Abbott escalates drive against Texas Muslim community

AUSTIN (MNTV) — Texas Governor Greg Abbott has intensified his campaign against a planned Muslim-centred community northeast of Dallas, throwing state power behind a drive to block a 400-acre development built around a mosque, an Islamic school and a retirement home.

Abbott has called for criminal and civil investigations into the project — formerly promoted as “EPIC City” and now rebranded “The Meadow,” near Josephine in Collin County — and has vowed it will remain “an empty meadow,” even as its developers insist it will comply with the law and welcome residents of all backgrounds. 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has opened a fair-housing investigation, which Abbott has publicly supported, and state Attorney General Ken Paxton has pressed local officials to slow it down, reports note.

The campaign has unfolded as anti-Muslim rhetoric has become more prominent among Texas Republicans, who have increasingly cast the state’s Muslims — less than 2% of the population — as a threat, including through claims about Sharia and alleged Islamic “control.” 

Community leaders say the development is simply a response to population growth, rising costs and overcrowded mosques, and reject suggestions it would be an isolated compound governed by religious law.

The hostility extends beyond rhetoric. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported 17 incidents targeting mosques and other Islamic sites in Texas across May, June and July — a 183% jump from a year earlier. 

Immigrants born in Muslim-majority countries, about 450,000 of them in Texas, generate an estimated $19 billion in annual income in sectors from health care to energy, even as, community members say, elected officials’ language deepens fear and raises the risk of harassment. 

At stake, advocates argue, is whether Muslim Texans can build and worship without being treated as objects of government suspicion.