The week before the start of early voting in the 2026 midterm elections, many Texans received an unexpected message from an unknown number with a West Texas area code.
"New school year? Here's your complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school," the text read. The message linked to a "Back to School Toolkit" written by the Transgender Education Network of Texas, an LGBTQ+ youth advocacy group also known as TENT.
Two days later, another text came through from a different number with the same 432 area code: "Questions about gender-affirming care in Texas? Start here. You can get the care you need." The message also linked to a TENT webpage.
The texts seemed as though they came directly from TENT and appeared no different than other mass communications that annoy voters during election season. Both included links that go straight to TENT's website, and both stated the recipient can reply "stop" to unsubscribe from the messages, which is required under federal law.
But TENT says they didn't send the messages.
"These text messages were not authored, authorized, approved, or distributed by TENT and are not affiliated with our organization," TENT wrote in a statement Oct. 13. "The texts do not represent the official position or communications of the organization."
As of Wednesday, more than a week after the first text was sent, the organization says it still doesn't know who sent the texts. Last week, TENT asked a judge in Travis County to force the people who may be behind the messages to share more information about them.
TENT also doesn't know who sent brochures to Texans across the state, from San Antonio up to the Panhandle, that were addressed to "students" of the recipient households. The mailers purport to be a guide for transgender, nonbinary and questioning youth and encourage them to reach out to four different LGBTQ+ organizations across the state, including TENT.
All of the groups told The Texas Newsroom they were not involved in creating, funding or authorizing the mailer.
Political consultants, attorneys and civil rights advocates speculate the communications were part of an effort to foment anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, either to prompt voters to select Republican candidates or dampen their enthusiasm for Democrats.
"Sometimes the goal of politics isn't just to get people to vote for your person or to switch people to vote from one to the other," said Republican political consultant Garrett Fulce. "Sometimes the goal is to prevent people who support your opponent from wanting to vote for them."
No matter who's behind them, the mysterious texts and mailers are a glaring example of how easy it can be to send out misleading messaging to large groups of people — and how difficult it is to hold such actors accountable.
"What we do know is somebody spent a lot of money to smear our client TENT and also to create confusion and division among the Texas electorate during the early voting period," said Mimi Marziani, an Austin attorney whose firm represents TENT. "The person or persons responsible for this have also gone to great lengths to shield their identity from the Texas public."
Where could the texts and mailers have come from?
Marziani's firm traced the phone numbers' registration back to Peerless Network, a telecommunications provider based in Chicago, and its parent company, Infobip. She sent a "cease and desist" letter to the company on Oct. 14 demanding that it put a stop to the texts.
Infobip responded two days later, saying it was reviewing the matter and taking certain "precautionary measures," but the company said it would not specify what those measures were or divulge the identity of the customer who had registered the phone number.
In an email to The Texas Newsroom, Infobip said it does not generally have control over messages sent by its customers, other than to filter out material such as hate speech, alcohol marketing or sexually explicit content.
Alex Quilici, CEO of the Dallas-based robocall blocking service YouMail, said companies like Infobip and Peerless Network function similarly to T-Mobile or other carriers: They get a customer's message from point A to point B.
That can include sending mass robocalls or messages to a list of numbers. These carriers don't always know if their service is being used for allegedly harmful activity, he said.
It's possible to trace the texts to a specific person or group, Quilici said. But at a certain point, law enforcement and the courts need to get involved. Only they can force the carrier to hand over specific information about its customer.
"It depends how clever the person doing this is," he said. "If they're using VPNs and prepaid cards and all sorts of other stuff, it can take some time, but the investigative agencies are surprisingly good and they're dogged. Eventually, the odds are they'll figure it out."
That's the goal of the request Marziani's firm made to a Travis County judge. Her team wants the judge to compel a representative from Infobip to give written and oral testimony on what they know about the texts' origins.
That request also covers whoever created the Texas Transgender Student Union, the group that sent the mailers. A group with that name registered as an LLC in Wyoming just last month, records from the state show.
"Right now, the content and the timing of the messages in the mail strongly suggest that it was the work of a single entity, but we would like to confirm that," Marziani said.
The address listed for that LLC is not valid, according to the U.S. Postal Service's address locator, though a UPS store just down the street happens to be the correct address for TENT's P.O. Box.
Another LLC, called Northwest Registered Agent, is listed on the records as the entity that is responsible for receiving the Texas Transgender Student Union's legal and tax documents. More than 300,000 businesses are registered at that entity's address, according to local press reports.
In an email, a spokesperson for the company wrote that they have "no way of knowing someone's intent when they're forming a new company" and "no knowledge of, or involvement in, any of our clients' business operations." The spokesperson, who did not identify themselves, added that the company plans to resign as the Texas Transgender Student Union's registered agent.
Employees at five different Austin post offices told The Texas Newsroom they couldn't determine the exact source of the mailers because they didn't have a tracking ID, which is a barcode workers can scan and trace to whoever sent the mail.
A spokesperson for USPS told The Texas Newsroom that an Illinois-based company called Three Z printing holds the bulk mailing permit used to ship the flyers. But it's still unclear who actually sent them.
A West Texas prosecutor launched an investigation into the mailers as potential forgery last week, which is a state jail felony, after a neighbor in her jurisdiction received one. A grand jury can now subpoena anyone involved to testify about who created and paid for the mailers, where the mailing list came from and whether there's been any improper use of personal information.
But the probe by the office of Sarah Stogner, the Republican district attorney for Loving, Ward, and Reeves counties, won't wrap up until well after the election.
Meanwhile, TENT has received "an onslaught of hate and violent threats" in response to the texts, and they've only received more since people began receiving the mailers, Marziani wrote in TENT's petition to a Travis County judge.
The public response forced TENT to hire attorneys and spend money on security measures for staff. The organization also canceled events it had planned in several major cities, which were referenced in the mailers.
OutYouth, one of the LGBTQ+ organizations also mentioned in the mailers, is temporarily closing its in-person programs and services while the organization bulks up its security measures.
"The safety of everyone at OutYouth comes first," Jaryn Holbrook Janeway, OutYouth's executive director, said in a text. "Telehealth counseling and all virtual programs continue without interruption, and we'll welcome our youth back in person soon."
Is sending texts and mailers like this legal?
The texts and mail walk a careful line between impersonation and third-party advertising.
Neither communication directly claims to come from TENT or any other organization besides the Texas Transgender Student Union. The texts simply share links, and the mailers are written completely in the second and third person.
Texas' political advertising laws prohibit misrepresenting identities and hiding the true source of political communication, said Andrew Cates, a legislative and campaign law attorney in Austin. But the mailers and texts at issue don't mention a specific political candidate or election.
"You can't really prove intent to influence an election just because somebody impersonated a group that is being used to, in my opinion, fearmonger leading up to the election," Cates said. "I'm not really sure how you would regulate that."
In her "cease and desist" letter to Infobip, Marziani alleged that the text messages were impersonating TENT without its consent in order to intentionally harm or defraud, a Class A misdemeanor. Whether anyone broke the law "turns on the sender's consent and intent" and "is not a determination for Infobip to make," the company wrote in its response.
Stogner, the district attorney, said she is not looking into the text messages or claims of impersonation. She's focused on the mailers as evidence of forgery.
In the meantime, there's no easy way for recipients to stop the barrage of text messages. They might be successful if they reply with STOP. Fulce, the Republican political consultant, added that some campaigns remove people from messaging campaigns after they've voted.
By then, they've already had their intended effect.
"You're not reading every text," Fulce said, "but you're just seeing a name. You're seeing the [basis] of the attack on the notification panel. You're deleting it and moving on, or you're pressing stop and moving on, whatever. But you've seen it, it's in your head."
Copyright 2026 KUT News
