When Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced he had sued the makers of Tylenol over a connection to autism that’s never been proven, he got exactly what he wanted — headlines from coast to coast.
The move was the latest in a rash of lawsuits, investigations and threatening letters from Mr. Paxton aimed at establishing his firm alignment with President Trump — who has publicly connected autism with Tylenol use during pregnancy — and crushing political opponents, immigrant rights groups and progressive organizers.
The actions, including a new crop of hostile letters targeting Texas towns that have recently moved to raise taxes, have an added advantage. They have kept Mr. Paxton front and center as he seeks to defeat Texas’ senior senator, John Cornyn, in next year’s Republican primary.
“I know it’s political,” said Phil Harris, the city administrator of the small, mostly Republican town of Whitesboro, Texas, which received one of the attorney general’s letters on tax increases. “I wish Ken Paxton wasn’t running for Senate. I think it impacts his decision making.”
Mr. Paxton, a darling of hard-line Texas conservatives now in his third term, has always spearheaded conservative litigation, supporting Mr. Trump and challenging the Biden administration for four years. But in recent months, Mr. Paxton has broadened the range and escalated the pace of his legal actions.
In March, he charged a midwife in the Houston area with providing illegal abortions, then expanded the indictments this month to include her staff. In June, he worked with the Trump administration to help strike down a law, signed under Gov. Rick Perry, a fellow Republican, that offered in-state college tuition to undocumented immigrants in Texas.
He secured indictments in May against Hispanic Democrats in one rural county over allegations they broke Texas election laws by helping older voters cast their ballots.
And he has tried to bankrupt former Representative Beto O’Rourke’s political organization and crush its efforts to register Democrats in Texas to vote.
“He effectively froze our ability to fund-raise,” said Mr. O’Rourke in an interview, recounting the legal back-and-forth with Mr. Paxton’s office. “It definitely interrupted our organizing program.”
Taken together, the headline-grabbing actions — including an announcement of an undercover operation by his office to “infiltrate leftist terror cells” — have positioned Mr. Paxton as the one of the most aggressively partisan state law enforcement leaders in the nation. If that means crippling the Democratic Party of Texas as it struggles to its feet, so be it, supporters say.
“Paxton has represented what I consider the Texan spirit,” said Larry Parr of the Waller County Patriots, a local Christian conservative group east of Houston. “You don’t settle, you don’t bend, you don’t kneel.”
A spokesman for Mr. Paxton declined to make him available or provide comment for this article.
To his allies, Mr. Paxton’s moves are a welcome extension of the Trump administration’s aggressive use of its law enforcement powers against political opponents.
To his critics, and to those caught in the cross hairs, it can feel like the weaponization of a powerful state law enforcement office, with hundreds of lawyers, in the service of enforcing one particular political vision of Republican rule in the nation’s second-largest state.
“We don’t break any laws, but obviously, that’s not their concern here,” said Katherine Fischer, who leads Texas Majority PAC, which aims to elect Democrats and has received funding from the liberal billionaire George Soros and has been a target of Mr. Paxton’s office. “Their concern is the prosecution of political enemies.”
Last month, seemingly aware that the sheer number of actions, investigations and lawsuits might be making it hard for each to get attention, the attorney general’s office issued a news release summarizing its previous months’ news releases under the banner of “victory after victory.”
Democratic attorneys general have frequently sued the Trump administration, noted Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. What’s unique in Texas is the large number of lawsuits filed by Mr. Paxton against targets within his state, Dr. Blackman said. That is driven by the political dynamic in Texas, with so many large Democratic cities in a firmly Republican-led state.
In Mr. Paxton’s case, what constitutes a “victory” can be malleable. Many of the cases he has touted are ongoing and, like the Tylenol litigation, are unlikely to be resolved before Mr. Paxton’s term expires next year.
Some have not moved beyond the initial announcement. Ms. Fischer, for example, said Texas Majority PAC had not gotten any follow-up after the news release announcing the group was in the attorney general’s sights.
“We have not been served,” she said, though the group is prepared just in case. “If you’re on the receiving end, you have an obligation to take it seriously.”
While the attorney general in Texas has limited jurisdiction over criminal matters, Mr. Paxton has made frequent and occasionally novel use of the powers of his office to enforce civil laws, including those around consumer protection and nonprofits.
Mr. Paxton has begun investigations into nonprofits that offer care and assistance to migrants, including a Catholic shelter along the border with Mexico in El Paso. He has also filed suit seeking to revoke the charter of FIEL Houston, a nonprofit organization that supports immigrants. Mr. Paxton accused it of illegally engaging in politics and of aiming to “destroy our country and flood our nation with foreign invaders.”
In recent days he sent a letter seeking documents from a homeless services nonprofit in Austin, claiming that it had violated state law by supporting a voter proposition on the ballot next week that would raise city taxes.
His suit against Mr. O’Rourke accused the former El Paso congressman and his political organizing group, Powered by People, of violating consumer protection laws — by raising money to support Democratic lawmakers during the political fight over congressional redistricting.
“When you have the most powerful law enforcement official in the state of Texas and his taxpayer-funded office coming at you, you have to respond,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “The point is to cause you to go out of business, or to throw in the towel, and to send the message to other progressive organizations across Texas that they shouldn’t be so bold.”
The flurry of activity may also be a means of distracting from what has been a tough summer of headlines for Mr. Paxton, said Chad Wilbanks, a Republican political consultant and former executive director of the Republican Party of Texas. Mr. Paxton’s wife, Angela Paxton, a state senator, announced in July that she was divorcing him “on biblical grounds,” cited extramarital affairs and said the couple had not been living together in over a year. Mr. Paxton at the time asked for “prayers and privacy.”
Mr. Cornyn’s campaign, flush with campaign cash, has levied a series of attacks on the character of Mr. Paxton, including that he may have violated the law related to his mortgages on several homes.
Mr. Paxton is “trying to change the narrative for the fall from how bad it was in the summer,” said Mr. Wilbanks, who has raised money for Mr. Cornyn in the past.
At a news conference in Houston this month, Mr. Cornyn said that federal legislation he proposed to enhance criminal penalties for elected officials who commit bank, mortgage, credit and tax fraud — aimed at political adversaries of Mr. Trump like New York’s attorney general, Letitia James — could also apply to Mr. Paxton.
Mr. Paxton, who survived an impeachment trial over corruption allegations in the Texas Legislature in 2023, has denied any wrongdoing.
In addition to targeting Democratic organizations, Mr. Paxton has also taken action against small- and medium-sized cities in conservative areas that recently voted to increase taxes. He sent letters to at least four towns accusing them of violating a new state law requiring municipal audits and ordering them not to raise taxes.
“It seems like we’re being hit unfairly,” said Cal Hendrick, who was recently elected mayor of Odessa, a conservative West Texas oil country town that received one of the letters from Mr. Paxton.
Mr. Hendrick, a lifelong Republican, said he was trying to clean up an auditing mess from a prior administration, and that the new revenue would go to city services. “We’re trying to fix it,” he said. “And at the same time, we’re being punished.”
The town of Whitesboro, with a population of 4,000 people who overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump, received a similar letter from Mr. Paxton after its City Council voted for a tax increase.
The city administrator, Mr. Harris, once worked at the accounting firm Ernst & Young and said the city believed it was on firm legal ground.
As for that letter, Mr. Harris added, “I thought it was very aggressive when it didn’t need to be.”
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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