Alonzo Cantu, the man behind the Border Health PAC, allegedly exerted power over Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to secure funding for a hospital with a transgender clinic that specialises in treating immigrants.
National File reported on Tuesday on the links between Border Health PAC, run by McAllen businessman Alonzo Cantu, and top Texas Republicans. Cantu, who chairs and “tacitly controls” the PAC, also has a “significant stake” in a hospital in Edinburg, which contains a “Gender Care Clinic” that offers “hormone replacement consultation” among other transgender treatments to many, including Central American migrants from countries such as El Salvador:
Initially reported by Tracy Shannon of MadMommaBear, a number of top Texas Republicans have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Border Health PAC. Since 2015, Governor Greg Abbott received $800,000 from the PAC, while his second-in-command, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, took $825,000 from them in the same time frame. House Speaker Dade Phelan also received $105,000, while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton received a cool $200,000 from them.
National File can further report that Cantu seemingly exerted pressure on Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to secure further funding for the centre in which the transgender clinic was located in the year the clinic was opened. The Gender Care Clinic opened its doors in March 2017, just under a year after the Family Medical Center, run jointly by the Doctors Hospital of Renaissance and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, opened at the hospital.
It seems that that same year, the Texas Senate had just “shortchanged” the funding for what Carlos Sanchez of Texas Monthly described as the “new medical school.” However, after Patrick visited the Valley and met with Cantu, Sanchez reported that most of the funding for the Family Medical Center, and thus the clinic within it, was restored. “That’s power,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez further wrote that Cantu, who also serves as Chairman of the Board of the Lone Star National Bank, gives money mostly to Democrats but also to Republicans “who vote the way he wants.” Last month, Texas Republicans killed three separate bills that would have targeted doctors providing transgender surgeries and chemical castrations to minors in the 2021 session. National File has been told that orders to kill these bills came from Abbott, and were orchestrated through Phelan and Texas Republican House leadership. With Cantu’s apparent exertion of power over Patrick regarding the clinic, further questions will likely be raised.
