Paxton, Ken

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    Texas Court Seals Records in Ken Paxton’s Divorce Case

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    The order meant details in the case, which involves allegations of adultery, would not be public as the Texas attorney general challenges Senator John Cornyn in the 2026 primary.A state court on Friday ordered records in the divorce of Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas to be sealed, a day after his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, filed a petition that accused Mr. Paxton of adultery.The order to seal the records in the case, in the 429th District Court in Collin County, north of Dallas, came after a request from Mrs. Paxton’s lawyer. This means that further details of the high-profile split would not be available to the public in a case that could significantly affect the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas.Mr. Paxton, a firebrand conservative who is popular among Republican voters, is challenging Senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary in 2026. Mr. Paxton has been leading in public polling.In a statement on Thursday, Mrs. Paxton said that she had filed for divorce “on biblical grounds” and “in light of recent discoveries,” suggesting that new events in their relationship had prompted her decision. The divorce petition said that the couple had not been living together since June 2024 and that the grounds for divorce included that Mr. Paxton “has committed adultery.”Mr. Paxton said the couple’s relationship was strained by the pressures of public life and “countless political attacks” in his own statement on Thursday. He asked for privacy.The divorce announcement came as a shock in Texas. Mrs. Paxton had remained at her husband’s side through years of criminal investigations, a state court indictment for securities fraud and an impeachment at the State Capitol in which Mr. Paxton was accused of abusing his office by doing favors for a real estate investor who helped him conceal an extramarital affair.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Angela Paxton Files for Divorce From Ken Paxton, Texas’ Attorney General

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      The announcement could have a significant impact on the race for U.S. Senate in Texas. Mr. Paxton is challenging Senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary.State Senator Angela Paxton of Texas, the wife of the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced on Thursday that she had filed for divorce, saying she made her decision “on biblical grounds” and “in light of recent discoveries.”The divorce petition, filed by Ms. Paxton in Collin County on Thursday morning, lists among the grounds for divorce that the “respondent has committed adultery” and that the couple has not lived together “as spouses” since June 2024.Mr. Paxton, in a parallel announcement on social media, said the couple had decided to “start a new chapter in our lives,” and suggested that the pressures of public life and “countless political attacks” had precipitated the rupture.“I ask for your prayers and privacy at this time,” Mr. Paxton said.The announcement of the divorce filing could roil Texas Republican politics, where the couple has been a fixture for years, and where Mr. Paxton’s primary challenge to United States Senator John Cornyn has already caused significant rifts ahead of the 2026 midterm campaign.Mr. Paxton, who has courted the hard right of the Republican Party for years, has been polling ahead of the incumbent in public surveys, and he has sought to align himself firmly with President Trump and his supporters.Democrats, in turn, have jumped at the prospect of contesting the seat, hoping that in a general election with Republicans facing headwinds, they could more easily defeat Mr. Paxton than Mr. Cornyn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Tillis Out, North Carolina’s Senate Race Will Draw Parties’ Firepower

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      A popular former Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, is expected to announce a bid this summer. The Republicans are banking on an endorsement by President Trump to clear their field.The announcement this past weekend from Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina that he will not seek re-election is renewing the focus on a Senate race that was poised to be one of the two top contests on the 2026 midterm map.For months, Democrats were eager to run against Mr. Tillis, who was being squeezed from both the political left and right as he sought to navigate life as a battleground-state senator with President Trump in the White House.Officials in both parties acknowledged that Mr. Tillis was in a weakened political state. He won his last re-election in 2020 only after his Democratic opponent was engulfed in an extramarital sexting scandal, and he has long had an arms-length relationship with the Trump base of his party.In recent months, several North Carolina Republicans have inquired about either mounting a primary challenge to Mr. Tillis or seeking the nomination with the expectation that the senator would not run again.Democrats, for the most part, have yielded to their expected front-runner, former Gov. Roy Cooper, who left office at the start of this year. During his farewell address to the state in December, he pointedly declared: “I’m not done.”Here are four key questions about North Carolina’s Senate race.Will former Gov. Roy Cooper run?Mr. Cooper is by far the most popular Democrat in North Carolina. He is undefeated as a statewide candidate, having won four elections as attorney general and two as governor. In 2012, Republicans did not even bother to put up a candidate against Mr. Cooper.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Google Agrees to Pay $1.4 Billion to Settle 2 Privacy Lawsuits

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      The Texas attorney general brought the cases in 2022 under state laws.Google agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the State of Texas on Friday to settle two lawsuits accusing it of violating the privacy of state residents by tracking their locations and searches, as well as collecting their facial recognition information.The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who secured the settlement, brought the suits in 2022 under Texas laws related to data privacy and deceptive trade practices. Less than a year ago, he reached a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over allegations it had illegally tagged users’ faces on its site.Google’s settlement is the latest legal setback for the tech giant. Over the past two years, Google has lost a string of antitrust cases after being found to have a monopoly over its app store, search engine and advertising technology. It has spent the past three weeks in the search case trying to fend off a U.S. government request to break up its business.“Big Tech is not above the law,” Mr. Paxton said in a statement.José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, said the company had already changed its product policies. “This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere,” he said.Privacy issues have become a major source of tension between tech giants and regulators in recent years. In the absence of a federal privacy law, states such as Texas and Washington have passed laws to curb the collection of facial, voice and other biometric data.Google and Meta have been the highest-profile companies challenged under those laws. Texas’ law, called Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier, requires companies to ask permission before using features like facial or voice recognition technologies. The law allows the state to impose damages of up to $25,000 per violation.The lawsuit filed under that law focused on the Google Photos app, which allowed people to search for photos of a particular person; Google’s Next camera, which could send alerts when it recognized visitors at a door; and Google Assistant, a virtual assistant that could learn up to six users’ voices and answer their questions.Mr. Paxton filed a separate lawsuit that accused Google of misleading Texans by tracking their personal location data, even after they thought they had disabled that feature. He added a complaint to that suit alleging that Google’s private browsing setting, which it called Incognito mode, wasn’t actually private. Those cases were brought under Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act. More

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      Ken Paxton Says He Will Challenge Senator John Cornyn in 2026

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      Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, officially announced on Tuesday that he was challenging Senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary next year, setting up what is likely to be the most contentious and expensive intraparty contest of 2026.Mr. Paxton, a firebrand conservative litigant who has sought to strongly align himself with President Trump, had been teasing a run against Mr. Cornyn for weeks. He all but announced his intentions in an interview with The New York Times last week.On Tuesday, Mr. Paxton unveiled a website for his nascent campaign, prominently featuring a photo of him posing with Mr. Trump, and he officially announced his run in an interview on Fox News.“It’s definitely time for a change in Texas,” Mr. Paxton said in the interview with Laura Ingraham. In a post on social media, he promised to “fight for President Trump’s agenda and take a sledgehammer to the D.C. establishment.”Mr. Paxton has tried to position himself as the preferred candidate of the Republican primary base in Texas, a conservative electorate that has appeared receptive to his campaign in recent polling.Mr. Cornyn, realizing the looming challenge, announced his own campaign last month in a video that heavily featured his own connections to Mr. Trump. In recent days he rolled out an endorsement from the union for U.S. Border Patrol agents, an important show of support for conservative voters who list border security among their top issues.In response to Mr. Paxton’s announcement, the Cornyn campaign pointed to the senator’s voting record, which it said aligned with President Trump more than nearly every other senator. The campaign referred to Mr. Paxton as “a fraud.”“This will be a spirited campaign and we assure Texans they will have a real choice when this race is over,” the campaign said in a statement on Tuesday.Republican voters in Texas are well familiar with both Mr. Cornyn, who has been in state politics for four decades, and Mr. Paxton, a former state representative and state senator now in his third term as attorney general.Mr. Paxton survived an impeachment trial in 2023, initiated by Texas House Republicans, over allegations of corruption and abuse of office that were lodged against him by some of his former top aides.Those aides also filed a whistle-blower suit against him over their firings. Late last week a judge sided with them, saying that Mr. Paxton had admitted to the allegations and that the state should pay $6.6 million to settle the claims. Mr. Paxton has vowed to appeal. More

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      Former Aides to Ken Paxton Win $6.6 Million in Whistle-Blower Case

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      A judge found that four whistle-blowers who accused Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, of corruption and reported him to the F.B.I. were unjustly fired.A judge awarded a total of $6.6 million to four former high-level aides to Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, who claimed that they were unduly fired after reporting him to federal investigators and accusing him of corruption in 2020.The plaintiffs — Blake Brickman, Mark Penley, David Maxwell and Ryan Vassar — proved that the attorney general’s office violated the state’s whistle-blower act, Judge Catherine Mauzy of a district court in Travis County ruled on Friday.Each plaintiff was awarded between $1 million and more than $2 million for lost wages, emotional pain, legal fees and other costs associated with the trial.“The Court finds that Plaintiffs have proved liability, damages, and reasonable and necessary attorney’s fees by a preponderance of the evidence,” Judge Mauzy wrote in her ruling.Judge Mauzy also noted that Mr. Paxton never disputed any issue or fact in the case, opting not to contest his office’s liability. Mr. Paxton did not testify.Tom Nesbitt, a lawyer for Mr. Brickman, celebrated the decision.“Yesterday’s judgment is the natural and intended consequence of Ken Paxton’s choice to surrender rather than fight the whistle-blowers’ claims in court,” he said in a statement on Saturday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Appeals Court Again Blocks U.S. From Cutting Texas Border Wire Along Rio Grande

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      The injunction is the second time that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has sided with Texas in a yearlong dispute over barbed wire around the city of Eagle Pass.For the second time, a federal appeals court has limited the Biden administration’s authority to cut barbed wire that Texas authorities have erected along the country’s southern border to deter migrants from crossing into the United States.But the ruling, issued Wednesday, required something of Texas authorities as well. The court order would protect the state’s concertina wire so as long as federal agents had “necessary access” to both sides of it — including in Shelby Park, a local park in the border city of Eagle Pass that the state seized and kicked federal authorities out of this year.The ruling is the latest development in an ongoing clash between state and federal authorities for control over border enforcement, as Texas has repeatedly tried to effectively set its own immigration policy. Since 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott has been deploying state law enforcement and National Guard members along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of an initiative called Operation Lone Star. Texas’ efforts to arrest migrants under a new state law and to place floating barriers along the Rio Grande have also led to court battles.The legal dispute over barbed wire began in October 2023 when Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued the Biden administration, claiming that U.S. Border Patrol agents were illegally destroying the state’s concertina wire fencing. The state, Mr. Paxton said, had the right to curb what he called an “alien surge.”A district court judge declined to give Texas the injunction it requested, finding that the federal government was likely to win the ongoing case because of sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine that can often shield state and federal governments from lawsuits. In December 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a temporary order limiting the Biden administration’s ability to remove the wire only in cases of medical emergencies. That ruling was vacated by the Supreme Court in January, sending the case back to the lower courts.Wednesday’s order, from the Fifth Circuit, rejected claims by the Biden administration that sovereign immunity and the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution meant that Texas couldn’t challenge federal actions along the border. Texas, the appeals court found, was seeking “not to ‘regulate’ Border Patrol, but only to safeguard its own property.”The Fifth Circuit has been hailed by some Trump-aligned Republicans as a model for the future of conservative jurisprudence. Three of its judges are often discussed as possible Supreme Court nominees during President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second term. One of those three, Stuart Kyle Duncan, wrote Wednesday’s ruling.In a post on X, Mr. Paxton called Wednesday’s ruling a “huge win,” and said that his office had “fought every step of the way for Texas sovereignty and security.”The Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Judge Tosses Out Biden Program For Undocumented Spouses

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      The ruling issued by a federal judge in Texas struck down a new initiative aimed at helping undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens stay in the country.A federal judge in Texas on Thursday struck down a new Biden administration program that sought to provide a path to U.S. citizenship for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants married to American citizens.The ruling, issued by Judge J. Campbell Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, came months after 16 Republican-led states, led by Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit claiming that the administration lacked the legal authority to enact the program. In August, Judge Barker temporarily blocked the initiative, just days after it had gone into place.On Thursday, in a 74-page decision, he explained that the Biden administration did not have the authority to create the program, which would have been unlikely to remain in place after President-elect Trump took office in January.The Biden administration started the initiative, known as Keeping Families Together, in August, allowing undocumented immigrants who were married to U.S. citizens and had been in the United States for 10 years or more a chance to gain a green card without leaving the country.Read the Judge’s RulingA federal judge in Texas struck down a new Biden administration program that sought to provide a path to U.S. citizenship for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants married to American citizens.Read Document 74 pagesGenerally, immigrants who have entered the United States illegally must leave the country to complete the green card process, which can take years. The Biden program, which was in place for a week, allowed those who were married to U.S. citizens to remain in the country by granting them what the immigration system refers to as “parole,” a status that also protected them from deportation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Read the Judge’s Ruling

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      Case 6:24-cv-00306-JCB Document 120 Filed 11/07/24 Page 6 of 74 PageID #: 2962
      a foreign port or place or from an outlying possession.” Id.
      § 101(a)(13), 66 Stat. at 167.³
      c. Obtaining LPR status. – As today, status as an alien law-
      fully admitted for permanent residence (LPR or “green card” sta-
      tus) enabled an alien’s eventual naturalization as a U.S. citizen. Id.
      § 318, 66 Stat. at 244 (“no person shall be naturalized unless he
      has been lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent res-
      idence”), codified as amended at 8 U.S.C. § 1429. The INA of 1952
      defined two processes for obtaining LPR status.
      First, an alien could apply for an immigrant visa at a U.S. con-
      sulate or embassy abroad, wait for one to become available and to
      issue, and then travel to a U.S. port of entry and be admitted for
      permanent residence under that visa. Id. §§ 101(a)(9) (consular
      officer), 203 (numerical limits), 211 (admission), 221 (consular is-
      suance), 66 Stat. at 166-67, 178–79, 181-82, 191–92. Aliens often
      had to wait their turn for immigrant visas to become available be-
      cause of annual limits on visa issuance. See id. § 201, 66 Stat. at
      175-76, codified as amended at 8 U.S.C. § 1151.4
      Second, an alien lawfully admitted to the United States in one
      status could, while here, adjust to LPR status. Under INA
      § 245(a), an alien “lawfully admitted to the United States as a
      bona fide nonimmigrant,” and who so entered the country, could
      petition for adjustment to LPR status upon certain showings re-
      lated to immigrant visas. Id. § 245(a), 66 Stat. at 217. But an alien’s
      parole from detention pending exclusion proceedings was not “an
      admission of the alien,” id. § 212(d)(5), 66 Stat. at 188, and thus
      did not allow the alien to petition to adjust to LPR status.
      ³ One exception was made, providing that LPR aliens were not “regarded”
      as “making an entry into the United States for purposes of the immigration
      laws” if they did not intend or reasonably expect to depart from the United
      States in the first place. Id.; see Rosenberg v. Fleuti, 374 U.S. 449 (1963) (inter-
      preting that clause). The need for that exception confirms that the term “en-
      try” itself refers to a physical movement into the country.
      4 Certain immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, however, have been ex-
      empted from immigrant-visa quotas. E.g., id. § 101(a)(27)(A), 66 Stat. at 169
      (“nonquota immigrants”); id. § 201(c), 66 Stat. at 176.
      -6- More