Anti-Islam rhetoric takes center stage in Texas Republican primary
WASHINGTON — Aaron Reitz aired his first television ad Wednesday pitching himself to voters as the best Republican candidate for Texas attorney general. But his commercial didn’t highlight his endorsement from outgoing attorney general Ken Paxton or his work under President Donald Trump. He didn’t discuss border security or election law.
Instead, Reitz pledged to target a religion practiced by hundreds of thousands of Texans.
“Politicians have imported millions of Muslims into our country,” Reitz said in the ad. “The result? More terrorism, more crime and they even want their own illegal cities in Texas to impose Sharia law. Not on my watch.”
Reitz’s ad is the latest example of Texas GOP candidates making anti-Muslim rhetoric a central piece of their messaging this cycle. As conservative activists push Republicans to take a harder line against Muslims, and the GOP and its factions debate what constitutes American identity, opposition to Islam has become a key campaign pillar for some Texas Republicans in statewide races and beyond.
Muslim civil rights groups say the negative messaging from Republicans around Islam is broader, more extreme and more frequent than in years past, and they worry about the cumulative effect of both heightened rhetoric and anti-Muslim policies.
“It’s definitely more coordinated than it was before,” said Sameeha Rizvi, the policy and advocacy coordinator for the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “We’re seeing it on a national and state level, and we’re seeing so-called influencer activists on the far right using this as a tool to further burn the flames of anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate.”
There are over 300,000 Muslims in Texas — more than all but four states — and long-established Muslim communities in Houston and North Texas.
The candidates characterize their opposition to Islam as an immigration issue, criticizing Muslim immigrants for not properly assimilating and claiming they wish to proliferate their values among other Texans .
“This is a coordinated political effort to Islamify Texas, and you’ve got to say it, you’ve got to mean it, you’ve got to push the Legislature to pass laws,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, who is also running for attorney general, said in an interview with Steve Bannon. “We’ve got to tweak the Texas Constitution. Whatever’s necessary to protect Texas from being Islamified by the radical Marxists.”
In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Roy said he respects freedom of religion and has no problem with people who hold different beliefs but love America. The problem, he said, is when the practice of their religion becomes political — and he believes Islam to some extent is inherently political.
Roy and Rep. Keith Self, R-McKinney, formed the Sharia-Free America Caucus in December. Both are sponsors of a bill that would deny anyone who “adheres to Sharia law” entry into the U.S. and mandate the removal of non-citizen Sharia adherents.
It’s not just campaign rhetoric. In November, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, as terrorist organizations. Numerous Republican politicians in Texas have attempted to stop the proposed East Plano Islamic Center, a planned residential development in North Texas that has become a flashpoint in state GOP politics as Republicans accuse leaders of attempting to create an exclusive community that enforces Sharia law. Developers say the community is open to all Texans, regardless of religious background.
Muslim civil rights organizations are fighting many of these actions in court, and are confident that items like Abbott’s CAIR proclamation violate the Constitution. CAIR has vehemently denied Abbott’s accusations that it has any ties to terrorist groups, and The Houston Chronicle reported that the organization worked with the FBI to stop an attack on President Donald Trump.
But advocates say even if the policies are unenforceable or legally dubious, the political rhetoric around Islam is intended to undermine Texas’ Muslim community and members’ ability to practice civic engagement.
“It forces impossible choices,” Marium Uddin, the legal director at the Muslim Legal Fund of America and a longtime Texas lawyer, wrote in an email. “Under this framework, Muslims are punished for ordinary civic participation. Organize? You may be designated extremist. Donate? Your charity may be weaponized decades later. Build a community? It may be labeled a ‘compound.’ Speak out? Your speech becomes evidence against you.
“This is not regulation,” she said. “It is systematic exclusion.”
In campaigns
In the attorney general’s race, both Roy and Reitz, a former deputy attorney general, are pledging to use the office to go after what they call Islamification, including the East Plano Islamic Center development, which is now called The Meadow.
Roy told the Texas Tribune as attorney general, he could use deceptive trade practice law and look closely at the finances of organizations he believes are promoting political Islam — legal tools, he said, that do not infringe on freedom of religion.
Reitz, meanwhile, has said he will “create a legal environment so inhospitable” to Islamists — or people who believe Islam should influence public life and government — that they’ll self-deport or go to jail.
In an interview with OAN in November, Reitz criticized “squish Republicans” who believe the First Amendment, which enshrines freedom of religion, prevents politicians from taking on CAIR and developments like the one in North Texas. Reitz told the Tribune he believes “terror-linked outfits” have “burrowed” into Muslim communities in Texas, and that they pose an “existential threat to our civilization.”
Reitz said he plans to treat “Islamism”, as he’s referred to it, like federal prosecutors treated organized crime syndicates— successfully going after them for process crimes.
“As Texas Attorney General, I’ll crush this sprawling web of Sharia supremacists just like the feds dismantled the Mafia, unleashing every tool in my legal arsenal: corporate crackdowns, nonprofit shutdowns, environmental enforcements, health and safety violations, regulatory hammers, criminal prosecutions, financial seizures, property forfeitures, and constitutional challenges,” Reitz said. “We’ll starve them out until they have no choice but to pack up and crawl back to where they came from.”
In the hotly contested U.S. Senate primary, candidates have used Sharia law as a cudgel to go after one another. Paxton, who is challenging Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary, sued the East Plano Islamic Center development and its leaders in December. But Cornyn has kept the heat on Paxton over the development, saying in a digital ad as early as April that Paxton is “too corrupt and compromised” to protect Texans from what the ad’s narrator calls a “safe haven for Sharia law.” The Cornyn campaign has routinely attacked Paxton for sharing a personal lawyer with the Islamic Center’s developers.
On Thursday, the Cornyn campaign launched a TV ad called “Evil Face” in which Cornyn, narrating and speaking to the camera says, “Radical Islam is a bloodthirsty ideology” and notes his efforts to revoke CAIR’s tax-exempt status.
Paxton, meanwhile, called Cornyn’s attacks a “desperate hail mary that can’t erase the fact that he helped radical Islamic Afghans invade Texas” — referencing a visa program for Afghans who helped U.S. forces to come to the country after a significant screening process. Both Cornyn and Hunt have supported the program, though Cornyn said in 2025 he does not have confidence in the vetting process.
Houston Rep. Wesley Hunt’s campaign released a digital ad of his own called “Sharia John”, using clips of Cornyn wishing Muslim Texans a good fast for Ramadan.
In a statement, Hunt framed the debate as one about immigration.
“As someone who served in combat in the Middle East, I have witnessed firsthand the devastating consequences of Sharia law,” Hunt said. “It is fundamentally incompatible with the values that define America, individual liberty, equality under the law, and freedom of conscience. We are a welcoming people and a nation built by immigrants, but America does not survive without assimilation.”
House hopefuls are also jockeying to be more stridently opposed to Islam than their opponents.
State Rep. Steve Toth launched a primary campaign against Houston Rep. Dan Crenshaw in July, and has attacked him on a number of issues, bashing his support for Ukraine aid and his rebukes of fellow Republicans who contested the 2020 election. But in his first campaign ad, Toth went after Muslims.
“Dan Crenshaw’s immigration plan is dangerous, demanding we allow more Muslim immigrants,” a narrator says in Toth’s ad. “Crenshaw even voted to bring thousands more from Afghanistan to our neighborhoods.”
Crenshaw’s campaign called Toth’s ad disingenuous and disrespectful. The congressman has supported resettling Afghans who assisted U.S. forces in the wake of the Taliban takeover of the country in 2021, with proper vetting, through Special Immigrant Visas.
“After the Taliban seized control, our allies who survived were forced into hiding, hunted by terrorists, or murdered for their cooperation with the United States,” the Crenshaw campaign said in a statement. “Abandoning them was a moral failure — and pretending their protection is reckless immigration policy only compounds that disgrace.”
Implications
Texas’ Muslim community has grown in size and in political power over the years. The first two Muslim state legislators, both Democrats, were elected to their positions in 2022.
But Muslims are an increasingly swingy political group. The Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Survey found that 42% of Muslim adults lean Republican, and that while the majority have preferences on immigration and the size of government that align with Democrats, majorities also have social beliefs on sexuality and gender identity, for example, that are more aligned with Republicans.
Texas lawmakers who traffic in anti-Muslim rhetoric could be isolating potential voters.
“[Anti-Muslim rhetoric] is a familiar pattern in Texas politics,” Rizvi said. “They’re just recycling the same political tactics, but intensifying it through their own political advocacy. But at the same time, they’re also seeing how Muslim and non-Muslim communities have been responding. We’re also organized. We’re also effective.”
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