The Latino Case Against Ken Paxton: Too Corrupt and Extreme to Help Texas Latino Families Get Ahead

Washington, D.C. — Today, Ken Paxton became the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas. Voto Latino is making the case against Trump’s hand-picked candidate who spent years intimidating, suppressing, and silencing Latino voters as Texas Attorney General.

Ken Paxton is the definition of corruption. Impeached by his own party, accused of bribery, and credibly charged with abuse of office, Paxton has spent years fighting to stay out of prison instead of fighting for working Texans. When he wasn’t defending himself in court, he was raiding the homes of elderly Latino volunteers, prosecuting community members for helping their neighbors vote, and suing counties for trying to register their own residents. He didn’t just tolerate voter suppression, he built the system. 

Ken Paxton is the wrong choice for Latinos in Texas—too corrupt and too extreme to help families get ahead. 

Ken Paxton has made silencing Latino voters a signature of his tenure, and in the Senate, he would make it federal policy.

• As Attorney General, Paxton has made it his mission to dismantle the infrastructure of Latino civic engagement in Texas, going after the nonprofits and volunteers that work to ensure that every eligible voter can make their voice heard at the ballot box.
• Ken Paxton himself has said the quiet part out loud—that if his office had not blocked counties from sending out mail-in ballots to all registered voters, the 2020 election would have turned out differently. A clear example of Paxton using his office to undermine the system and rig election outcomes. 

Latinos in Texas stand to lose with Ken Paxton as Senator, with their economic future on the line.  

• The median household income for Latinos in Texas is $48,900, below the national Latino median of $52,000. And if Paxton is elected to the Senate, he’ll rubber-stamp the administration’s reckless economic agenda that has sent the cost of housing, groceries, gas, and health care soaring for working families.
• Texas’ $7.25 minimum wage has remained the same for the past 15 years, and yet Paxton fought in court to block a minimum wage increase for federal contractors. While Texans were actively being left behind, he was sticking taxpayers with a $5 million bill for his impeachment trial.
• Paxton sued to block agricultural workers from unionizing and collectively bargaining for better wages and working conditions, bolstering harmful rhetoric against the very workers who fuel Texas’ agriculture.

Ken Paxton would eliminate the ACA, making health care more expensive and out of reach for Texas Latino families.

• Texas ranks last in the country when it comes to access to health care. Yet, Paxton led the charge to tear down the Affordable Care Act, a move that aimed to rip health care coverage from up to 1.9 million Texans. 
• As Attorney General, Paxton has pushed some of the most extreme reproductive health restrictions in the country, and as Planned Parenthood clinics shuttered across Texas, 2.9 million Latina women lost access to the basic health services they depend on.

Ken Paxton would provide a blank check to Trump and MAGA Republicans’ corruption. 

• Paxton’s own colleagues in the Texas House voted to impeach him on 20 charges including bribery, abuse of office, and obstruction of justice. 
• While Texas families struggled to make ends meet, Ken Paxton used his time in office to build a personal fortune, seeing his net worth surge to millions on a government salary through private investments and business deals—including in companies with lucrative state contracts.
• Paxton spent nearly a decade facing three felony securities fraud charges that could have sent him to prison for decades. And yet, he paid his way out, never admitted guilt, and never faced a jury. 

Ken Paxton has spent years making Texas hostile to immigrant families. A Senate seat would only give him more power to do it. 

• Ken Paxton has spent years dismantling DACA in the courts, leading a seven-state lawsuit that had the program declared unlawful and new applications blocked. When the Biden administration tried to salvage DACA, Paxton filed immediate legal challenges, ultimately resulting in a Fifth Circuit ruling striking down DACA. 
• Texas once offered in-state tuition to undocumented students for over two decades until Paxton filed a motion to end the program entirely, putting affordable higher education out of reach for thousands of Texas students overnight.
• As Attorney General, Paxton used his office as a weapon against immigrant families, filing lawsuit after lawsuit to strip away the programs and protections that allowed them to build a future in Texas. 

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Voto Latino is a civic advocacy organization dedicated to educating and empowering the next generation of Latino voters while working to build a more inclusive and representative democracy. Since its founding, Voto Latino has registered over two million voters. In 2024, the organization took legal action to protect voting rights, filing multiple lawsuits in Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina to safeguard access to the ballot ahead of the elections.