Texas Republicans Are Moving From Demonizing Muslims to Stripping Away Their Rights
The ugly logic of bigotry is on vivid display in the Lone Star State
For American Muslims, the Republican Party has become a giant no-go zone, ringed with barbed wire and “Keep Out” signs. From the president on down, Islamophobia is now a standard sentiment, expressed without inhibition. Muslims, in Republican eyes, are not just one of many legitimate religious minorities in our pluralist society. They represent an irredeemable enemy.
Rep. Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, recently posted, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” His Republican colleague, Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, agreed: “We need more Islamophobia, not less.” Fine also said: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, alluding to the 9/11 attack, wrote of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, “The enemy is inside the gates.” (He had used the same language in response to Mamdani swearing the oath of office on the Quran.) Donald Trump, of course, has a vast history of smearing Muslims—most recently calling for two Muslim congresswomen, both American citizens, to be sent “back from where they came.”
And then there’s Texas.
The Lone Star State’s Long Slide: From Bush to Abbott
The Supreme Court has long held that “the clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” But Texas Republicans are disfavoring one religion at every opportunity.
It wasn’t always this way. Texas Gov. George W. Bush got more than 70% of the Muslim vote in winning the presidency in 2000. Six days after 9/11, Bush spoke at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and declared, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” He celebrated the contributions of Muslims to American society and said women who wear head scarves should not be afraid to appear in public.
But 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq stamped Muslims as a potential threat in the eyes of many Americans, particularly those on the right. The false claim that Barack Obama was a Muslim turbocharged GOP opposition to him, with Donald Trump stomping on the gas pedal. In 2011, Trump told Fox News: “He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim.” Back then, most Republicans thought Obama was indeed an adherent of Islam—and two out of three Republicans had a negative opinion of Islam.
You might expect that, after Islamic terrorism subsided and the forever wars ended, the animus would ebb. But it hasn’t. A 2024 poll found that “expressed public prejudice toward Muslims remains higher than toward any other religious, ethnic, or racial group studied.” Only 46% of Republicans have a favorable view of Muslims—compared with 80% of Democrats. GOP politicians, ever attuned to the party’s base, have found that demonizing Muslims is never a bad electoral tactic. The consequences are measurable: complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination and harassment reached 8,683 nationwide in 2025, the highest annual total on record.
But Texas, as we’ve always been told, doesn’t do things on a small scale, and Republicans there are not about to be outdone when it comes to inciting fear and loathing of Muslims. Gov. Greg Abbott, now in his third term and practically guaranteed to win a fourth in November, has made certain that no one can outdo him on this issue. Last year, he designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a long-established civil rights group, as a foreign terrorist organization—something that the federal government, which happens to have actual jurisdiction over such matters, has never done. He demanded a state investigation into Sharia courts—religious tribunals that, like rabbinical courts, provide a forum for the private resolution of disputes among believers and, in this country, lack the force of law. He excluded private Muslim schools from a state tuition voucher program.
The governor has also exploited the hysteria that erupted after the East Plano Islamic Council proposed to build a residential community with more than 1,000 homes near Dallas, which opponents depicted as “a 402-acre sharia city.” He signed a bill banning “Sharia compounds” that was clearly aimed at the development. And though it caters to Muslims, the developers say it would be open to non-Muslims and would comply with fair housing laws.
“The irony,” said Texas Monthly, “is that if EPIC was trying to segregate Muslims from the general public out of fears for their safety, such a move now looked quite reasonable.” Trump’s own Justice Department undertook an investigation of the project and closed it without taking further action.
What connects these episodes is not just bigotry but the selective application of the law—in Abbott’s case, he deployed raw government power against a Muslim development while giving his tacit blessing to the comparable projects of other, approved faiths. “Never in 42 years of practicing criminal defense have I seen the number and absurdity of the accusations lodged here,” said attorney Dan Cogdell, who is representing the organizers of EPIC City.
But Abbott has done nothing to block an even larger Catholic community planned for construction near Tyler, which its sponsors say will include “seven Catholic institutes, a retreat center, residences, multilevel educational program” designed to “bring together a community of believers whose goal is to safeguard the deposit of faith through uncompromising fidelity to sacred Scripture and sacred Tradition.”
The Politicians Competing to Be Most Extreme
If it’s hard to be more extreme than Abbott, plenty of Texas politicians are giving it their best effort. The Sharia-Free Caucus in the state House boasts 38 members, all Republicans. It is led by Rep. Brent Money, who put out an incendiary statement: “We will not stand idly by as Islamic influences seek to transform our great state into another conquered territory.” The March Republican primary ballot included a nonbinding referendum proposing a ban on Sharia law, which 95% of GOP voters approved. GOP candidates have poured more than $10 million into alarmist television ads about “Sharia” and “Islam” so far this cycle, the vast majority of it in Texas, representing a tenfold increase over any of the previous four election cycles.
Sen. John Cornyn, a fourth-term incumbent who by Washington standards is relatively moderate, alleges that his opponent in the Republican primary runoff, Attorney General Ken Paxton, is “soft on radical Islam.” That charge is unlikely to stick, given that Paxton has filed a lawsuit to ban CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood from Texas on the fantastical ground that they are operating as a “radical terrorist organization that exists to usurp government power and establish dominion through Sharia law.” He proclaimed, “Sharia law and the jihadists who follow Sharia law have no business being in Texas.” This is a transparent pretext for marshalling the state’s prosecutorial power to punish a religious group for its beliefs, in flagrant disregard of the First Amendment.
If CAIR or the Muslim Brotherhood have committed crimes, such as engaging in violence or working with foreign terrorist organizations, they can be prosecuted. In 2008, following a mistrial the previous year, an Islamic charity called the Holy Land Foundation was convicted of providing funds to Hamas. But as for CAIR, a federal district court ruled that its due process rights had been violated by the public release of the claim—which it said was “unaccompanied by any facts providing a context for evaluating the basis for the United States Attorney’s opinion. Neither CAIR nor the other unindicted co-conspirators have been charged with a crime and they have no judicial forum in which to defend against the accusation.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is a decentralized international group, and the U.S. government has designated only a few foreign chapters as terrorist organizations. For Abbott and Paxton to label not just all the U.S. chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood but also CAIR as terrorists is the equivalent of smearing all Republicans as insurrectionists, based on the Jan. 6 Capitol assault.
In February, Shaima Zayan, operations manager of CAIR Austin, testified before the State Board of Education, asking that the curriculum include Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, both important American Muslims, and note that many Africans brought here as slaves were Muslim. One board member, Brandon Hall, later responded that “Texas is a Christian state” and that if CAIR didn’t like the school curriculum’s omission of Muslims, “we should be buying them tickets to the Middle East or some other Muslim country.”
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, decrying Sharia as “an existential threat,” has introduced legislation to forbid “all foreign nationals who observe Sharia from entering the U.S. or from remaining in the country.” But as George Mason University law professor and The UnPopulist contributor Ilya Somin testified to a House subcommittee:
All or most Muslims accept Sharia law at least to some degree, though they differ greatly among themselves about its meaning and significance. Thus, discrimination against adherents of Sharia law discriminates against Muslims in much the same way as a bill targeting adherents of Talmudic law discriminates against Orthodox Jews, or a bill targeting adherents of Catholic Canon Law discriminates against Catholics.
The First Amendment, he reminded the committee, applies just as much to non-citizens as to citizens. And while the affected foreigners may not be entitled to come here, expelling them “in retaliation for their speech or religion violates the First Amendment.”
Retaliation against Muslims for their religion has become a key part of the Republican brand. There is virtually no anti-Muslim statement extreme enough to disqualify the speaker from being welcome in the Texas GOP. Valentina Gomez, running for Congress in central Texas, put out a video of her burning a Quran with a flamethrower. “Vote for me so we can kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas,” she said, warning that “your daughters will be raped and your sons beheaded, unless we stop Islam once and for all.” Larry Brock, an Air Force veteran who spent two years in prison for taking part in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and is running for a state House seat, says, “We should ban the burqa, the hijab, the abaya, the niqab”—articles of clothing worn by some Muslim women to cover the body and head. “No to halal meat. No to celebrating Ramadan. No, no, no.”
What the First Amendment Actually Says
The First Amendment doesn’t allow the federal government or Texas governmental officials to persecute people for unpopular religious beliefs or religious practices that violate no law. It doesn’t allow the state to erect hurdles to Muslim projects that it doesn’t interpose against other faiths. A state program that permits the use of vouchers for private Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish schools may not exclude accredited schools merely for being Islamic.
Texas Republicans know this constitutional command. They have simply decided it does not apply to Muslims. In May, Trump created a Religious Liberty Commission, noting, “The Founders envisioned a Nation in which religious voices and views are integral to a vibrant public square and human flourishing and in which religious people and institutions are free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or hostility from the Government.” Yet Texas Republicans are doing everything they can to make sure that every day, followers of this particular religion experience fear of discrimination and government hostility.
The idea that Muslims, who make up 2% of the state population, are a threat to gain power and transform Texas into an ISIS caliphate is enough to make an undertaker fall over laughing. The vast majority of Muslims are conventional law-abiding people who want only to live and work in peace. Many of them, or their parents, came to America to escape oppressive theocratic rule in Islamic countries. The gunman wearing a “Property of Allah” hoodie who killed three people and wounded 14 others in Austin’s entertainment district on March 1 is no more representative of Muslim Texans than Patrick Crusius, who fatally shot 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019 in an attack aimed at Hispanics, is of white Texans.
A Party That Once Knew Better
Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush are among the Republican leaders who cultivated ties with American Muslims, recognizing that they make important contributions and have every right to full inclusion in American society. But that approach has been rendered obsolete by religious zealots, white supremacists, and cynical demagogues who traffic in flagrant bigotry to sow panic and hatred.
Zayan considers the campaign against Muslims to be outright religious persecution, not mere Islamophobia. “It’s become very systematic and very systemic, and it’s touching all aspects of life,” she told me. “It’s a very orchestrated effort to suffocate the Muslim community, to silence the Muslim community, and to drain them of their hard-earned resources.”
It doesn’t matter that the overwhelming majority of Texas Muslims have never threatened or harmed anyone. In the eyes of too many Texas Republicans, they are a permanently suspect alien class, undeserving of the rights guaranteed to all other people by the Constitution. They are here at our sufferance, and thus subject to whatever burdens the majority chooses to inflict.
The consistent message from Texas Republicans is that Muslims are to be treated as enemies simply for being Muslim. If Republicans can do this to Muslims today without consequence, the question every other minority in this country should be asking is simple: Who is next?
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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I would have shared this if not for the comment on the Holy Land Foundation. Please refer to Miko Peled's book Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five.
https://theintercept.com/2018/08/05/holy-land-foundation-trial-palestine-israel/