No LULAC, Texas Rangers Are NOT 'Racist Terrorists'

You are wrong, League of United Latin American Citizens. The Texas Rangers are not a racist terrorist organization.

This smear of the Rangers was made by Domingo Garcia, the national president of LULAC after a woman with a history of activism with LULAC was arrested for double-voting in Texas.

When the Washington Times covered the arrest of Isabel Calderon and her relationship with LULAC, Garcia smeared the Texas Rangers.

LULAC condemns voter fraud by anyone. But we also know we’re dealing with racist terrorist organizations like the Texas Rangers, who have a history of police brutality and voter suppression in Texas.

Did you hear that, Texas? The Texas Rangers, according to LULAC, are a “racist terrorist” organization.

As they say, they are “messing with” you, Texas.

Denying voter fraud and personally smearing those who expose election vulnerabilities is one of the central missions of LULAC, as we will see.

Is Texas Ranger Lee Roy Young, Jr. a racist terrorist? Young, in an interview, seems not.

I went to a gentleman’s home to contact him to get a statement from him. [By] the time I arrived there at his home, I couldn’t tend to my business first because he was so excited about just seeing a Texas Ranger he had to call out his three or four grandkids that were staying there with him. The grandkids come out and I had to stand up with the grandkids so he could take, take photographs of me standing with the grandkids. Because it wasn’t the fact that I was a Black Ranger or this or that or whatever, the fact was he had a Ranger in his home and he wanted his kids to meet a Ranger and to be, to have the opportunity to be photographed with a Ranger.

To the contrary, Texas Rangers regularly risk their lives – and sometimes sacrifice them – to protect lives and property. In 2011, Texas Ranger Louis Owles helped rescue an adult and two children being held by MS-13 kidnappers. That’s the sort of peril Texas Rangers could face every day they put on the white hat.

The overwhelming majority of Texans do not agree with LULAC’s smear of the Texas Rangers, because they know stories of Rangers like Owles, Young, and Rangers who gave their lives like Stanley Guffey did to save others.

What LULAC’s President said about the Texas Rangers didn’t surprise me, as I’ve been on the receiving end of LULAC’s personal attacks.

The arrest in Texas is just one more example of how the institutional left is less interested in good faith discussions about voter fraud and election vulnerabilities than they are trying to destroy those who try to improve electoral systems.

Personal smears and attacks await those who enforce voter fraud laws or even report on voter fraud’s existence.

Here’s my own experience. The story begins in 2017. I had learned through well-placed election officials that Virginia had a problem with non-citizens registering to vote, and that a pile of non-citizen cancellation documents existed in the public election records.

All one had to do was ask for them.

This was not a surprise because I had already begun to collect firsthand data about aliens being registered to vote through a broken Motor Voter registration process. Naturally, none of the usual groups who put up smokescreens to conceal voter fraud had any interest in documenting this phenomenon. Their groups, and their allied media outlets, are funded to deny voter fraud or to minimize it once it is undeniable that it is happening.

Shame on them.

When an organization I am president of – the Public Interest Legal Foundation – sought to collect the government records of canceled non-citizens who were on the voter rolls, they were stymied. Virginia state election officials put the word out to counties not to comply with our request for records. The Foundation had to sue two counties using federal law to obtain the records of non-citizen cancelations.

Fairfax County, in contrast, was one county that turned the records over voluntarily. Virginia’s largest county had a longstanding problem with aliens registering to vote, despite the fact that local law enforcement officials never did anything about it even after the urging of county elections board member Hans von Spakovsky.

Von Spakovsky recounted to me his time trying to fix this problem of non-citizens registering to vote when he was on the county board:

I was shocked when I discovered that not only were noncitizens registered to vote in Fairfax, but had cast ballots in prior elections, yet nothing was being done about it and the county had no procedures in place to certify citizenship of registered votes. When we referred these aliens to the local district attorney and the U.S. Justice Department for prosecution, they just ignored the cases and did nothing about them.

Here’s the saddest part of all: Aliens who improperly register to vote jeopardize their own immigration status. If groups like LULAC and the Brennan Center really cared about them, they would have been as active as we were trying to get to the bottom of the alien registration problem. The Foundation even sought to sue Virginia for canceling citizens’ voting rights.

And still, the groups do nothing, except attack those trying to solve the problem.

Finally, Virginia state election officials capitulated and provided the responsive documents showing the lists of registrants canceled as “declared non-citizens.” The documents contained thousands of names and public registration information, and these were only the ones that were flagged as canceled as “declared non-citizens.”

Aliens on the rolls who do not self-confess are usually not caught because Virginia – like the majority of states – does not conduct citizenship verification of voter rolls. The state documents were entitled “declared non-citizen” on every page.

State officials confirmed in writing that no one the list ever later registered to vote, perhaps after naturalization.

It is axiomatic that federal law makes it a felony for an alien to register to vote. So it isn’t a big leap to surmise that a list of “declared non-citizens” who were canceled from the voter rolls might have a problem with those same federal statutes.

Cue the government screw-ups.

The Washington Times reported that one of the registrants canceled as a “declared non-citizen” was in fact a missionary in Guatemala.  Virginia had canceled the voter registration of an American as a non-citizen.

It turns out that a broken Motor Voter system was not only allowing aliens to register to vote in Virginia, but also bouncing valid citizens off the voter rolls as non-citizens.

We all know government can screw things up, but I never imagined it could screw things up that badly.

That means the official Virginia list of “declared non-citizens” was a mix of citizens and non-citizens. A gaggle of activists joined up with LULAC’s Virginia chapter – after finding three citizens canceled by Virginia — to sue… wait for it… me on a defamation claim. The case settled early in the litigation process but it spawned a number of falsehoods as well as truths.

First the truths. Groups like LULAC will do and say anything to mask vulnerabilities in our election system. Texas Rangers are not racist terrorists, and publishing public government documents showing thousands of “declared non-citizens” had registered to vote isn’t voter intimidation.

LULAC, their allies in academia and other groups like them, exist to smear, malign, and personally destroy their opponents. They are part of cancel culture.

Twenty years ago, if someone found thousands of registered voters were being canceled as “declared non-citizens,” everyone would agree there is a problem to be addressed, and the problem isn’t the messenger.

Instead, lawfare against those who speak and write about voter fraud was the top priority, not addressing the problems of either non-citizens registering to vote or citizens improperly being canceled.

We saw the same reaction to President Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

The other truth we learned was that election officials need to be more transparent and not circle the wagons when conservative election integrity groups come calling. This isn’t 2010, and the left is no longer the only game in town. Election integrity groups aren’t going anywhere, and they are proliferating.

One Virginia election official – when asked her for public records showing non-citizen cancellations – said “there are no illegal aliens in our county.”  Of course, that isn’t what was being sought, but it showed the reflexive ideological opposition to any good-government group. Another local Virginia election official vowed on a private list-serve to alter the requested election records before they were turned over in raw form.

Next, we learned the truth that elections are a mess. The ham-handed attempts at vote-by-mail the last two months have only reinforced that conclusion. State election officials should not be canceling citizens from the rolls, and the Motor Voter system should not be canceling citizens any more than it should be registering aliens.

That brings me to the first of many falsehoods spawned by these events.

It’s natural to have sympathy for any voter canceled as an alien by an election official’s mistake. It should never happen and that’s why I thought it was important to apologize. Never again should anyone assume a government election official got it right when they canceled someone through a routine Motor Voter interaction. Instead, publications like TPM Muckraker trumpeted that I was “forced” to apologize. Hardly. It was my idea because those people should not have had to endure what they did, and the government should not be canceling citizens as non-citizens.

There is no role left for mercy in the vote-denier’s world. The groups who exist to deny voter fraud come from a place where an apology is a badge of shame, of ideologically motivated supremacy that makes it elementary to cancel someone from public discourse. Of course some of us inhabit that other place, where apologies are moments of grace and wisdom.

The government has yet to apologize for canceling some citizens as non-citizens. LULAC has yet to do anything to try to remedy the procedures that led to these mistakes. LULAC and the leftist activists and their swarms of lawyers have filed no lawsuits against the election officials responsible for landing citizens on the government lists of aliens by mistake. Only my group has tried to address that wrong.

Remember, LULAC and their allies aren’t interested in exposing vulnerabilities related to aliens registering to vote. We know it is happening, and have documented self-confessed communications from the aliens themselves, over and over, in other jurisdictions.

They are interested more in canceling the speech of those with whom they disagree about voter fraud.

One of my favorite nasty tweets to receive is the idea that I – your humble correspondent – personally published the social security numbers of thousands of people. This is brazenly false but is a zesty smear.

If anyone did such a thing, it was the Fairfax County (Va.) elections office. As part of a records request, Fairfax County provided hundreds of pages of detailed public election records related to potential non-citizens registered to vote. They published those records and the Foundation made those public records available as supporting documentation showing the scope of alien registration problems in Fairfax County. Hence, anyone could see that when the Foundation said there was a problem, documents backed up the assertions. But alas, Fairfax County screwed up by failing to redact social security numbers on the records they published. As soon as the Foundation learned of Fairfax’s mistake, they took the records down until Fairfax could correct their mistake.

For that, I get to read that I personally published the social security numbers of thousands of people. That’s a lie on multiple levels, but it’s what they specialize in – smears.

I suppose in 2020 we should be used to ideological disagreements boiling over into lawfare and campaigns of personal destruction and ruin.

The voter fraud arrest in Texas reminded me that LULAC is a skilled practitioner in the fine art of foundation-backed smears. Texas Rangers are not a racist terrorist organization any more than I am a so-called “vote suppressor.”

I’ll put my record on voting rights up against the critics anytime. There are minority elected officials across the country who would not be in office but for cases I worked on happily, and that’s just a start. It’s time groups like LULAC, and their deep-pocketed lawyer allies, start realizing that voter fraud is real, and if they focused less on the smears, everyone might be able to do something about it.

This is my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.