A Latino civil rights group is asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into a series of raids conducted on Latino voting activists and political operatives as part of a sprawling voter fraud inquiry by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations, said that many of those targeted were Democratic leaders and election volunteers, and that some were older residents. Gabriel Rosales, the director of the group’s Texas chapter, said that officers conducting the raids took cellphones, computers and documents. He called the raids “alarming” and said they were an effort to suppress Latino voters.
In a statement last week, Mr. Paxton, a Republican, described the raids, carried out in counties near San Antonio and South Texas, as part of an “ongoing election integrity investigation” that began two years ago to look into allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting. His office has said that it will not comment on the investigation because it is still underway.
That investigation is part of a unit, the election integrity unit, which was created as Republican-led states sought to crack down on supposed voter crime after former President Donald J. Trump began making false claims of fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. Experts have found that voter fraud remains rare.
Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general have been promoting aggressive prosecutions in voter fraud cases, sometimes making felony cases out of instances that might have been labeled mistakes in the past.
On Tuesday, Mr. Rosales said, officers raided the home of Cecilia Castellano, a Democrat running against Don McLaughlin, the former mayor of Uvalde, for a state House seat, taking her cellphone.
Ms. Castellano described her experience as “very frightening” and said she still did not know why she was targeted. “This is all political,” she said.
Last week, officers also broke down a door to raid the home of Manuel Medina, a consultant for Ms. Castellano’s campaign and the chair of the Tejano Democrats, a group that advocates Hispanic representation in the Democratic Party.
“I have been contacted by elderly residents who are confused and frightened, wondering why they have been singled out,” Mr. Rosales said. “It’s pure intimidation.”
One of those residents was Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old retired educator in San Antonio. She said she heard a knock on her door right before 6 a.m. on Tuesday. She thought that maybe a neighbor needed milk and eggs, she said, and she fastened her sleeping gown and opened the door.
Nine officers, seven of them men, some with guns in their holsters, then pushed open the door and marched past a living room wall decorated with crucifixes, she said.
“I got scared,” she recalled in an interview on Sunday, speaking in both English and Spanish. “They told me, ‘We have a warrant to search your house.’ I said, ‘Why?’ I felt harassed.”…