Judicial Watch Sues Walz for Refusing School Security

Judicial Watch Sues Gov. Walz for Refusing Security at Nonpublic Schools
Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Grants to Left-Wing European NGOs
Nearly Twice as Many Illegal Alien Child Sex Offenders Arrested under Trump
Kash Crisis: What is the FBI Hiding?

 

Judicial Watch Sues Gov. Walz for Refusing Security at Nonpublic Schools

On August 27, 2025, a gunman opened fire on the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, killing two children.

What makes this worse is that, despite pleading from churches, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had denied security to private schools. And his office doesn’t want anyone to know about his decision-making.

Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against Walz (Judicial Watch Inc. v. Office of the Governor and Tim Walz in his official capacity as Governor (No. 86-CV-26-1292)).

Minnesota’s Safe Schools Program, created in 2019 to fund security enhancements, excludes the state’s 72,000 students attending nonpublic schools. After major school shootings in Uvalde, TX (2022) and Nashville, TN (2023), Catholic and independent school leaders repeatedly urged Governor Walz to extend security funding to all students or include nonpublic schools in new grant programs. Walz declined to act each time, leaving nonpublic school students without access to these safety funds despite the state’s $17.6 billion budget surplus at the time.

We sued in the Minnesota District Court under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act after the governor’s office failed to respond to a records request filed on August 28, 2025, the day after the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, MN. Specifically, Judicial Watch asked for:

• Requests or proposals to include nonpublic schools in the Safe Schools Program and a proposed $50 million Building and Cyber Security Grant Program — to nonpublic schools, including Catholic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or other private or parochial schools;
• Communications between the Governor’s Office and the Minnesota Catholic Conference (including leaders such as Archbishop Bernard Hebda and MCC Executive Director Jason Adkins) about security funding for nonpublic schools;
• Records about decisions to deny or not approve security funding for nonpublic schools, including discussions of political priorities, use of the 2023 state budget surplus, or influence from groups like Education Minnesota;
• Communications with the Minnesota Department of Education, legislators, or other state agencies regarding expanding safety funding to nonpublic schools, including any bipartisan legislative efforts;
• Any updates or reconsiderations after 2023, including responses following the August  27, 2025, shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School.

We note in our complaint that: “For years Minnesota’s Catholic bishops and school leaders warned Governor Walz that the state’s 72,000 nonpublic school students were unprotected. They asked him to act. He did not. When the legislature offered a path forward, it went nowhere — while Minnesota sat on a $17.6 billion surplus.”

Governor Walz left the state’s nonpublic school students unprotected. Minnesota’s Catholic bishops and school leaders asked him to act. He refused. This lawsuit seeks transparency on why nonpublic school students were excluded from safety funding.

Earlier this month, Judicial Watch announced a major legal victory after the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County must release non-exempt portions of records related to the March 27, 2023, at The Covenant School shooting, including the shooter’s writings. We had filed an open records lawsuit to force the release.

Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Grants to Left-Wing European NGOs

Americans deserve to know if their hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being used to fund foreign, left-wing organizations that have a pattern of anti-freedom and anti-American policies. The State Department has failed to provide these records, leaving the public in the dark.

Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State for records on contracts, grants, and communications with several left-wing European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:26-cv-00346)).

We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the State Department failed to respond to a November 2025 FOIA request for all contracts and grant agreements from January 2016 to November 2025 connected to the organizations Free Courts (Wolne Sądy), the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, DemoCrisis, and Ökotárs Alapítvány (Hungarian Environmental Partnership Foundation), as well as all associated communications of State Department officials.

According to the Open Society Foundations’ website, the Free Courts Foundation received a $130,000 grant in 2023. The organization lists the quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy as a partner organization on its website. Polish lawyer Michał Wawrykiewicz, who co-founded Free Courts, is on the board of DemoCrisis which was founded in 2023 and is an umbrella organization of non-government organizations (NGOs) in Israel, Poland and Hungary.

The Civil Liberties Union for Europe (LibertiesEU), which was spun off from Open Society Foundations and received approximately 40% of its funding from the organization. LibertiesEU has been aggressive in its campaign againstHungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The Hungarian Environmental Partnership received $306,000 from the Open Society Foundations between 2017 and 2022. One of the projects the organization funds was also supported by the U.S. Embassy Budapest’s Free Media Grant Program. Earlier this year, a report found U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to help fund this program; however, the funds mainly went to organizations that are critical of the Hungarian government.

We have led the effort to expose how U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used to finance left-wing, anti-American non-profits that are supported by George Soros, filing multiple FOIA lawsuits relating to funding for these Soros-backed operations.

In March 2025, we sued the State Department for records on grants made by the Biden State Department to various Hungarian media outlets and educational organizations opposing conservative Orban.

In October 2018, we obtained State Department documents showing top Soros representatives in Romania collaborating with the State Department in a program jointly funded by, among others, Soros’ Open Society Foundations – Romaniaand USAID, called the “Open Government Partnership.”

Additional State Department records uncovered in October 2018 showed U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding for George Soros’ left-wing nonprofit organizations in Albania. The documents deal primarily with the activities of Soros’ top operative in Albania, Andri Dobrushi, the director of Open Society Foundation-Albania, who was actively engaged in channeling funding to what Orban called Soros’ “mercenary army.” The documents show U.S. grant money flowing through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that profess to promote “civil society,” while in fact attacking traditional, pro-American groups, governments and policies.

In April 2018, we uncovered records showing the Obama administration sent U.S. taxpayers’ funds to a group backed by Soros, which used the money to fund left-wing political activities in Albania, including working with the country’s socialist government to push for highly controversial judicial “reform.” The records also detail how the Soros operation helped the State Department review grant applications from other groups for taxpayer funding.

Nearly Twice as Many Illegal Alien Child Sex Offenders Arrested under Trump

Our children are safer now with President Trump in office. Our Corruption Chronicles blog reports the details.

In yet another noteworthy immigration enforcement accomplishment ignored by establishment media, the Trump administration nearly doubled the number of illegal alien child sex offenders arrested during Biden’s last year in a U.S. city known to be a cesspool of undocumented criminals. In Trump’s first year back in the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) apprehended 414 criminal alien child predators in Houston, Texas compared to just 211 under the last administration’s final year in office. The recently arrested criminal aliens accounted for 761 child sex offenses and 525 other serious crimes ranging from homicide to robbery, according to an announcement issued this week by ICE, the 20,000-employee Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency created after 9/11 to enforce immigration laws and preserve national security.

The latest roundup of child predators comes on the heels of two separate operations in Houston less than a year ago in which more than 1,000 dangerous criminal aliens were apprehended in the area, which is estimated to be home to more than half a million illegal immigrants. In the first effort ICE arrested over 350 gang members with 1,700 criminal convictions who entered the U.S. illegally more than 1,400 times. Most belonged to violent gangs, including the renowned Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Tren de Aragua, Latin Kings,15th Street Gang, Sureños, Paisas and Tango Blast and were convicted of serious crimes including homicide, sexual assault of a child, drug and sex trafficking and unlawful possession of a firearm. A few weeks later, in a separate Houston crackdown, federal authorities nabbed another 822 illegal immigrant offenders with convictions for murder, sexual assault, domestic violence and driving while intoxicated among other crimes. The figures spoke loudly about the Biden administration’s catastrophic open border policies that welcomed a record-breaking 7.6 million illegal aliens, including hundreds of thousands with serious criminal records and more than 1.7 million from countries that DHS determined pose a national security threat to the U.S.

There has been incredible progress in a little over a year under this administration despite serious resistance from local sanctuary governments that protect illegal immigrants, an increasingly powerful leftist movement, and its allies in the mainstream media. “While elected officials and media pundits across the country were zealously trying to manipulate the American public with fake news stories about ICE’s public safety mission, the brave men and women of ICE were quietly going about their business to arrest and remove more than 400 dangerous child predators from our local communities,” said the director of ICE’s Houston field office, Gabriel Martinez, this week. “Thanks to their tireless efforts, parents across Southeast Texas can sleep a little better tonight knowing that these pedophiles and child rapists are no longer a threat to their children.” The ICE Houston field office is responsible for immigration enforcement operations in 58 southeastern Texas counties situated in the state’s gulf coast from Beaumont to Corpus Christi and the Houston/Galveston area out to Waco. The busy ICE office reveals that this operation was a team effort assisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), U.S. Marshals Service and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Among the child sex offenders rounded up in Houston in the last year are Alex Samuel Lara Diaz, a 35-year-old previously deported Honduran wanted in his native country for homicide and convicted in the U.S. of aggravated sexual assault of a minor. Gabriel Julio Lopez-Velazquez, a 25-year-old Mexican who entered the U.S. illegally four times has been convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a minor, aggravated assault, and illegal entry and twice for felony illegal reentry. Another Mexican, 48-year-old Juan Leonardo Garcia Ibarra, illegally entered the U.S. a dozen times and has been convicted of sexual indecency with a child, aggravated assault, cruelty toward a child and driving under the influence. Milton Alexander Magana Fuentes, a 32-year-old from El Salvador, entered the U.S. illegally four times and has been convicted of sexual indecency with a minor and failure to register as a sex offender. Luis Mario Monsalve Chaux, a 52-year-old Colombian, has convictions for possession of child sexual abuse material, four burglaries, and twice for larceny. The list is extensive and includes mug shots of the perpetrators.

Kash Crisis: What is the FBI Hiding?

The Biden administration’s misdeeds are slowly coming to light, but we still have far too many questions for FBI Director Patel, our chief investigative reporter Micah Morrison writes in Investigative Bulletin.

FBI Director Kash Patel has repeatedly vowed to bring accountability and transparency to the agency, but his tenure at the top is increasingly looking like business as usual. Judicial Watch has been warning about trouble at the FBI for months. In June, we reported that conservative insiders were alarmed by signs that Patel and then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino had been taken hostage by the Deep State consensus. Conservative distress in recent weeks has mounted over Patel’s moves to shut down a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over records in the death of January 6 victim Ashli Babbitt.

In July came bombshell news—Patel had discovered a cache of Russiagate documents in “burn bags” in a “secret room” at FBI headquarters.

A few burn bag documents were released to the public, but most were not. Along with newly disclosed material from the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence, the documents, Judicial Watch noted, added weight “to charges that starting in 2016, top government figures, including then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, [FBI Director James] Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Hillary Clinton and others conspired to protect the Clinton presidential candidacy, defame candidate Donald Trump, and later destroy his presidency.”

Discrepancies soon began to creep in to Patel’s descriptions of the discovery of the documents. In June, teasing their upcoming release, Patel told Joe Rogan, “Just think about this. Me, as director of the FBI, the former ‘Russiagate guy,’ when I first got to the bureau, found a room that Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building, full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of. Locked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna find this place.’’

By December, the story had shifted. Patel now told Fox News that there was not “a room” but multiple rooms—secret rooms “hidden away from the map” of the building, rooms no one had access to. And many burn bags. “And once we got into those rooms,” Patel said, “we found more information related to the Russiagate hoax from prior FBI leadership. Information that was in burn bags that they wanted to have destroyed, but for whatever reason, no one ever got around to it, or they thought we would just never find it.”

The mystery deepened. Was it one room or many rooms? How many rooms? What was the history of the secret rooms? How many burn bags were there? What exactly was in the burn bags? Where did they come from? Were there other documents, perhaps not in burn bags, in the rooms?

These are not incidental questions. The FBI has a long history of burying inconvenient information.

Judicial Watch started seeking answers.

In June, we sent a FOIA request to the FBI seeking “all documents” related to the room, all FBI communications between Patel and Bongino about the discovery of the documents, and all directives sent to FBI offices about handling the documents. The FBI ignored the request—a clear violation of FOIA law.

In November, we sued the Justice Department for the secret room information. “We know Comey was spying on Donald Trump,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “He was the Obama administration’s go-to guy, trying to set Trump up to be toppled from the campaign and then from office. These hidden-room documents may contain additional smoking guns.”

Also in November, we filed a second FOIA tightly focused on the burn bags.

The FBI again ignored the lawful request.

In February, we sued again. The second lawsuit contains important new details. It zeroes in on a court filing,Document 138-12, which notes “an original referral by the Central Intelligence Agency to former FBI Director James Comey” containing “certain intelligence related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.”

Could this be a key Russiagate document—a smoking gun pointing to the origin of the effort to topple Trump?

The February lawsuit specifically asks for the original CIA referral to Comey. It also seeks the full contents of the burn bags, including all unclassified documents related to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search, the January 6 events at the Capitol, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and the Durham investigation. For classified documents, we requested a Vaughn Index that briefly describes and justifies the withholding of classified material.

The curious case of the secret rooms could go beyond Russiagate. What else is hidden at FBI headquarters? More Epstein files? Reports on the Benghazi attack? Evidence of the FBI’s role in the Harlem Mosque Incident murder of a New York City patrolman?

Evidence of the alleged presence of federal agents at the assassination of Malcolm X? Kash Patel promised a“wave of transparency” at the FBI to restore public trust. He could start by literally cleaning house—turning over all the burn bag records to Judicial Watch and searching every nook and cranny at FBI headquarters for more secret rooms and secret files.

Until next week.

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