Texas AG Paxton issued opinion enabling exclusion of Islamic schools from voucher program over unsubstantiated terrorism claims

On January 24, 2026, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a formal legal opinion concluding that the state comptroller could exclude private schools from the state's newly created Education Freedom Accounts voucher program if the schools had alleged ties to foreign terrorist organizations or held disqualifying foreign ownership. Paxton issued the opinion in response to a request from Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock, who had asked in December 2025 whether the office could bar an unnamed number of schools with supposed ties to the Chinese government or that had hosted events for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil-rights group.

New court filings unsealed in 2026 in a lawsuit brought by four Islamic private school campuses show the underlying allegations were substantially supplied by Sam Westrop, a researcher whom a British court ordered to pay more than $173,000 in libel damages after he falsely called an Islamic television channel's founder a "convicted terrorist," a claim Westrop later admitted lacked evidentiary support. Westrop shared similar unverified claims about Texas Islamic schools with the comptroller's office beginning in fall 2025. An eight-hour deposition of Murl Miller, the comptroller's chief counsel for general litigation, showed the resulting investigation was far broader than previously known: the state paid two outside investigators to examine the histories of nearly 50 private schools statewide over alleged extremist or Chinese-government ties.

The comptroller's office ultimately admitted all of the investigated schools into the voucher program, but four Islamic school campuses that sued in March 2026 over their exclusion are continuing to press for class-action certification to bar the comptroller from discriminating against specific religious schools in the future. Gov. Greg Abbott had designated CAIR a terrorist organization in November 2025, a designation CAIR is challenging in court, and at least one North Texas school district cited the designation in ending negotiations to host a CAIR-organized event.

Updates

2026-04-02 — Judge let Paxton's office withdraw as Hancock's counsel amid feud [4]

Comptroller Kelly Hancock accused Attorney General Ken Paxton's office in a leaked letter of mishandling the schools' legal defense, including failing to highlight alleged ties between one school and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Paxton responded publicly by calling Hancock an "incompetent loser" and urging Gov. Greg Abbott to remove him from office. U.S. District Judge Alfred H. Bennett granted Paxton's request to withdraw his office as counsel for the comptroller in the litigation, conditioned on Hancock's office securing replacement counsel without delay.