When Pooja Sethi was out canvassing last winter for the Democratic nomination for a Texas house of representatives seat, a staff member alerted her to a viral X post about her campaign banner. Savanah Hernandez, a Turning Point USA influencer and Trump supporter known for videos targeting immigrants, had posted a photo of the banner with the caption: "Welcome to politics in Texas." Sethi said the responses to it frightened her.

The far right then turned her name into a racist slogan, "Don't Pooja my Texas." If elected, Sethi would become the first Asian Democratic woman and south Asian woman in the Texas legislature.

A rising tide of incidents

Anti-south Asian hate has spiked nationally since Trump took office: the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found online rhetoric against south Asians surged by 240% between January 2024 and June 2026. The CSOH report points to xenophobia, racism, economic resentment casting south Asians as "invaders" and "job thieves", increased political visibility, and anti-migrant policies including Trump's prohibitive annual H-1B visa application fee as drivers of hate aimed at south Asians of all faiths and nationalities.

At the height of election season in October, a room of about 50 south Asians gathered at a private community listening session on anti-south Asian hate in Austin, where Sethi said she had not run to combat anti-Indian hate. The event, which included Washington congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, was hosted by Indian American Impact, a nonpartisan group supporting south Asian candidates and voter engagement.

Chintan Patel, the group's executive director, told attendees that hate and discrimination had been building online for years and was now moving to the foreground.

Other recent incidents have deepened alarm:

• •In September, the Department of Homeland Security posted on X an AI-generated, movie-poster-style image of a Sikh man facing an Optimus Prime-like character, captioned "America for Americans. Get off our roads, you don't know how to drive Mr. Singh." It deleted the image amid backlash.
• •Days later, Bo French, the Republican candidate for the Texas railroad commission, posted a photo of mostly south Asian American UT Austin students celebrating a football win, writing: "I heard UT graduation this year look like this, I didn't believe it, the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined."
• •About a week after the DHS post, a Sikh truck driver was stabbed 17 times at a rest stop in Wyoming.
• •In October, the day before the Austin event, news broke that a self-described white supremacist armed with a rifle and body armor had planned to "kill Indian people" in an attempted mass shooting at a Hindu temple in Aurora, Illinois.

State officials under fire

Chanda Parbhoo, founder and executive director of SAAVETX EF, says Texas has become the "ground zero" for anti-south Asian hate - a state where more than 600,000 south Asians live, the second-largest south Asian population in the country behind California and one of its fastest-growing ethnic groups, according to 2021 US census estimates.

Community leaders point to actions by state officials they say have fueled the climate:

• •Texas attorney general Ken Paxton - locked in a Senate race dead heat with Democrat James Talarico - has taken CAIR to court in an effort to dissolve the country's largest Muslim civil rights organization.
• •Paxton and Republican governor Greg Abbott have branded CAIR a "terrorist organization", brought fabricated charges against a North Texas mosque, and opened an investigation into unsubstantiated H-1B visa fraud claims disproportionately targeting Indian immigrants.
• •Republican state representative Brent Money launched a "Sharia Free Texas Caucus" that amassed nearly 40 members, following the creation of a national "Sharia Free America Caucus" started by Texas congressmen Keith Self and Chip Roy in 2025.
• •A 2026 Stop AAPI Hate Action survey put ICE deportations of south Asians at roughly 14 times the level seen before Trump's second term, and found that in July Texas alone accounted for close to a third of all ICE arrests nationwide - a larger share than any other state.

Legislators and communities respond

Texas state representative Salman Bhojani, who immigrated from Pakistan as a teenager, says the current environment is worse than anything he has witnessed - including the period after 9/11.

Bhojani receives calls almost daily from people whose relatives were picked up by ICE or who faced threats. "My dad was picked up by ICE, my brother was picked up by ICE, or my sister was walking on campus in a hijab," he recounted of the calls. In his city of Euless, a white woman was sentenced to five years in prison for attempted murder after she tried to drown a three-year-old Muslim girl in 2024.

Bhojani, who in 2022 became one of the first Muslims and south Asians in the state legislature and launched the Religious Freedom Caucus to promote religious tolerance, warned that the targeting will not stay confined to one community: "Today, Muslims are on the chopping block. Tomorrow maybe other communities – we cannot afford that. We need to stop it right now."

From fear to the ballot box

The response increasingly runs through electoral politics. SAAVETX EF collaborated with the US Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego on the Belonging Under Pressure: 2026 South Asian Community Survey, a first-of-its-kind statewide survey of about 1,000 south Asian Texans, released on Wednesday. Its findings:

• •57.5% of respondents reported at least one experience of hate in Texas during the past year due to race, ethnicity, religion or immigration background.
• •63.7% said their community's concerns are not well understood or not understood at all by elected officials.
• •53.6% believe their community holds little to no political power.

Tom Wong, associate professor of political science and director of the US Immigration Policy Center at UCSD, said the poll shows "there's high motivation to vote – to mobilize, organize, and change who's in office".

Parbhoo said south Asians remain underrepresented as a voting bloc despite their potential. "We are still underrepresented, overlooked, and we're not getting the attention that we should probably receive," she said. Wong added that Texas could turn blue through a multiracial coalition including Asians, and that Asian Americans can decide outcomes in tight races including Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina.

The margins argument is concrete: Beto O'Rourke lost the 2018 Senate election to Ted Cruz by 2.6% – about 215,000 votes – and Parbhoo says the south Asian vote makes up that margin of victory. Bhojani himself was elected to the city council in 2018 by only 37 votes.

As of 26 October, one week into early voting, Parbhoo said the total number of south Asian Texans who voted in 2022 has already been surpassed.