(NEW YORK) — A prominent Latino voting organization is calling on the Justice Department to investigate a series of raids held across Texas last week as part an ongoing election fraud investigation led by the state’s controversial attorney general, Ken Paxton.
The raids targeted prominent Democrats and election volunteers — including some in their late 80s — according to a spokesperson for the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, at a press conference on Monday.
Investigators allegedly confiscated cellphones, computers, and other records, according to LULAC officials.
“I call upon the appropriate federal authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the factors that led Texas Attorney [General] Ken Paxton to order these armed raids,” Lupe Torres, a LULAC leader, said.
Among those targeted in the raids was Lydia Martinez, an 80-year-old retired teacher who lives in San Antonio, who “was removed from her home in her night gown and made to wait outside in full view of her neighbors and the general public, causing great humiliation and discomfort,” said LULAC president Roman Palomares at the Monday press conference.
“Lydia’s devices, personal calendar, and voter registration materials were confiscated, and she was coerced into providing her passwords under the threat of delayed return of her property,” LULAC said in its letter to the Justice Department.
Speaking to ABC News on Tuesday, LULAC CEO Juan Proaño called the raids “baseless.”
“There’s no merit to it at all. There’s no evidence that was actually provided, even to the judge when they received these warrants. They’re baseless,” Proaño said of the allegations. “We know for a fact, certainly as it relates to our members, that there is nothing at all to substantiate any voter harvesting, any voter fraud at all.”
Paxton said in a statement last week that his office had uncovered “sufficient evidence” of election fraud to justify the search warrants executed during the raids. A county prosecutor outside San Antonio referred the alleged “election fraud and vote harvesting” to the attorney general’s office in 2022, according to Paxton’s statement.
The raids also coincided with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement this week that the state, since 2021, had purged more than a million people from the state’s voter rolls, including nearly half a million deceased people and over 6,500 noncitizens. State election officials frequently update voter rolls to remove deceased individuals or those who have moved out of the state.
Proãno told ABC News that the small fraction of noncitizens make up only half of a percentage point of the registrants removed, which he believes is proof that widespread voter fraud among noncitizens is not a systemic issue in the state of Texas.
“It’s almost half a percent. We’re not saying that it doesn’t exist. We’re not saying that there are folks that are not U.S. citizens who are registered. Sometimes they register by accident. Sometimes they get bad information and they do register. But there is not systemic voter harvesting going on there, not systemic voter fraud,” Proãno said on ABC News Live with Kyra Phillips.
Abbott said his office had referred “any potential illegal voting” activity to Paxton’s office for investigation.
A Justice Department spokesperson told ABC News it had received a letter from LULAC, but would not comment on whether they plan to take any investigative steps.
Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
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