Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an emergency petition in state district court on Monday arguing that Saturday’s rescue of a child from a submerged vehicle constitutes an illegal expansion of local government overreach.
Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an emergency petition in state district court on Monday seeking an immediate injunction against the Beeville Police Department, arguing that Saturday’s rescue of an infant from a submerged vehicle constitutes an illegal expansion of local government overreach.
The incident, captured on body-camera footage released Sunday, showed local officers and firefighters wading into fast-moving currents south of San Antonio to retrieve the child from a partially submerged white car. By Monday morning, the Attorney General’s office had filed a 43-page brief asserting that the Beeville first responders unlawfully bypassed the Texas legislature by unilaterally distributing state-subsidized buoyancy to a private citizen.
While we understand the emotional appeal of preventing a child from drowning, local municipalities do not have the statutory authority to arbitrarily decide who receives taxpayer-funded oxygen.
According to the lawsuit, the distressed father’s plea to an approaching officer—“Can you get my kid?”—amounted to an unlawful solicitation of a municipal handout. The filing argues that providing emergency extraction services creates a dangerous culture of dependency among Texas infants, who must learn to navigate the state’s increasingly frequent extreme weather events through personal responsibility and free-market aquatic solutions.
The litigation mirrors a broader statewide enforcement strategy by Paxton, who recently sued Harris County to block a poverty-relief program on the grounds that it constituted an illegal gift of public funds. The Beeville injunction requests that the infant be returned to the floodwaters until the Texas Supreme Court can rule on the constitutionality of the rescue, noting in a footnote that the state has recently spent $11 billion outfitting its rivers with circular saws and razor wire to ensure that Texas waterways remain fully lethal.