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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a wildly cruel and corrupt Christian Nationalist who was impeached by House Republicans last year but kept his job thanks to the more MAGA Senate Republicans, is suing a homeless shelter for “operating a taxpayer-funded drug paraphernalia giveaway next to an elementary school.” He claims the Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center is a “magnet” for drugs and crime, largely due to the syringe distribution service offered by the location, and if he succeeds in court, the shelter will shut down.
What’s interesting about this lawsuit, though, is that Paxton is effectively suing a Christian ministry for helping unhoused people—and the ministry plans to respond to the threat by saying they have a religious right to assist others:
[Mark Hilbelink, the pastor at Sunrise Community Church and executive director of its homelessness ministry,] noted that churches are protected under the First Amendment, the U.S. Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act and also the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
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This week, Alan Graham, of Texas Christian nonprofits Mobile Loaves and Fishes and Community First! Village, expressed his support for Sunrise Community Church and its ministry in the face of the new suit. “Faith-based institutions like churches offer some of the most important solutions to the epidemic of homelessness in Texas,” Graham said. “Thankfully, the First Amendment, federal law, and state law protect churches that serve people experiencing homelessness across our country, even when governments attempt to restrict their work.”
To put all this another way, a Christian Nationalist with power is trying to shut down a church’s ministry that wants to help the “least of these” while inadvertently highlighting a problem that Republicans exacerbated.
The Houston Chronicle points out that Sunrise Community Church is “part of the Reformed Church in America, a generally liberal denomination within the Protestant faith.”
There’s no way to sugarcoat the problem. As the lawsuit notes, the unhoused people are urinating, defecating, fornicating, fighting, and leaving needles in the area—an area which is right next to Joslin Elementary School. The Austin City Council has given Sunrise over $2.5 million to do its work since 2021. That’s why Paxton wants to shut it all down.
[Sunrise] permits this drug use on and around its surrounding property. And it then permits the homeless to linger in and around the community even if they are in an unstable state. In Sunrise’s own words, Sunrise has converted the area into a “steady home base” for this dangerous, drug-addled homeless population. The result is predictable, and devastating for the local community.
Paxton says the ministry has “enriched” itself with the public money but there’s no evidence of the religious leaders getting wealthy off of this project or the institution not using the money appropriately.
He also claims the ministry “seems to tolerate the drug use” by offering syringes, but there’s an explanation for that: If people are struggling with substance abuse, they’re not magically going to stop doing drugs. They’ll find a way to get them and they’ll use whatever needles they can get their hands on to inject those drugs into their bodies, hurting themselves even more and possibly hurting others indirectly due to the spread of diseases. By offering people sterile needles, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, it “can reduce the risk of infection and prevent outbreaks.” Programs like these are “proven and effective.” More importantly, they do not encourage drug use. It’s about harm reduction. (The abysmal reporting about this lawsuit by local news outlets doesn’t mention any of this.)
This is a key takeaway from the lawsuit: Paxton spends dozens of pages describing all the ways people in the community are disturbed by the people serviced by Sunrise, but he has no Plan B to help them out. He wants to shut down the Christian ministry without offering any kind of alternative. The unhoused people aren’t going away. They’ll just find different places to go—but with even fewer resources than they have right now thanks to Sunrise.
Rather than helping those victims himself, Paxton wants to punish the people taking on that role. His party’s no different. Texas Republicans aren’t releasing any policy plan to increase affordable housing or give those unhoused people access to licensed social workers and potential jobs. They just want them to disappear. If they die from lack of help, the Republicans don’t care.
But this ministry does. That’s what they said in response to the lawsuit:
“It is regrettable that the Attorney General Paxton took this route, especially during the week of Thanksgiving, but Sunrise intends to keep offering services to people in our community who need them,” said Mark Hilbelink, Executive Director of Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center. “We are committed to being a good neighbor. We will continue to work, every day, to support Joslin Elementary School, our neighborhood, and our entire community.”
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As the largest provider of homelessness services in Travis County, Sunrise has helped more than 4,275 people move into safe, supportive housing. Sunrise serves thousands of people each year through its digital call center, outreach efforts, housing programs, and in-person services. These critical resources support a diverse population — including many families with young children, who are among the fastest-growing segments of Austin’s homeless population.
If the Republicans running the state government want to give the city enough funding to open new shelters away from local schools, that would be one thing. That’s not the case here. He wants to shut down this one and let city officials in this relatively blue part of the state figure it out from there. (Two new “navigation center” locations have been proposed but there’s no timeline for when they’ll be up and running.)
The lawsuit will only make the homelessness crisis worse as a result of GOP intervention, and Republicans will inevitably blame Democrats when the problem gets worse.
It will be interesting to see, though, if the faith-based arguments will shield the ministry from any consequences.
Earlier this year, Paxton sued Annunciation House, a Catholic ministry helping refugees, but the ministry prevailed for reasons unrelated to their faith background. (The case has been appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.) The lawsuit itself angered people who might otherwise support conservative causes:
Catholic Bishop Mark Seitz, who’s served the Dallas and El Paso dioceses for more than 40 years, has condemned Paxton’s litigious attempts to close the Annunciation House. Seitz, who is the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ migration committee, has been an outspoken critic of fellow Catholic Gov. Greg Abbott’s alleged “racist projects,” including multi-billion-dollar efforts to challenge the Biden administration.
If Paxton succeeds here, he would effectively be telling church leaders they have no right to carry out faith-inspired actions meant to help people. It could be a short-term victory with long-term consequences.
I mean, just look at how the lawsuit criticizes Sunrise for trying to help people with nowhere else to go, even when they’re creating problems, all while going to the police for assistance with those same individuals:
Another incident in 2024 involved a Sunrise client in possession of prescription drugs who was “yelling at” and “threatening to fight other subjects on scene” at Sunrise.
Another incident in 2024 involved a Sunrise client “kicking, swinging, and threatening the [other] patrons” at Sunrise.
Although Sunrise appears to call police when one of its homeless clients physically threatens Sunrise, it nevertheless continues to serve those same violent clients if they re-appear sometime after their arrest. For example, one police report describes Hilbelink telling an officer that a particular client has a “history of burglaries.” Sunrise had “been providing services to [this client] for 10 years” notwithstanding the burglaries. Indeed, Hilbelink is so familiar with this particular client that Hilbelink knows exactly where he goes after he commits burglaries. He told police that the client “doesn’t go very far,” and actually found the client for the police at the scene for a call.
That sounds like a guy who wants to help people even when they choose not to help themselves. (Dare I say that’s almost Christlike…?) This is a running theme for the ministry, which puts it all very bluntly on the website:
Austin’s homelessness issues are in some ways caused by what they are caused by in many cities: gentrification, systemic racism, lack of access to medical & mental healthcare, the breakdown of family, substance abuse, lack of affordable housing, lack of a social safety net, domestic violence, the foster care system, re-entry from incarceration and more. In addition, Austin’s particular challenges have been historic racial divides, quickly-booming population growth, a separation of humanitarian aid from housing programs, a lack of shelters, location of shelters to business district & university and more. Additionally, the disconnected efforts of public & private entities, especially faith-based entities has created much duplication and the lack of a cohesive or efficient approach as a community. The political reality of living in a very left-leaning city in a very right-leaning state means political solutions are often problematic.
They know Republicans aren’t eager to help them, so they’re doing it on their own, motivated by their Christian faith. Hilbelink even says the ministry’s mission is “to “take care of the poor.”
“These laws have been tested in court on multiple occasions, always with the same result: churches are protected to do work that is an expression of their religious practice,” Hilbelink said, adding that it was “regrettable” that Paxton would file the suit the week of Thanksgiving.
By forging a relationship with those unhoused individuals, as difficult as that may be, instead of leaving them to their own devices, the problems won’t disappear, but I guarantee they’ll go down. Just ask teachers who work with students with behavior issues. If Paxton had his way, those kids would simply be expelled. All the issues would still be there but they’d be harder to manage. Paxton and his conservative colleagues are more interested in sowing chaos than fixing problems.
It’s no surprise that Paxton is a Southern Baptist who attends Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano. The pastor of that church, Jack Graham, is a MAGA cultist seen in a famous image of Christian leaders putting their hands on Donald Trump. Graham later attributed all the criticism he got for that to Satan, saying the image “just stirred the devil and his crowd up.”
