Late last week, nonprofit and charitable organizations around Texas received a troubling letter from the executive commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. Dated November 19, the letter instructs all refugee-related agencies in the state of Texas to report any plans of resettling Syrian refugees to the commission, and asks that if they are in the process of resettling Syrian refugees, to “please discontinue those plans immediately.” The commission’s letter followed a separate letter sent November 16 by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to President Barack Obama, wherein the governor informed the president that Texas would not be accepting any Syrian refugees.

If Abbott’s discomfort with Syrian refugees had remained at the level of gubernatorial grandstanding—keeping in mind the fact that governors lack the authority to deny specific religious or ethnic groups entry into their states—then it would likely not have been more newsworthy than similar reservations expressed by a host of other American governors. But with the letter to nonprofits and other private agencies with refugee resettlement programs, Texas moved into direct opposition to federal law and, some say, threatened the religious liberty of numerous Texan faith groups.

“The letter the HHSC sent, they crossed a line into actual substantive policy steps,” Bee Moorhead, executive director of Texas Impact/Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy, said in a phone call with the New Republic. Texas Impact is the oldest and largest interfaith social action network in Texas, and functions as a membership organization for faith groups doing state-level advocacy and interpreting public policy.

The requests made in the letter put nonprofit agencies in the position of either disobeying state-level requests or breaking federal law, Moorhead said. A return missive from Texas Impact clarified that “8 U.S. Code § 1522 Sec. 5 requires that ‘assistance and services funded under this section shall be provided to refugees without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex, or political opinion. ... Plainly, HHSC is demanding that local resettlement agencies violate federal law by engaging in illegal discrimination.” If the commission’s letter does result in a court battle, Moorhead said, this will probably be the axis on which the arguments unfold. But it’s not the only issue at hand.

In Texas, most refugee services are carried out by private organizations that receive funding in the form of contracts from the state. This has been one of the ways, Moorhead said, that Texas has managed to put relatively little of its own tax revenue into social services. But many of these private organizations are faith-based, and their commitment to aiding refugees flows from their overall religious orientation. For that reason, the commission’s directive to suspend all aid to Syrian refugees struck several such faith-based charities as an infringement upon their free exercise of religion.

