aid to asylum-seekers. The efforts were linked to a 2022 letter from Abbott to Paxton urging him to investigate whether nongovernmental organizations were helping people cross the border illegally.

Separately, last month, a Harris County judge rejected Paxton’s effort to shut down FIEL Houston, an immigration-focused nonprofit, supposedly because the group had referred to Donald Trump as “son of the devil” in Spanish.

“It is a pattern all of a piece,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented FIEL in court. “Namely, misusing the prosecutorial apparatus that is under [Paxton’s] control.”

On the phone with HuffPost, LULAC’s national CEO, Juan Proaño, listed off a series of migrant shelters and civic nonprofits that Paxton has gone after with lawsuits in recent months.

“It was our expectation that he was going to sue LULAC next,” Proaño said.

The cycle in Texas — which also includes demands for medical records from gender-affirming health care providers — has drawn concerns about “anticipatory obedience,” or the notion of civic society voluntarily ceding ground to authoritarian politicians. Groups like LULAC and Annunciation House, which rallied hundreds of allies and community leaders to its cause, have fought back strongly against the state, refusing to cede arguments over humanitarian assistance and voting rights.

LULAC has coordinated with its allies, held a raucous press conference following the search warrant executions on its members, and requested the Justice Department investigate Paxton. Several lawmakers have also made similar requests. The DOJ confirmed receipt of the requests but declined further comment to HuffPost.

But other groups are hesitant to confront state leaders publicly, and word of Paxton’s strategy has spread. One person in management at a shelter along the border told HuffPost they did not want to be named while discussing the attorney general.

“I don’t want to draw any fire from Paxton or the governor,” the person said.

“It is scary,” Ali Boyd, director of human rights and advocacy at Border Servant Corps, an immigration services organization with shelters in El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico, told HuffPost.

She added that BSC is figuring out “how to be ready if there’s a knock at the door” and stressed the importance of solidarity between organizations in the face of Paxton “using the power of his office to intimidate people.”

“We are very nervous, but we feel that there’s a role to have a voice in this conversation. If everybody’s scared, who’s going to be left to speak?” Boyd said. “The more organizations willing to follow the lead of LULAC and Annunciation House in standing up to this type of behavior, the less the chilling effect evolves.”

‘Just A Pretext’

Texas’ Republican leaders see immigration and election integrity as inextricably linked. “There’s a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally,” Paxton said earlier this month. “They were put in the states that they needed to win.”

Texas has worked hard to substantiate that point — even if there’s zero evidence that immigrants who aren’t eligible to vote have ever voted in significant numbers.

Last month, for example, Abbott made the dubious claim that “over 6,500 noncitizens” had been removed from Texas voter rolls since 2021. Of those, he said that “approximately 1,930 have a voter history.”

Similar purges have happened before. In 2019, Texas tried to remove tens of thousands of supposed noncitizens from its voter rolls, only to quickly acknowledge that at least 25,000 were actually citizens. (Often, outdated records refer to people as noncitizens who have since gained citizenship and registered to vote.) Voting rights groups immediately filed a lawsuit against the state. The ordeal led the secretary of state at the time to resign.

Texas has quietly acknowledged uncertainty this time around, too. For instance, Abbott’s initial claim of “over 6,500 noncitizens” being removed from the voter rolls has since been updated to refer to them as “potential” noncitizens.

Texas’ methodology has long been suspect as well. Out of those 6,500 potential noncitizens, 657 people were identified as such because they’d said at some point that they could not serve on a jury because they were not citizens, the secretary of state’s office told The New York Times. (Sometimes, this simply indicates a legitimate voter wants to get out of jury duty, an election official told HuffPost.)

The remaining 90% of names, however, were purged from voter rolls simply because they didn’t respond within 30 days to a letter from the state alerting them that their registration to vote was being “examined.” In 2021, several counties found that significant percentages of people receiving these “examination” letters were in fact citizens. It also likely doesn’t help that any Texan can challenge anyone else’s citizenship for the purpose of disenfranchising them.

To critics of Texas’ leaders, the purpose of Abbott’s announcement is clear.

“My gut feeling is that all this is happening in advance of the election to intimidate, and after the election, you’re not going to hear much about it,” one county election official told HuffPost. (They requested anonymity because, as an election official, “we have to work with these people.”)

Meanwhile, others can speak more freely.

“There’s absolutely no evidence of any widespread noncitizen voting in Texas elections,” said Joyce LeBombard, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, whose volunteers often register voters at naturalization ceremonies for new U.S. citizens.

“The concern is that this false claim of noncitizen voting ... is just a pretext for undermining the access to the vote by marginalized communities — communities of color, especially those that are naturalized citizens,” LeBombard continued, adding that Texas leaders could also be laying the groundwork for more restrictive voting laws or sowing distrust in election results — as they did in 2020.

‘Undercover Operations’

Other efforts that risk disenfranchising or discouraging voters are ongoing, even without any credible evidence of wrongdoing.

In an Aug. 21 press release, Paxton said he was looking into reports that nonprofit organizations “may be unlawfully registering noncitizens to vote,” but he didn’t identify the reports he was looking into, nor did the rest of the press release detail any laws being broken. Instead, the announcement said simply that “various nonprofit organizations” were “operating booths offering to assist in voter registration” outside drivers license offices, which is completely legal in Texas.

Despite this, the press release said that voter registration efforts outside driver license offices “call[s] into question the motives of the nonprofit groups” and warned that Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit was conducting “undercover operations ... throughout major metropolitan areas of Texas.”

“That kind of language, the ‘undercover’ nature of alleged investigations that are happening in alleged ‘metropolitan areas,’ is concerning,” said Edgar Saldivar, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. He noted that census data shows that the vast majority of population growth in Texas has occurred in communities of color, and particularly so in “major metropolitan” areas like Houston and San Antonio.

“For them to allege that there are undercover investigations in these areas, without any details or information about what’s actually being alleged, is concerning,” Saldivar continued. “It creates fear; it [potentially] creates a chilling effect on people who simply want to exercise their fundamental right to vote.”

The same concern extends to voter registration volunteers. Paxton hadn’t alleged any concrete wrongdoing in his press release — so what was he talking about?

“It’s not clear to anybody where the line is — or where Ken Paxton is trying to say there may have been some wrongdoing,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, which does advocacy around voter registration policy. “If there’s an organization out there trying to register people — what’s wrong with that?”

Paxton didn’t acknowledge it, but the press release came just three days after Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo made a wild claim about illegal voting and drivers license offices in Texas, leading many to believe the attorney general and the cable TV host had the same goal: spinning up hysteria about voter registration.

Bartiromo said on X, formerly called Twitter, that a friend of a friend’s wife had seen a “massive line of immigrants” being registered to vote outside two Texas driver license offices and other voter registration efforts outside a third. Bartiromo didn’t clarify how she knew the account concerned ineligible immigrants, let alone immigrants at all. But she’s been clear on that allegation, mentioning during broadcasts that she’d heard about driver license offices that were “packed with illegals” who were quickly getting registered to vote — “an obvious Democrat operation,” she said.

Bartiromo later acknowledged a statement from a local GOP chair refuting her story, as well as one from a Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson. But there’s plenty Bartiromo didn’t mention, including the DPS spokesperson calling her claims about illegal voting “kind of racist.”

The Fox Business host has a history of this kind of thing. In March, she retold a story from a friend who claimed that two men who “looked like illegals” approached her at a food truck and asked if she wanted to sign up to become a Democrat and vote.

Then, in April, Bartiromo said, “Republicans are warning that there’s a Biden executive order, which allows illegal immigrants and felons to vote,” even though that’s plainly untrue and no such order exists. The following month, she also claimed without evidence that the government “is giving people drivers licenses and Social Security numbers and saying, ‘When you’re in the U.S., don’t forget to vote for Joe Biden.’”

Were Bartiromo’s clearly dubious claims an excuse for Paxton to launch a statewide undercover probe of voter registration efforts that advocates say could chill political participation? Neither Abbott nor the attorney general’s office responded to this question — along with a detailed list of others — for this story.

But the state isn’t done propping up specious claims in a potential effort to discourage people from exercising their voting rights. On Wednesday, Paxton sued the leaders of Bexar County, which is home to San Antonio and borders Castellano’s district, after the county decided to mail voter registration forms to residents.

The lawsuit cited Abbott’s press release from a few days earlier but made no mention of the issues with “potential noncitizen” data or the near certainty that many or most of the people flagged as noncitizens are in fact eligible voters.

“Over 6,500 noncitizens have been removed from Texas voter rolls since 2021,” the attorney general alleged. “Of those noncitizens, nearly 2,000 have voted.”

Bexar County contracted with a vendor who uses technology to identify eligible voters who are unregistered — for example, people who just moved to the state. But Paxton’s office had a different term for them in his lawsuit: “recipients who may or may not be eligible to vote.”