BREAKING: Regulatory Complaint Filed Seeking Review of CAIR-Texas CHARITABLE Operations
- Dewey R. Collier
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Today, I filed a formal complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s Charities Division requesting regulatory review of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Texas operations (“CAIR-Texas”).
This filing is not about ideology, religion, or viewpoint. It is about structure, transparency, and compliance with Texas charitable-organization law.
Under both the U.S. and Texas Constitutions, government must remain neutral—protecting lawful private activity (the Shield) while enforcing the rules that govern the use of public benefits and legal privileges (the Sword). That balance is not optional. It is the foundation of equal treatment under law.
Based solely on CAIR’s own publicly available materials—including annual reports, fundraising appeals, voter-engagement campaigns, legislative advocacy materials, and coordinated media messaging—it is not possible for a reasonable donor or regulator to determine where CAIR-Texas’s charitable activity ends and where national political advocacy begins.
CAIR presents its work to the public as a single, unified operation: shared branding, shared leadership, shared fundraising platforms, shared messaging, and coordinated campaigns. At the same time, CAIR-Texas claims the legal protections and tax benefits reserved for a Texas charitable organization.
That structural ambiguity is the issue.
Texas law does not require regulators to guess. Charitable organizations must be organized and operated in a way that allows meaningful compliance review. Donors and regulators must be able to verify how funds are used, how activities are categorized, and how legal limits are observed.
When an organization’s own publications openly describe:
Legislative advocacy,
Election-year civic mobilization,
Coordinated protest activity, and
Political media campaigns,
—without clear operational separation, regulators cannot simply presume compliance.
This complaint does not allege criminal conduct. It asks a narrower, necessary question:
Does CAIR-Texas’s structure allow meaningful compliance review at all?
If CAIR-Texas is operating lawfully, that conclusion should be supported by transparent answers to basic governance questions, including:
How charitable funds are segregated,
How advocacy activity is limited, tracked, or accounted for,
How national and state operations are operationally separated, and
How donors are informed about the use of their contributions.
These are not hostile questions. They are baseline requirements for any organization benefiting from charitable status.
This is where the Sword & Shield principle matters.
The Constitution protects belief, speech, and association. That is the Shield.
But it also forbids the State from granting special privilege without accountability. That is the Sword.
Compliance is free.
It costs nothing to follow the rules that come with tax-exempt status.
What is not free is the public trust—and that trust depends on transparency.
This filing was submitted in good faith and relies exclusively on CAIR’s own public representations.
The public deserves confidence that Texas charitable law is enforced consistently, regardless of organization, cause, or popularity.
Transparency is not hostility.
Oversight is not censorship.
Compliance is not optional.
Original Complaint Filed
For accuracy and completeness, the full complaint filed with the Texas Attorney General’s Charities Division is linked below. Readers are encouraged to review the document directly:
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