Updated at 11:50 a.m.: Revised to include additional information.

AUSTIN — A civil rights group has sued Texas for advising counties to review the citizenship of tens of thousands of eligible voters in the state with flawed data, claiming it violates the voting rights of U.S. citizens and legally registered Texas voters who are foreign-born.

The lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund alleges the state has "singled out for investigation and removal" the names of U.S. citizens who are registered voters because they were born outside the United States. It asks for an injunction to prevent recently naturalized citizens from being investigated and a rescission of the state's advisory to comb through a list of 58,000 people whom state officials said had potentially voted while not citizens.

The complaint, filed late Friday night in Corpus Christi, names Secretary of State David Whitley, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott as defendants. It also includes Galveston County Tax Assessor Collector Cheryl Johnson, who serves as that county's voter registrar. The lawsuit alleges that Johnson sent letters to more than 830 people questioning their citizenship.

Officials in the offices of the governor, attorney general and secretary of state did not immediately respond for requests for comment.

The complaint lists multiple individual plaintiffs, including two people from Dallas County, as well as three voting rights advocacy groups. It also has plaintiffs from Harris County, where the state mistakenly placed about 18,000 people on the list for investigation.

"Texas continues to distinguish itself through its aggressive efforts to target legitimate voters and to deter or suppress their participation," Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel, said in a written statement. "Targeting naturalized citizens is particularly perverse given the high level of participation in voting and civic engagement among those who chose to become United States citizens."

Last Friday, Whitley's office sent an advisory to all the counties in the state saying that about 95,000 people who received driver's licenses — while legally in the country, but not U.S. citizens — also appeared on Texas voter rolls. Whitley's office asked Texas counties to investigate the 58,000 people included on that list who also appeared to have voted in one or more elections between 1996 and 2018.

Critics quickly pointed out that the state data didn't appear to account for people who had become naturalized citizens after getting or renewing their driver's licenses with a green card or visa. Immigrants are required to show proof that they're in the U.S. legally to obtain a Texas driver's license or state ID card, but they're not mandated to update DPS on their citizenship status.

That was the case for the two Dallas County plaintiffs, Maria Yolisma Garcia and Lorena Tule-Romain.

By Wednesday, at least 20,000 people had been taken off the state's list after officials told counties they had been placed there in error and had already proved their citizenship.

Nina Perales, MALDEF's vice president for litigation, said in a statement that targeting naturalized citizens "was a naked attempt to strip minority voters from the rolls," after Latino voter turnout had doubled since the last midterm elections.

The lawsuit also alleges the state's actions harmed the three advocacy organizations that are plaintiffs — Southwest Voter Registration Project, Mi Familia Vota and La Union del Pueblo Entero — because it harms their efforts to register voters by "calling into question the voter registration of naturalized citizens in Texas and discouraging naturalized individuals from registering to vote."

Galveston is the only county whose elections administrator is named in the suit because it was the only one among the counties where one of MALDEF's clients have received a notice asking to review their citizenship. But lawyers for the plaintiffs said they could add more counties to the lawsuit as they learn additional facts.

Many counties across the state refrained from sending out notices of citizenship review until they could sort out the information the state had given them. Some, like Galveston, however, sent notices to people who had already proved their citizenship before the state could alert them of the error.

Bosque County, in Central Texas near Waco, sent out notices earlier in the week. But after receiving corrected information from the state, the county sent out follow-up letters to some people asking them to disregard the initial letter.

"I apologize for any inconvenience these letters have caused you," wrote Crystal Denman, the county's elections administrator.

This is the second lawsuit filed against the state for its advisory to investigate potential noncitizen voters with flawed data. On Tuesday, the League of United Latin American Citizens also filed a federal lawsuit alleging the state was violating the prohibition on voter intimidation in the Voting Rights Act and calling the state's actions a "witch hunt."