You Believed the Slogan on the Placard. Then Someone With a Microphone Told You to Leave.
You came to a state political convention in Houston believing what the convention materials said. Unity drives victory. You wore the lanyard. You walked the floor. If you were a registered delegate, you cast votes in the business of your party. If you stood in the back of a panel room and spoke up when someone on stage said something false about your own faith, you did what a citizen in a democracy is supposed to do — you corrected a public lie in a public room.
What followed was not debate. It was not disagreement. It was not even the rough give-and-take of political life. It was a sitting state senator telling the audience that your religion requires you to lie. It was a former Southern Baptist pastor with a national platform telling the same room that, given political power, you would cut off his head. It was the outgoing chair of the state party, speaking from the stage, advising you by name to leave the caucus. And when you asked the pastor, voice breaking, What do you want me to do, leave? — he said Yes.
You left in tears. The chair where you sat alone to cry was ten feet from the man who had just said it. He followed you, sat down next to you, and put an arm around your chair. The same man. Within minutes.
If that is what happened to you — or to someone you love, or to a community you are part of — then this page exists for one reason. What was done to you is not just cruel. Under federal civil rights law, under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and under Texas common law, it is actionable. The people who did it are identifiable by name. The evidence that proves it is being lost right now, in hours and days, not months. And the people who would tell you to be quiet, to let it go, to count your losses and move on — those people are wrong about what Texas law permits, and they are wrong about what the next two years give you the right to do.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Our trial team is led by Ralph Manginello, who has spent twenty-seven years trying cases in Texas courtrooms and federal court, including the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Houston — the same venue where your case will likely be filed. Lupe Peña, a former insurance-defense attorney who now fights for plaintiffs, brings to this work the same instinct that wins injury cases: when a powerful institution treats a human being as a number, you study how the institution builds its file, and you build yours harder.
What follows is the roadmap. Read it carefully. Then call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. And we serve Texas families in English and Spanish — Hablamos Español.
What Happened at the June 2026 Texas Republican Convention
The record is documented. The Texas Tribune reported it in detail, and the events are not in serious dispute. At the June 2026 Republican Party of Texas Convention in Houston, at least four Muslim Texans attended as registered delegates or attendees — among them Mohamed Hussein, whose father Tarek Hussein founded the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the wake of September 11, 2001. They came to participate in the annual meeting of the state’s most hardlined Republicans. The convention’s tagline was Unity drives victory.
What they encountered instead was a coordinated program of exclusion built around two pillars.
First, the on-stage expulsion. Outgoing GOP Chair Abraham George addressed two Muslim delegates tied to CAIR from the convention stage and publicly advised them to leave. The exact words, as reported: I would strongly advise you to leave our caucus. There is a Democrat convention happening in a couple weeks. Join them. This was not a private conversation in a hallway. It was a directive issued from the stage, in front of the party’s membership, by the officer holding the highest elected position in the state party apparatus.
Second, the Judeo-Christian Caucus panel. On the convention’s final day, Hussein attended a panel hosted by the Judeo-Christian Caucus and moderated by Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor and the president of Recover America, an organization that mobilizes ministers and pastors in political action. From that panel stage, Scarborough accused American Muslims of political deception by faith: You’re going to find Muslims that aren’t being antagonistic or mean, at least not publicly. But I’ll guarantee, if they get power, they’ll cut your head off as believers of Christ. State Senator Bob Hall, a Republican from Edgewood, echoed the claim that Muslims are required by Sharia to lie in order to stay below the radar of being aggressive.
Hussein objected from the back of the room. He told the audience that he was himself practicing Sharia at that moment, that the characterization was false, and that calling an entire faith’s members liars put his Texan neighbors in an impossible position. His exact words, on the record: When they tell you that we’re compelled to lie, they are putting your Texan neighbors in an impossible position where nothing that we can say or do can absolve us from the crimes that they are accusing us of. That is not just, the Bible commands you to be just, and that is not American.
After the panel, Hussein and Scarborough exchanged contact information. Shortly thereafter, Scarborough approached Hussein. Hussein asked him, What do you want me to do, leave? Scarborough answered, Yes. Hussein, sobbing, retreated to some chairs. Scarborough followed, sat beside him, and placed an arm on the back of Hussein’s chair. In a later interview with the Texas Tribune, Scarborough clarified what he meant: If you’re going to embrace the values and the teachings that you’re advocating for, there’s no place in America for you. That’s not assimilation. That’s taking over.
This is the documentary record on which a federal civil rights case can be built. None of it requires a witness to testify about what they think happened. The statements are on video. The actor’s identities are public. The damage is documented in the only way emotional damage can sometimes be documented — in tears, in a public room, in front of the cameras.
The First Seventy-Two Hours — What to Do Before You Do Anything Else
The most perishable evidence in any civil rights case is rarely the legal record. It is the recording. Convention livestreams are typically retained for days to weeks before being overwritten by the venue or the production company. Cell phone video held by individual attendees is the most fragile category of all — phones get lost, upgraded, replaced, and the videos that exist on no backup server disappear when the device is traded in. Witness memories, sharp in the first seventy-two hours, begin to drift within weeks. And in a case where the conduct happened on a public stage in front of hundreds of people, the central question is not whether it happened but whether the recordings survive to prove it.
Here is the immediate roadmap.
Hour one through hour twenty-four. Do not delete anything on your own phone, tablet, or laptop. If you recorded anything at the convention — even a few seconds — back it up to a separate cloud account now, before you sleep. Forward it to a personal email account you control. Send it to a trusted family member’s email so that even if your device is lost or damaged, a copy exists outside it. If you saw anyone else recording, write down their name and any contact information you have, the same day.
Day one through day three. Write down everything you remember while you remember it. Not for a press release. Not for social media. For your own file. Names, times, the exact words you heard, what you saw, who you spoke to afterward, what they said. Do not embellish and do not omit. The detail that seems unimportant today may be the detail that proves the case in eighteen months.
Day one through day seven. Capture public coverage. Use the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) to save the convention livestream URL and every news article written about the panel. Take dated screenshots. Save every social media post you can find that documents the panel — yours, other attendees’, news outlets’. Save them now; they get deleted.
Day one through day fourteen. Do not give a recorded statement to anyone — not to a journalist, not to a political operative, not to a private investigator who calls saying they are just checking in. Recorded statements taken before counsel are reviewed in a way that almost always benefits the defense. If a reporter wants an interview, you can give one — but on your timeline, after counsel has prepared you, and never without a written record of the questions asked.
Day one through day fourteen. Do not sign anything from the state party, the convention organizers, Recover America, the Judeo-Christian Caucus, or any insurer or attorney representing any of them. If a release is offered — a refund of registration fees, a goodwill payment, anything that requires you to release claims in exchange — call us first. The release is the trap. The check is the bait.
Day fourteen. By two weeks out, the preservation letter should already be out the door. We send same-day litigation-hold letters to the Republican Party of Texas, to the George R. Brown Convention Center, to Recover America, to Dr. Scarborough’s office, and to the official livestream production vendor identified by the convention. These letters freeze the recordings before they can be overwritten, and they create a paper trail of preservation demand that becomes evidence of spoliation if anything disappears later.
Your Federal Civil Rights — 42 U.S.C. § 1983, § 1985(3), and the Constitutional Claims That Travel With Them
When a state actor — a state senator, a governor, a party officer acting under color of state-conferred authority — deprives you of a constitutional right, federal law gives you a cause of action. It has for one hundred fifty years. It is called 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and it is the statute under which most religious-discrimination claims against government officials are filed.
42 U.S.C. § 1983 (verbatim): Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.
The statute is short. Its application here is not complicated.
First Amendment — Free Exercise and Free Speech. The Free Exercise Clause protects your right to practice your religion, including your right to be a Muslim at a political convention — to attend, to speak, to object, to worship, to identify with your faith without being told by a party officer that you should leave the country for it. The Free Speech Clause protects your right to speak in that convention room and to respond to what was said about your faith from that stage. When a state senator endorses a panel that publicly characterizes your religion as a license to lie, and when a party chair responds to your objection by ordering you off the floor, the constitutional question is whether your protected expression was the but-for cause of the adverse action taken against you. The temporal sequence — object, then order to leave, then confrontation, then tears — is the causation the statute requires (Howeth v. State, the causation framework Texas federal courts apply).
Fourteenth Amendment — Equal Protection. Religion is not, in the federal courts’ ordinary framework, a suspect classification triggering strict scrutiny. But classifications that burden religious exercise — that single out members of a faith for adverse treatment — receive heightened scrutiny under Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, the Supreme Court’s foundational Free Exercise case. A public directive that Muslims leave the caucus is not a neutral rule of general application. It is a religion-specific directive issued from a stage by officers who hold themselves out as the party’s voice. Even under the rational-basis review that applies to most non-suspect classifications (City of San Antonio v. Rodriguez), the question is whether the differential treatment is rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest. Telling a delegate to leave a political party because of his faith is not a legitimate governmental interest. It is the textbook Equal Protection violation the Fourteenth Amendment was written to forbid.
42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) — Conspiracy to Deprive Civil Rights. When two or more persons conspire to deprive any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws, they are liable in federal court. A panel whose speakers coordinate content, a state senator who endorses the same content from the same stage, and a party chair who implements the panel’s premise by ordering the named targets off the floor — that is more than one defendant acting alone. It is the kind of coordinated action the conspiracy statute exists to reach.
The state-actor question — and why the Republican Party of Texas is not automatically off the hook. Private associations are generally not subject to § 1983. But under Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, a private entity can be treated as a state actor when it is so entwined with government — or with the structures of public authority — that it must answer under the Constitution for what it does. A state political party whose chair presides over delegate credentialing, whose conventions are governed in part by the Texas Election Code (Chapter 174), and whose actions in selecting party nominees effectively determine who appears on Texas ballots, has a substantial entanglement argument to answer. We do not concede it. We force them to litigate it.
The Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act — Your State-Law Parallel
Texas has its own Religious Freedom Restoration Act, codified at Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§ 110.001–110.005. Where federal Free Exercise doctrine has narrowed in recent years, Texas RFRA remains a strong statute. It prohibits government from substantially burdening a person’s religious exercise absent a compelling governmental interest pursued by the least restrictive means.
The statute applies to government actors. That is why the analysis matters here: of the named defendants, State Senator Bob Hall is plainly a government actor, and Governor Greg Abbott’s designation of CAIR as a terrorist threat — if operationalized through any state-action mechanism — raises direct Texas RFRA questions about how state power is being used to single out a religious association for adverse treatment. A state legislator endorsing a public panel that characterizes Muslims as required to lie, in coordination with party leadership acting under the party’s quasi-public authority, crosses the line the Texas Legislature drew in 1999 when it passed the statute.
Texas RFRA’s remedy is damages, attorneys’ fees, and injunctive relief. It runs on the same two-year limitations period that applies to most Texas civil actions. And critically, it provides a cause of action against officials in their individual capacities where the constitutional claim would otherwise be foreclosed by qualified immunity on the federal side.
Texas Common-Law IIED — The Tort That Punishes Outrageous Conduct
Texas recognizes intentional infliction of emotional distress, but the Texas standard is famously demanding. Under Hoffmann-La Roche v. Zeltwanger, the conduct must be utterly intolerable in a civilized community. Most states set the bar lower. Texas sets it high.
But high bars exist for a reason — they filter for the cases that genuinely shock. This is one of them. The conduct alleged here is not a private insult in a private room. It is a sitting state senator, on a public stage, telling an audience that an entire faith’s members are required to lie to them. It is a former pastor with a national following, on the same panel, telling the same audience that given power, the members of that faith will cut off his head. It is the chair of a major state political party, speaking from the convention stage, ordering by name two delegates tied to a Muslim civil rights organization to leave the caucus — and pointing them to the Democratic convention as their proper home. And it is the same pastor, minutes later, telling a man who has just been publicly expelled from his own party that yes, he should leave. Period. One word. Then the arm around the chair while the man he has told to leave sits alone crying.
The Texas Supreme Court has made clear that the utterly intolerable standard is met where the defendant knows the plaintiff is particularly susceptible to emotional distress and proceeds anyway, or where the conduct is so extreme that the susceptibility is irrelevant. A state’s most powerful party officers, on a public stage, in front of cameras, targeting named delegates because of their faith, falls into the category of conduct that does not need a specially susceptible plaintiff to be actionable. It is the conduct itself that does the work.
Critically, the IIED claim runs against the private defendants — Scarborough, Recover America — without the immunities that protect government officials. Punitive damages are available against private defendants in Texas where the plaintiff proves the conduct was committed with malice or reckless indifference. The on-stage, coordinated, named-defendant nature of the conduct at this convention is precisely the kind of record from which a Texas jury can infer the malice the statute requires.
The Defendant Map — Who We Sue and Why Each One Is Different
Each defendant carries different legal exposure, and the right case names each one for the right reason. The defense will try to push you toward the easiest defendant and away from the rest. We name them all.
State Senator Bob Hall. A sitting Texas state senator is a state actor for § 1983 purposes when he acts in his official capacity. His on-stage endorsement of the required to lie characterization, in his role as a state legislator, in a state party convention, is the kind of conduct that triggers personal-capacity damages under § 1983 and parallel liability under Texas RFRA. Hall is sued for what he said, in the role he held, to the audience he addressed.
Abraham George. As outgoing chair of the Republican Party of Texas, George spoke from the convention stage with the authority of the office. His public order to two named delegates to leave the caucus — issued from a state party convention stage — is the paradigmatic adverse action taken in response to protected religious expression. Whether George is sued in his individual capacity, in his official capacity, or both depends on the availability of damages against the office. Either way, he is named.
Dr. Rick Scarborough. Scarborough is a private party for § 1983 purposes. He is a defendant under Texas IIED for the confrontation in which he told Hussein Yes. He is a defendant under § 1985(3) for the coordinated conduct across the panel and the post-panel confrontation. And he carries punitive damages exposure that a government defendant would not.
Recover America. As the organizing entity that sponsored and structured the panel, Recover America is jointly liable with Scarborough for the conduct of the program it put on. Its institutional records — IRS Form 990s, board minutes, donor communications, prior panel programming — become evidence in discovery of the pattern, motive, and the organization’s tolerance for the conduct its leader engaged in.
Judeo-Christian Caucus of the Republican Party of Texas. The caucus hosted the panel. If it acted as an arm of the state party — and the state party ratified, adopted, or benefited from the panel’s content — it can be reached both as a state-actor-entangled entity under § 1983 and as a private actor for IIED and § 1985 purposes.
Republican Party of Texas. The state party is named as a defendant on the state-actor entanglement theory under Brentwood Academy. The argument: a party whose conventions are partially regulated by the Texas Election Code, whose endorsements determine ballot access, and whose chair acts with the authority of an office recognized by state law cannot credibly disclaim public-character status when it expels delegates based on their religion.
Governor Greg Abbott (subject to further investigation). The Governor’s formal designation of CAIR as a terrorist threat, if implemented through any state-action mechanism, raises distinct Establishment Clause and Free Exercise concerns under both federal law and Texas RFRA. Whether he is named as a defendant depends on what discovery shows about how the designation is operationalized. The threat is real. The investigation is the predicate.
What Your Case Is Worth — Damages, Caps, and the Money Ladder
Damages in a religious-discrimination case arising from a public political event break into three categories.
Economic damages. Convention registration fees. Travel and lodging. Lost opportunity costs from being unable to participate in caucus business. These are real but modest in dollar terms. More substantial is the political-capital value of delegate participation — committee assignments, platform influence, the networking that leads to future appointments — which can be quantified through expert testimony on the comparable value of delegate participation in Texas party politics.
Non-economic damages. This is the heart of the case. Severe emotional distress, documented by the public crying and the trajectory of the confrontation. Loss of political-associational enjoyment — the dignitary injury of being told by your own party’s leadership that your faith disqualifies you from the room. Reputational harm to a man whose father founded a Houston Muslim civil rights organization in the wake of September 11. The injury is real, the documentation is on video, and Texas does not impose a general cap on non-economic damages in civil cases. The 2003 tort reform caps have been narrowed or struck down across multiple categories of cases. In civil rights cases, no cap applies.
Punitive damages. Punitive damages are unavailable against government defendants in § 1983 actions under City of Newport v. Fact Concerts. They are available against private defendants — Scarborough, Recover America — for IIED and § 1985(3) conspiracy where malice or reckless indifference is shown. The on-stage, named-defendant, coordinated nature of the conduct is the kind of record that supports a punitive finding. A Texas jury that sees the convention video and hears the Yes spoken to a man asking what he should do will make its own judgment about whether the conduct crossed the line.
On case value, the analysis is honest. The lower range — $75,000 to $250,000 — represents the realistic settlement band for a garden-variety religious-discrimination or IIED case with strong but narrow facts. The middle range — $250,000 to $1,000,000 — represents the realistic trial band where liability is clear but emotional-distress severity is contested and the § 1983 compensatory caps in some categories apply. The upper range — $1,000,000 to $5,000,000 or more — becomes reachable where a § 1985(3) conspiracy is proven, where the state-actor theory expands the pool of liable defendants, or where the punitive multiplier attaches to Scarborough and Recover America in a way that materially changes their exposure.
The honest framing matters. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we can say is that the documented, on-stage, named-defendant nature of this conduct raises the floor in a meaningful way. Defense counsel for a defendant who appeared on a public stage telling a man to leave his own country will calculate that the cost of going to trial against the cost of resolving the case — and that calculation is what brings defendants to the table.
The Evidence Clock — What Exists, Who Holds It, How Fast It Dies
The most important evidence in this case is video and audio. Here is who holds what and how fast it dies.
Convention livestream and official recordings. Held by the convention’s production vendor — typically a third-party contractor hired by the state party. Retention windows vary, but most livestream platforms overwrite within days to weeks of an event. The Judeo-Christian Caucus panel session in particular is at risk because the panel was a sub-program within the larger convention and may have been recorded under different retention rules than the main stage. Window: 24 to 72 hours for live-capture archives; 14 to 30 days for edited highlights. Preservation letters go out the day you call.
George R. Brown Convention Center security and venue recordings. The GRB is a public venue operated by the Houston First Corporation. Internal security cameras record public spaces. These recordings are typically retained on rolling 30-day windows. Window: 30 days from the event date. A formal preservation demand to Houston First Corporation must be served within that window.
Attendee cell phone video. The single most important category of evidence and the single most fragile. Hundreds of attendees had phones. Most did not record. Some did. Those recordings are scattered across personal devices, cloud backups, and social media uploads. We identify the attendees who were recording and secure their footage through preservation letters and, where necessary, subpoenas. Window: indefinite, but devices get lost, traded in, replaced. The window is not the device’s lifetime — it is the next phone upgrade.
Delegate credentialing records. Held by the Republican Party of Texas through its Secretary and convention credentials committee. Establishes that the four Muslim Texans were registered delegates or credentialed attendees — defeating any they were just protesters defense. Window: indefinite, but request within 14 days for cleanest response.
Recover America organizational records. IRS Form 990s (publicly available but require formal request for current-year filings), board minutes, donor communications, prior panel programming, Scarborough’s prior public statements. Window: 30 to 90 days for formal discovery; years for already-public filings.
Judeo-Christian Caucus programming documents. Panel schedule, speaker submissions, speaker biographies, sponsorship records. Held by the caucus and the state party. Window: 30 to 60 days.
Social media posts, livestreams, and press coverage. Already public, but platforms delete content on user request or for terms-of-service violations. The press coverage itself is permanent, but social-media coverage of the press coverage decays fast. Window: immediate for Wayback Machine snapshots; immediate for authenticated downloads.
Hussein’s and the other delegates’ personal devices. Text messages, call logs, the shortly thereafter contact-information exchange with Scarborough, contemporaneous notes. We collect and image these devices within the first 14 days, before any device loss, replacement, or routine data-purge window. Window: immediate.
Abbott administration CAIR designation records. Press releases, public statements, any operational documents implementing the designation. Recoverable through Texas Public Information Act requests and federal FOIA. Window: 30 to 60 days.
The preservation letter is the single most important legal document we send in week one. It does not need to file a lawsuit. It freezes the evidence. It creates a paper trail. It turns deletion into spoliation, which becomes its own evidence at trial. The day you call us is the day that clock starts working for you.
How We Build the Case — The Proof Story, Step by Step
Here is how a religious-discrimination case of this kind actually moves from a convention floor to a courtroom — and, more often than not, from a courtroom to a settlement.
Week one. Preservation letters to the Republican Party of Texas, Houston First Corporation, Recover America, the convention production vendor, and identified attendees with cell phone video. Evidence imaging of our client’s devices. Initial public-records requests under the Texas Public Information Act for any government-actor records. Establishment of the evidence chain of custody so that what is preserved can be authenticated at trial.
Weeks two through eight. Formal demand letters to each named defendant. Subpoenas to third-party holders. Identification of fact witnesses — other convention attendees, caucus members, party staff. Where defendants decline to preserve, motions for preservation orders and, where appropriate, spoliation sanctions.
Months two through four. Retain a religious-studies expert to authoritatively rebut the Sharia requires lying claim. The Texas IIED claim and the constitutional claims both depend on the proposition that the panel’s content was a knowing falsehood about the plaintiff’s religion, not a religious disagreement the speaker was entitled to make. A credentialed scholar who can explain to a Harris County jury what Sharia actually is — fasting, daily prayer, modest dress, charity — versus what it is not — a license to lie — is the kind of evidence that converts a contested factual dispute into a documented one.
Retain a civil rights historian to establish the pattern of religious exclusion in Texas political life and the historical context in which the on-stage conduct sits. Retain a damages expert to quantify the political-capital value of delegate participation in Texas party conventions.
Months four through six. File the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division (the federal court in Houston), or in Harris County state district court. Federal court is the likely venue because the § 1983 claim anchors federal jurisdiction and lets us pull in the parallel state claims under supplemental jurisdiction. The Southern District of Texas Houston Division sits in the same building as the U.S. Courthouse where federal civil rights cases against Texas state officials are routinely filed.
Months six through twelve. Discovery. Document production from each defendant. Depositions of Abraham George, Rick Scarborough, Bob Hall, the panel’s other speakers, the credentials committee members, the convention staff. The depositions of George and Scarborough in particular are where the case either becomes a settlement or proceeds to trial — because the same men who were unambiguous from a stage tend to develop considerable ambiguity under oath.
Voir dire in Harris County. Harris County’s jury pool is the most politically diverse in Texas. The voir dire process must surface any juror hostility to Muslims, to Islam, or to CAIR specifically — and a comprehensive religious-discrimination questionnaire is the right tool for the job. The court’s response to that request tells us a great deal about the jury we will face.
Mediation. Mediation is realistic early in this case because all named defendants carry significant reputational exposure. Dr. Scarborough’s organization depends on donor and ministerial-network support that is sensitive to litigation optics. State Senator Hall faces reelection pressures that make a public trial of this kind costly. The state party will not want a federal jury hearing the convention video. Early settlement is genuinely likely — but only after preservation is locked in and the depositions have put the defendants on the record.
The Defendants’ Playbook — and How We Counter Each Move
Defendants in religious-discrimination cases run a recognizable playbook. The playbook is not evil. It is professional. Knowing it in advance is half the defense.
Play one: the rogue-individual defense. The party and the other panelists will say that Scarborough and Hall spoke for themselves, not for any coordinated effort. Counter: The panel was scheduled, the speakers were selected, the moderator introduced them, and the chair of the party then implemented the panel’s premise by ordering the named targets off the floor. That is not a rogue individual. That is a program. The programming documents — recoverable from both the state party and Recover America — prove the coordination.
Play two: the free-speech defense. Defendants will say the First Amendment protects their religious speech about Islam. Counter: The First Amendment protects Scarborough’s right to say what he believes about his own faith. It does not protect his right to publicly characterize a third party’s faith as a license to lie, in a way that deprives that party of the equal protection of the laws and the equal ability to participate in a state party convention. Speech that targets a protected class in a way that deprives them of legally protected participation is not protected speech in the constitutional sense. Church of the Lukumi is the controlling answer.
Play three: the terrorist-threat framing. The CAIR designation will be deployed to suggest that the expulsion had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with national security. Counter: CAIR has denied any wrongdoing. No court has found CAIR to be a terrorist organization. The federal government’s designation list — to the extent it reaches CAIR at all — names foreign affiliates, not the U.S. organization. And the conduct here was not directed at a security classification. It was directed at four Texans whose faith disqualified them, in the words of the chair, from the caucus. The pretext is the defense’s problem, not ours.
Play four: media narrative management. Defendants will work to shape the public story before discovery. Counter: Do not give recorded statements before counsel has prepared you. Do not relitigate the event publicly before the lawsuit is filed and the record is controlled. The strongest civil rights cases are the ones where the public narrative is anchored by the lawsuit itself, not by the months of back-and-forth that precede it.
Play five: implicit witness pressure. Other Muslim attendees, other delegates, other caucus members may be approached — by party officials, by Recover America representatives, by political allies of the named defendants — with suggestions that their testimony is unnecessary, or that speaking up will have consequences. Counter: Witness intimidation is itself a federal crime when it touches federal civil rights proceedings (18 U.S.C. § 1512), and a civil rights conspiracy claim (§ 1985(3)) that expands to include post-event witness pressure is a different case than the one that started on the convention floor. We move fast to identify witnesses and to put them in contact with counsel.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue a political party for religious discrimination?
It depends on the theory. Pure private-association claims face headwinds. But under the state-actor entanglement doctrine of Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, a state political party whose conventions are partially regulated by the Texas Election Code, whose endorsements determine ballot access, and whose chair acts with the authority of an office, can be reached under § 1983. And even where § 1983 is unavailable, the parallel claims under Texas RFRA, Texas IIED, and § 1985(3) conspiracy remain. We name the party and force them to litigate the state-actor question rather than concede it for free.
What is the statute of limitations on these claims?
Two years. Both the federal § 1983 claim and the Texas IIED claim borrow Texas’s two-year personal-injury limitations period. Texas RFRA claims run on the same two-year clock. That window is generous but not infinite, and the most perishable evidence (the convention video, the cell phone footage, the witness memories) is at risk in days, not years. The preservation letter goes out before the lawsuit is filed.
Do I have to be a registered delegate to have a claim?
No. Credentialed attendees, panel attendees, and even observers subjected to the same public exclusion have standing. The strongest cases, however, will be those where the plaintiff was a credentialed delegate or attendee whose participation was specifically impaired. The credentials records are part of the evidence we secure in week one.
Can I sue a sitting state senator personally?
Yes — in his individual capacity. A state senator does not have absolute immunity for statements made at a party convention; absolute immunity protects legislative acts like voting on bills, not partisan political speech. Personal-capacity damages are available, and Texas RFRA provides a parallel cause of action against officials in their individual capacities.
What damages can I recover?
Economic damages (delegate fees, travel, lost political capital), non-economic damages (severe emotional distress, dignitary injury, reputational harm — the heart of this case), and punitive damages against the private defendants (Scarborough, Recover America) where the conduct meets the Texas malice or reckless-indifference standard. Texas does not impose a general cap on non-economic damages in civil cases, and there is no cap in civil rights cases. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Will this case be a public trial?
Likely yes at some level, but the public nature of the underlying conduct — already on video, already covered nationally — means the privacy loss has largely already happened. What a structured civil rights case does is take the public narrative off cable news and put it into a courtroom record, under oath, with discovery, with expert witnesses, and with a jury of the defendant’s peers weighing the evidence. That is the venue where the defendant’s case is hardest to win.
How long will the case take?
Federal civil rights cases in the Southern District of Texas typically resolve in twelve to twenty-four months from filing. Early settlement is realistic in this matter given the reputational exposure of the named defendants, but only after preservation is locked in and the depositions have been taken. We prepare every case as if it will be tried.
Will I have to pay anything upfront?
No. Attorney911 handles civil rights co-counsel matters on a contingency basis where the facts and the litigation permit. The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. The contingency framework for civil rights cases is explained in plain English on our contingency-fee explainer.
What if I have already spoken to the press?
It is not disqualifying. Many civil rights plaintiffs speak publicly before counsel is retained, and the strongest cases are often the ones where the public narrative is anchored by the plaintiff’s own voice rather than the defendant’s. What matters going forward is that all future statements — to media, to opposing counsel, to defense investigators — are made on your timeline, after counsel has prepared you.
Will speaking out hurt my case?
Not if speaking out is structured. Public advocacy and a civil rights case are not in tension; they reinforce each other when handled carefully. What hurts cases is unstructured public commentary that locks in inconsistent factual positions before discovery. We help our clients navigate both.
How Our Firm Works on Cases Like This — and How to Reach Us
Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — is, at its core, a personal-injury trial firm. Our record over twenty-seven years reflects more than $50 million recovered for Texas families, including verdicts and settlements in catastrophic injury and wrongful-death cases against some of the most well-funded corporate and institutional defendants in the country. We were part of the BP Texas City refinery explosion litigation, and we have tried cases in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas and in state courts across the state.
Civil rights and religious-discrimination cases arising from political events are not within our standard practice taxonomy. We are honest about that. What we offer on cases of this kind is the part of the work that does not wait for co-counsel: same-day preservation letters, evidence imaging, public-records requests, and the intake work that turns a CNN clip into a litigated file. For the full litigation strategy and trial work, we co-counsel with vetted Texas civil rights attorneys who bring the religious-liberty and constitutional claims experience this kind of case requires. We will tell you in the first call whether our network is the right fit for your matter, and if it is not, we will tell you where to go.
Ralph Manginello leads our trial team. A journalism graduate of the University of Texas at Austin before he was a lawyer, Ralph has spent twenty-seven years trying cases in Texas courtrooms and federal court. He was a starting point guard on a New England Prep School championship basketball team at Cheshire Academy, where he has since been inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame. He carries a Texas bar license he earned in 1998 and a federal-court admission to the Southern District of Texas — the same venue where your case will be filed.
Lupe Peña, a third-generation Texan with family roots tying to the King Ranch, grew up in Sugar Land and earned his law degree at South Texas College of Law Houston after studying international business at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. Before joining our firm, Lupe spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decide how to deny, delay, and devalue claims. He now uses that playbook for plaintiffs. He serves Texas families fully in Spanish. Hablamos Español.
For the broader view of our practice areas and how we work, see our practice areas overview. For a direct conversation about your matter, the consultation is free, there is no fee unless we win, and you can reach us at 1-888-ATTY-911 or through our contact page. We answer the phone. We send the preservation letter the same day. And we walk the case from the convention floor to the courtroom — and, more often than not, to a settlement that reflects what was done to you.