More than a year after a Travis County jury convicted Daniel Perry of murdering a protester in Austin, Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned the former U.S. Army sergeant on Thursday shortly after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended a full pardon.

A Texas state district court judge sentenced Perry in May 2023 to 25 years in prison for shooting and killing U.S. Air Force veteran Garrett Foster during a 2020 demonstration protesting police brutality against people of color.

One day after a jury convicted Perry, Abbott directed the parole board to review the former U.S. Army sergeant’s case.

“Among the voluminous files reviewed by the Board, they considered information provided by the Travis County District Attorney, the full investigative report on Daniel Perry, plus a review of all the testimony provided at trial,” Abbott said in a statement announcing the proclamation that absolved Perry. “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”

Abbott approved the board’s recommendation, which included restoration of Perry’s firearm rights.

“The members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles delved into the intricacies of Perry’s case. The investigative efforts encompassed a meticulous review of pertinent documents, from police reports to court records, witness statements, and interviews with individuals linked to the case,” the pardon board wrote in a Thursday statement.

Perry was driving for Uber at the time he encountered protesters a few blocks from the Capitol in downtown Austin. He stopped his car and honked at protesters as they walked through the street. Seconds later, he drove his car into the crowd, Austin police said.

Foster was openly carrying an AK-47 rifle at the time and during the trial, each side presented conflicting accounts as to whether the protester raised the gun to Perry who was also legally armed. Perry shot Foster and then fled the area, police said. He then called police and reported what happened, claiming he shot in self-defense after Foster aimed his weapon at him.

The case caught the attention of influential conservative voices like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi, who both pressured Abbott to pardon Perry saying he acted self-defense in the face of dangerous protests.

Abbott rarely issues pardons, which the board must recommend before the governor can act. Abbott granted three pardons in 2023, two pardons in 2022 and eight in 2021 — most for lower-level offenses.

Shortly after Perry’s conviction, unsealed court documents revealed he had made a slew of racist, threatening comments about protesters in text messages and social media posts. Days after George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer prompted nationwide protests, Perry sent a text message saying, “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” Both Perry and Foster are white.

During his trial, several colleagues in the Army testified that Perry treated everyone fairly, regardless of race. His lawyers called Perry’s social media posts and messages as “barracks humor.”

EL PASO — Before Annunciation House Director Ruben Garcia received a demand from the Texas Attorney General’s office to hand over sensitive documents about the migrants who have stayed at his shelter, the state had been monitoring Garcia’s and other staffers’ activity.

In court documents, Anthony Carter, a criminal investigator with Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office, described Garcia dropping off groceries in a white Toyota truck and noted “several Hispanic individuals from adults to small children seen entering and leaving” one of the El Paso shelter network’s facilities. Carter noted that only three people had keys to the shelter, while everyone else had to ring a doorbell.

Rob Farquharson, an assistant attorney general in Paxton’s office, said in the same court documents that what Carter observed showed that the shelter had an “unusually covert way” of operating. He said Annunciation House appears “to be engaged in the business of human smuggling,” operating an “illegal stash house” and encouraging immigrants to enter the country illegally because it provides education on legal services. (Garcia’s lawyer said that’s just how migrant shelters operate, for the safety of guests and staff).

“When we first read it, we thought it was creepy,” said Jerome Wesevich, a lawyer with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid who is representing Annunciation House in its legal fight with Paxton. “I don’t know if I would call it spying, but if they would have just asked us, we would have talked to them.”

Earlier this month, Paxton’s office sent lawyers to Annunciation House, seeking records about the shelter’s clients and gave Garcia a day to turn over the documents. When Wesevich said that wasn’t enough time and asked a judge to determine which documents shelter officials are legally allowed to release, the AG’s office interpreted the delay as noncompliance and filed a countersuit to shut down the shelter network.

For the past few years, right-wing advocacy groups and Republican lawmakers have targeted non-governmental organizations that shelter migrants, many of them asylum seekers, blaming them for incentivizing illegal immigration with taxpayer money.

Those efforts come as religious figures, emboldened by the rise of Christian nationalism, continue to demonize migrants and those who aid them as part of a broader scheme to dilute the American electorate. On Sunday, Ed Young, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and the longtime pastor of Houston's massive Second Baptist Church, gave a lengthy sermon in which he reportedly called migrants "garbage" and "undesirables" who are being brought in to support a "progressive, Godless" dictatorship.

"We will not be able to stand under all the garbage and raff in which we're now inviting to come into our shores," said Young, whose church has been attended for years by prominent state Republicans. "And they're already here."

Far-right Catholics have also mobilized against organizations such as Catholic Charities, calling it the "enemy of the people" and blasting it for assisting migrants — many of whom are also Catholic, but conflict with the ethno-nationalism that experts say is highly correlated with white Christian nationalist beliefs.

Last year, right-wing Catholics launched a campaign to defund bishops who aid migrants at the border; and in an interview with the group Church Militant, self-professed Christian nationalist and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, said Catholic Charities’ work was proof of “Satan controlling the church.”

And some Texas politicians have targeted faith-based groups like Annunciation House — which has been in operation for nearly 50 years — with accusations that such shelters encourage, and profit from, illegal immigration.

Paxton’s move comes as immigration has become one of the main issues in this year’s presidential elections and Texas has dramatically ramped up its efforts to deter people crossing the Rio Grande.

Last year, Garcia expressed concern that Gov. Greg Abbott’s escalating efforts to halt illegal immigration could impact the work of Good Samaritans.

“The church is at risk because the volunteers are asking themselves, ‘If I feed someone who’s unprocessed, if I give someone a blanket who’s unprocessed, if I help them get off the street, am I liable to be prosecuted for that?’” Garcia said during a public meeting with U.S. senators visiting El Paso. “Shame on us, that on this day, this is even being brought up in the United States.”

On Friday, Garcia said Paxton’s move is the first time a state official has actually taken action to stop the work he and his staff have done to help migrants. He said that he is “concerned about the language that is used” by some politicians to describe the work his organization and others are doing with migrants because it can “encourage people to do terrible things to organizations and to people who are trying to provide basic human services to individuals.”

A 2017 court ruling reinforced the idea that migrant shelters can’t be charged with crimes related to helping migrants. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued Texas in 2016 over House Bill 11, a state law with a provision that says people commit a crime if they “encourage or induce a person to enter or remain in this country in violation of federal law by concealing, harboring, or shielding that person from detection.”

The following year the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the state’s favor but said organizations that provide services to immigrants aren’t at risk of prosecution under the law, “Because there is no reasonable interpretation by which merely renting housing or providing social services to an illegal alien constitutes harboring . . . that person from detection.”

Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in court documents at the time that his agency “would not investigate, file criminal charges, or otherwise engage in enforcement activity” under this state law against non-governmental organizations that provide aid to migrants.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said Paxton’s move is “absolutely terrifying and should send a chill down the back” of people who care about immigrants’ rights and the groups that help them. She said that “extreme far-right members” in Congress have worked to defund organizations that help migrants.

“This is a wake up call for the country that this far-right extremism knows no bounds. And I assure you that what has happened to Annunciation House will be a pattern that will be executed on every nonprofit, every local government, every organization that offers care to anyone who might be undocumented, or someone who is an immigrant and an asylum seeker in this country.”

Two years ago, U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Terrell, sent Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley and two similar faith-based organizations a lengthy demand for information about migrants and the services they provide to them — not unlike the demand Paxton’s office sent to Annunciation House.

He threatened the organizations with congressional subpoenas if they didn’t comply, but two years later, Gooden said Catholic Charities has not responded to his demand.

“They know that what they're doing is so politically disgusting to the average American that the outrage would really increase if they cooperated with any oversight investigation by Congress,” Gooden said of Catholic Charities.

Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in McAllen, said the alarmist rhetoric Gooden and others are spreading about the border and her work is politically motivated.

“I wish they would come and actually see what we're doing so they can understand what is actually happening at the border,” Pimentel said. “We respond to what our own faith calls us to do, to take care of our brothers and sisters who are hurting, who are suffering.”

In a May 2023 letter to DHS Secretary Mayorkas, Gooden wrote that NGOs receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars through federal grants to provide lodging and transportation for migrants “to be released anywhere they want in the United States.” Gooden added that groups like Catholic Charities stood to financially benefit from more illegal crossings because then the federal government would provide more money to fund their facilities and services.

Pimentel disputed this characterization. She said in addition to helping house and feed migrants, Catholic Charities also serves families in four counties in the Rio Grande Valley.

Gooden’s scrutiny of Catholic Charities came at the same time as right-wing groups, like the Deposit of Faith Coalition and Alliance for a Safe Texas, were also targeting the faith-based group. The Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of conservative Catholic organizations critical of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ stance on a number of issues from immigration to climate change, has labeled Catholic Charities an “enemy of the people,” and accused the organization of profiting off the federal assistance they use to provide shelter and food to those in need.

Pimentel said those are false accusations “based on just political rhetoric … to create a problem or a crisis so that the [Biden] administration looks bad.”

Last week, after Paxton’s investigation into Annunciation House became public, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops released a statement “expressing solidarity with ministry volunteers and people of faith who seek only to serve vulnerable migrants as our nation and state continue to pursue failed migration and border security policies.”

On Monday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement of support for Texas Catholics and other people of faith helping to “meet migrants’ basic human needs.”

Garcia said that he wants people to recognize that what’s at stake is the well-being of human beings.

“That should cause all of us to pause, take a step back and to ask ourselves, ‘How do we behave?” he said. “How do we respond when human beings are involved?”

Robert Downen contributed to this story.

In the months since Texas outlawed abortion and prohibited adolescents from receiving gender-transition care, women have flooded abortion clinics in nearby states and parents with transgender children have moved to places where puberty blockers and hormone therapy remain legal.

So now, Texas conservatives are testing the limits of their power beyond state lines.

Some cities and counties have passed so-called travel bans aimed at stopping Texans from driving to abortion appointments in other states. Meanwhile, Attorney General Ken Paxton has demanded medical records from at least two out-of-state clinics that provide gender-affirming care to minors.

“This request from the Texas Attorney General is a clear attempt to intimidate providers of gender-affirming care and parents and families seeking that care outside of Texas and other states with bans,” Dr. Izzy Lowell, a Georgia physician who received one such demand letter, said in a statement.

These recent efforts to restrict or scrutinize what Texans do out-of-state raise an important question: Just how far does Texas’ authority over its residents extend?

The question of extraterritoriality — when and whether a state can impose its laws beyond its borders — is largely unresolved, legal experts say. It just hasn’t come before the courts that often. And while the right to travel is well-established in the U.S. Constitution, the local travel bans are enforced through private lawsuits, a legal loophole the U.S. Supreme Court has so far allowed to stand.

When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to set their own laws on abortion, it put them on a political crash course with each other. These recent legal maneuvers from conservatives in Texas indicate a willingness to wade into a Constitutional morass the country hasn’t dealt with since the lead-up to the Civil War.

“Slavery is probably the best historical parallel to what we’re seeing now,” said Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at Penn Carey Law at the University of Pennsylvania. “Obviously, that didn’t end well. Well, it did, because we abolished slavery federally, but it was a tough road.”

Extraterritoriality, Texas-style

In most cases, state laws align pretty well with each other. All states prohibit murder and they all criminalize child abuse. When there’s conflict, it’s usually over wonky things like environmental regulations and what food additives can be used to make candy, and everyone works together to find a common-sense solution.

Even on more controversial issues, like gambling and marijuana laws, states with stricter rules usually just turn a blind eye as their residents flood casinos and dispensaries just over state lines.

“Maybe a state like Wyoming prosecutes someone who bought marijuana in Colorado and came back to Wyoming, but it doesn’t set off a battle where Wyoming is trying to get someone back from Colorado or get evidence from Colorado,” said Darryl Brown, a law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “States just haven't disagreed with each other so sharply that they have come to loggerheads about this.”

Until recently.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to set and enforce their own laws about abortion, it put red and blue states at odds with each other on an extremely hot-button political issue. All states still agree murder is bad. They just don’t all agree on whether abortion is considered murder.

In 1974, just after Roe was decided, the high court ruled in Bigelow v. Virginia that a “state does not acquire power or supervision over the internal affairs of another State merely because the welfare and health of its own citizens may be affected when they travel to that State.”

But in a Columbia Law Review article, legal scholars David Cohen, Greer Donley and Rachel Rebouché note that, in addition to being an old ruling that focused on First Amendment arguments, Biglow relied in part on Roe v. Wade.

“The current U.S. Supreme Court, now that it has eviscerated Roe, could revisit Bigelow’s anti-extraterritoriality principle,” they wrote.

Roosevelt, the Pennsylvania law professor, said if you remove politically heated issues like abortion or gender-affirming care from the equation, it can make sense to let states punish bad actors and protect vulnerable residents anywhere in the country.

“Imagine states have different laws about the degree of violence that parents can inflict on children in order to chastise them,” Roosevelt said. “Is it really OK if a Texas parent takes their child to the state that allows whipping just in order to whip them? I think we’d all agree, probably not.”

But much like disagreements over whether abortion is murder, states now sharply disagree on whether providing a trans child access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy constitutes child abuse. Major medical groups, trans people and LGBTQ+ advocates say such care is lifesaving for kids who face higher rates of suicide attempts and mental health problems than their cisgender peers. But Republicans and others who oppose letting kids access gender-affirming care say medical providers have latched on to a “social contagion” to misguide parents and push life-altering treatments on kids.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott previously ordered the state’s child welfare agency to investigate parents who provide their trans children with gender-affirming care even after lawmakers failed to explicitly add such treatments to the state’s definition of child abuse.

But as Paxton will likely learn with these recent administrative subpoenas to medical providers in Washington and Georgia, nothing requires states to help each other with cross-border investigations. And, in some cases, it’s even prohibited.

Washington is one of 22 states that have passed or enacted “shield laws,” that protect health care workers from extraterritorial investigations. While these laws tend to focus on abortion providers, nine states, including Washington, specifically include protections for gender-affirming care.

“If Texas wants to arrest someone who's in Washington State, one of their residents, Washington doesn't have to arrest that person and extradite them back to Texas,” Brown said.

Most notably, many of these shield laws, including the one in Washington, prohibit sharing patients’ confidential information, even if they’re issued a subpoena to do so. Seattle Children’s Hospital, which received one of Paxton’s administrative subpoenas, has sued Texas to protect records of transgender patients.

Karen Loewy, senior counsel and director of constitutional law practice at Lambda Legal, said there is nothing in the law lawmakers passed last session to ban gender-affirming care for minors that regulates what happens outside the state. The letters Paxton sent don’t mention the gender-affirming care ban, but instead came on behalf of a consumer protection investigation, which doesn’t give Paxton jurisdiction to subpoena information from non-Texas entities, Loewy said.

“More than anything it's designed to scare Texas families,” Loewy said. “This more smacks of efforts to just send a loud and clear message that the Attorney General's Office is going to do everything — whether in its power or not — to cut off access to care that trans kids in Texas really need.”

Paxton’s office has been silent as to the intent of the letters since they became public in December.

A warning sign

In Georgia, Lowell received Paxtons demand for her patient’s medical information the day it was due. The physician’s mail had been stopped for weeks after an arsonist set fire to QueerMed, her gender-affirming care clinic.

Her lawyers had to negotiate with Paxton’s office to get a one-week extension to review the letter. Lowell ultimately declined to turn over patient information.

Jeff Graham, executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Georgia Equality, said political rhetoric and misinformation can exacerbate the threats LGBTQ+ people and their medical providers face. Paxton’s demands are a warning sign, even if the attorney general knows they might fail, he said.

“People around the country really should be paying attention to [what happened at QueerMed] because it’s showing the lengths that these politicians are going to strip people from their ability to make medical decisions for themselves and their families,” Graham told The Texas Tribune.

The attorney general’s office has not sought records from any out-of-state abortion clinics, according to a review of its civil investigative demand letters. But conservative legal activist and former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell has tried to get abortion funds to hand over records of clients they have helped obtain abortions out-of-state. A federal judge in Austin, in addition to rejecting Mitchell’s request for the records, has ruled that abortion funds are likely safe from prosecution if they help Texans pay for abortions elsewhere.

But this is unlikely to stop conservative efforts to block people from accessing certain health care outside Texas.

“There's a lot of states with laws that seem to permit them to go after out-of-state conduct, and a lot of political activists or politicians saying that we really need to do this,” said Roosevelt. “But I'm not aware of states actually doing the most aggressive thing, which is trying to prosecute an abortion provider or health care provider in another state.”

Local travel bans

Four counties and a handful of cities in Texas have passed local ordinances that prohibit using county roads to transport someone out of state to get an abortion.

These ordinances are enforced through private lawsuits instead of by government entities, the same novel legal mechanism that Texas used to ban abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy in 2021. The Supreme Court, while expressing frustration with the constitutional workaround, allowed the six-week abortion ban to stand, saying the private enforcement mechanism didn’t allow for pre-enforcement review.

In general, it’s much easier for a state or local government to regulate what happens within its borders than to try to enforce their laws in other places. But efforts to restrict travel, even within a state or county, likely will run afoul of the constitutional right to travel, which Noah Smith-Drelich, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, said is better thought of as several intersecting rights.

“The constitutional provisions that protect your right to travel from, for example, Texas to Washington, include some provisions that may not protect your right to travel within the state of Texas,” Smith-Drelich said. “I think it's a reflection of just how important, how fundamental travel is, that there are multiple different constitutional protections that say you can't limit travel without a really good reason.”

The Supreme Court has not often been called to litigate the right to travel, Smith-Drelich said, but it’s an example judges often point to in other decisions as a fundamental right that’s not up for debate. It’s also historically been an ideologically neutral legal question.

“I don't know that it'd be optimistic about challenging Texas' restrictions on travel, in service of preventing abortion outside of Texas, in front of the 5th Circuit,” Smith-Drelich said, referring to the conservative court that hears federal appeals originating in Texas. “But I wouldn't be as pessimistic about that as I would probably most efforts to limit Texas's anti-abortion efforts.”

And, much like Paxton’s letters seeking out-of-state medical records, these bans don’t have to be enforced to incite fear among health care providers or abortion seekers and those helping them cross state lines.

History lessons

For legal scholars and historians, these efforts are a little too reminiscent of another period in U.S. history, when individual states’ laws began to sharply diverge over a highly contentious issue.

“States have very different policies on lots of different stuff, but they tend to just keep those policies within their own borders,” Brown said. “What's unusual here and what was unusual about slavery is that states were extending their own policy or enforcing their own policy in states that didn’t agree with them.”

In the 1800s, as some states abolished slavery and others clung to it more tightly, free states began passing personal liberty laws saying they would not cooperate with efforts to return escaped enslaved people to their enslavers.

Slave states, especially border states, pushed for and won the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required free states to work with the federal government to return enslaved people to their enslavers in the South. This helped tip the nation into the Civil War.

Reconstruction, the period of putting the nation back together after the Civil War, marked a shift in the balance of power between states and the federal government.

“States lost some of what you might have described as their sovereignty or independence through that,” said Smith-Drelich. “Part of what we’ve seen through U.S. history is this move to becoming more of a country and less of a confederacy of states, and Reconstruction was a big part of that.”

The 2022 Dobbs decision, allowing states to set their own laws around abortion, in many ways represents a significant reversal of that trend. While both major political parties are angling to pass a federal law that would either prevent or preserve abortion access, the current status quo all but guarantees increased state-on-state litigation to undermine and frustrate each other’s goals.

As the Civil War demonstrated, these state-level feuds can have ripple effects far beyond the contentious political issue of the day. The American experiment requires states to work together relatively amicably under the auspices of one, overarching federal government. It’s one of the things that makes the United States different from the European Union.

“In order for us to work as a united country, states have to be able to make laws that apply in their own states,” Smith-Drelich said. “And part of that means that they can't really be making laws apply outside of their own state.”

But it remains to be seen whether the courts will see their way to maintaining that balance of power, especially without much precedent to guide them. And after a decades-long push to reshape the federal court system in the conservative image, especially in Texas, these precedent-setting cases have the potential to radically change certain accepted — but not often litigated — rights.

“Sometimes, I feel like the law is clear enough that the Supreme Court is going to follow it,” Roosevelt said. “But I don't think the law is very clear here. And abortion is definitely an issue where the justices care intensely. So I think if you want to predict what's going to happen, you basically have to just look at who's on court.”

FBI agents disrupted a plot by three men – two of whom said they were part of a militia – to travel to the Texas-Mexico border to kill Border Patrol agents and immigrants crossing illegally because they believed the country was being invaded, according to court documents filed in federal courts.

One of the men also called and left a phone message to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office to alert him about their plans, saying: “If y'all cannot take care of this border and shut it down then we will be forced to come in and do it ourselves,” according to a criminal complaint. The complaint does not say when he left this message but that he summarized his message to a confidential FBI source on a recorded phone conversation on Oct. 3, 2022.

The men — Bryan C. Perry, 38; Jonathan S. O’Dell, 33; and Paul Faye, 55 — were arrested by FBI agents and face various federal charges in connection to their alleged plot, which authorities say they started organizing in 2022 and planned to carry out in October 2023.

The most recent arrest was of Faye of Tennessee on Monday. He faces a single charge of being in possession of an unregistered firearm silencer.

In the criminal complaint, the FBI said that Perry had “extensive contact “ with Faye before Faye was arrested. Faye “expressed a desire to travel with Perry and another individual” to the border and “commit acts of violence,” the complaint says.

Perry and O’Dell are also accused of attempting to kill seven federal agents. According to the criminal complaint, as the FBI attempted to serve a search warrant at O’Dell’s home in Missouri, Perry fired approximately 11 shots from a multicaliber rifle at FBI agents.

Perry of Tennessee and O’Dell of Missouri were arrested in late 2022 and were indicted last year by a grand jury on several charges including conspiracy to murder a federal officer, conspiracy to assault a federal officer, attempted murder of a federal officer and assault of a federal officer, according to superseding indictments filed last year in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri. After their arrests, authorities found six firearms, over 20 magazines, roughly 1,770 rounds of ammunition and other equipment at O’Dell’s residence.

According to the criminal complaint, Perry and O’Dell began talking as early as November 2021 about grievances they had with the federal government. The following year they attempted to recruit other members to their militia group to travel to Washington, D.C., “to stop the madness going on,” the complaint says. It also says that they shared maps of the Capitol and other governmental buildings.

“Basically start a war”

In August of 2022, Perry and O’Dell agreed to go “to war with the border patrol,” according to the superseding indictment. Perry later told a woman he attempted to recruit on TikTok and Instagram that his “intentions are to go down there and basically start a war,” the complaint says.

“I mean, you know I know a lot of people are like, well, we don’t want violence. Well, that’s what it’s gonna take for people to open up their eyes,” Perry told an undercover federal agent over the phone, the complaint says. “I’m goin down there to hold up a rifle. You come across, you’re gonna lose your life.”

According to the criminal complaint, Perry uploaded a TikTok video announcing the group’s plan to travel to the southern border with the intent of “shoot[ing] to kill.” O’Dell indicated in the comment section that they planned to go to Texas on Oct. 2, 2022. In the video, O’Dell appears holding the buttstock of a rifle. In other TikTok videos, Perry blames U.S. Border Patrol agents and said he viewed them as treasonous for allowing migrants to cross the border.

The complaints do not say where on the Texas-Mexico border the men intended to travel. But in Faye’s criminal complaint filed Feb. 2, the FBI said he was in communication with a person from North Carolina who had previously been to Eagle Pass with a militia group called NC Patriot Party and planned to travel back to the border on Jan. 20.

Lawyers representing the three men didn’t respond to an after-business-hours email from The Texas Tribune seeking comment. Both Perry and O’Dell have pleaded not guilty.

Authorities first learned of Perry’s threats to attack the federal government after receiving an anonymous tip in September 2022, according to the complaint.

Perry and O’Dell were members of the self-styled 2nd American Militia, according to an October indictment and made plans to travel to the border to shoot federal agents who opposed them and then take the ammunition and night vision goggles from murdered agents.

At one point, prior to Perry’s arrest, he told an FBI source that he called Abbott.

“I basically told him, I said look, we’ve uh – I am a cofounder of a militia out here in Tennessee and Missouri. Um, you know we’ve-we’ve been watching the news. We know that ya’lls (sic) watched people come across the border that are trafficking drugs,” Perry said, according to the criminal complaint. “You know, it’s not acceptable anymore. If ya’ll cannot take care of this border and shut it down then we will be forced to come in and do it ourselves.”

Abbott’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

“We are being invaded”

Faye’s arrest came one day after Abbott hosted Republican governors from across the country in Eagle Pass to double down on his border security tactics, which he has claimed are necessary to defend the state from an “invasion” of migrants. On Thursday, Abbott plans to host another press conference in Eagle Pass, this time with Republican lawmakers from Texas.

In an eight-page criminal complaint, the Justice Department outlined a months-long relationship between an undercover FBI agent and Faye, which began in March 2023 on the social media platform TikTok.

In December, just over a year after Perry and O’Dell were arrested, the FBI agent and Faye discussed a plan to travel south with unregistered firearms and explosive devices to carry out a plan with militia groups from Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee “to stir up the hornet’s nest” at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Faye discussed his belief that the government was training to take on its citizens, and more specifically, that the federal government was allowing illegal immigrants to enter the United States to help the government ,” the complaint read.

The complaint alleges that Faye told the undercover agent that he could gather necessary gear for their plan, like bullet-proof vests, from deceased individuals “as we go.” Additionally, Faye told undercover agents that he was already in possession of explosive targets and that he had boobytrapped his property in the event law enforcement came to his home, the complaint alleges.

In January, Faye transferred the unregistered silencer to the federal agent as they prepared to travel to the southern border, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee. After Faye’s arrest, law enforcement searched his property in Cunningham, Tennessee and recovered several firearms, a silencer, explosive targets and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, the release stated.

Last year, according to the complaint, Faye asked the undercover agents to train together in person before traveling to the border, saying that the “patriots are going to rise up because we are being invaded. We are being invaded.”

Abbott has repeatedly characterized the high numbers of migrants — many of whom are seeking political asylum — arriving at the Texas-Mexico border as an invasion. His campaign used the term as recently as Wednesday morning in a fundraising email. And lawyers for Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office recently tried to make a legal argument saying Texas is being invaded by “transnational cartels.” However, District Judge David Ezra dismissed Texas' argument and wrote: "Such a claim is breathtaking."

Still, Abbott and other Republican leaders in Texas and across the country have doubled down on the use of the phrase, despite demands from. immigrant rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers to stop using rhetoric that could inspire someone to commit violence against immigrants.

In August 2019, a gunman — who railed about an “Hispanic invasion” in a document published online — drove about 700 miles from Allen to El Paso and fatally killed 23 people and injured 22 others at a Walmart. According to the DOJ, the gunman has described himself as “a white nationalist, motivated to kill Hispanics because they were immigrating to the United States.”

Last month, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told reporters in Eagle Pass that Texas is being invaded by “murders, molesters, terrorists, rapists, gang members, drug dealers, car jackers, kidnappers” in describing the people crossing the Texas-Mexico border. When asked by a reporter if using such language could inspire another violent attack such as the August 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Patrick responded saying that is “a silly question.”

“Every time an elected official publicly embraces the rhetoric of the replacement and invasion conspiracy, they are contributing to a climate where someone with hate in their heart and a gun in their hand believes they should take matters into their own hands,” said Zachary Mueller, political director at America’s Voice, a progressive pro-immigration group.

Earlier in January, Abbott was heavily criticized for saying that Texas has used every tool to control the border short of ordering officers to shoot migrants.

“The only thing that we're not doing is we're not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” Abbott said during the Jan. 5 radio interview with Dana Loesch, a former editor at Breitbart News and spokesperson for the National Rifle Association.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, responded on social media to Abbott’s comments: “I can't believe I have to say 'murdering people is unacceptable.' @GregAbbott_TX. It’s language like yours that left 23 people dead and 22 others injured in El Paso.”