Republican Rep.
Wesley Hunt of Texas, a rising conservative star who has built his congressional brand on dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, previously participated in advancing precisely those same ideological agendas at a major Houston-area mental health authority.
According to Western Journal, public records and meeting documents show that Hunt, while serving on the board of the Harris Center for Mental Health and Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities from January 2019 to March 2021, joined unanimous votes that expanded contracts, funding, and personnel decisions steeped in left-wing DEI and gender ideology.
During his tenure, the board approved lucrative agreements with organizations that explicitly promote structural racism narratives, intersectional identity politics, and LGBTQ-focused programming, and it helped oversee a controversial jail diversion program tied to a George Soros-backed district attorney that allowed thousands of offenders to avoid traditional prosecution and, in many cases, repeatedly cycle through the system with minimal accountability.
Hunts service on the Harris Center board coincided with a period in which the agency embraced an aggressive equity framework, embedding progressive concepts into both its criminal justice initiatives and its internal culture. Meeting minutes and contract records indicate that Hunt was present for key votes in which the board unanimously approved contracts with Justice System Partners (JSP), a left-leaning criminal justice consultancy, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Greater Houston, both of which openly champion race-based and LGBTQ-focused policy agendas.
In October 2019, the board awarded Justice System Partners a $151,000 contract to provide an external evaluation of The Harris Centers jail diversion program, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The groups own materials state that structural racism exists both in society and within the criminal legal system, and that the intersection of race, skin tone, gender, disability, sexuality, age, and income produces unequal outcomes in the justice system, language that mirrors the broader progressive push to redefine criminal justice through the lens of identity politics rather than individual responsibility.
JSP had already been on record in 2017 advocating the elimination of cash bail for defendants charged with serious but not violent crimes, elevating analysts who framed the issue as one of personal freedom and liberty. Between fiscal years 2020 and 2021, the Harris Center paid JSP $130,000 for Consultation Services, during which time JSP, working with the Center, produced a guide urging more just and equitable alternatives to incarceration for specific racial or ethnic groups, effectively prioritizing group identity over equal treatment under the law.
The organization has continued to push that ideological framework, releasing a 2023 Equity Through Action plan that calls for restructuring decision-making authority to prioritize outcome equity and for diversifying decision-makers. Such language reflects a broader DEI paradigm that seeks to engineer equalized results across demographic categories, often at the expense of merit-based standards and traditional notions of justice, a model conservatives have warned undermines both public safety and the rule of law.
Hunts congressional campaign, however, insists that his brief tenure on the Harris Center board was defined by resistance rather than complicity. During his short time on the board, Wesley Hunt was one of the only voices pushing back. He challenged the lefts ideological insanity head-on, and ultimately walked away rather than legitimize woke nonsense, a spokesman for Hunts campaign told the Daily Caller News Foundation. That wasnt an endorsement. It was a warning sign.
The spokesman further argued that the experience steeled Hunts opposition to DEI once he entered Congress. A wake-up call that hardened his resolve to dismantle these ideologies once and for all when he got to Congress. Even Elon Musk has commended Wesley on his anti-Woke and anti-DEI rhetoric and policies, he added, portraying Hunt as a conservative who learned firsthand how deeply entrenched progressive ideology has become in public institutions.
In Washington, Hunt has indeed emerged as a vocal critic of DEI, denouncing such policies as discriminatory and insisting that merit, not race or identity, should guide hiring, admissions, and public policy. He publicly applauded the University of Texas in 2024 for dismantling its DEI departments, arguing that these bureaucracies have fueled rising anti-Semitism and eroded First Amendment protections by enforcing ideological conformity on campus.
His campaign has also framed the current scrutiny of his Harris Center record as a political attack driven by establishment forces threatened by his ascent. The truth is simple: Wesley Hunt is surging, and the establishment is scrambling to stop him. We wish John Cornyn the best on his bronze place finish, the spokesman said, signaling that Hunts team views the controversy as part of a broader intra-party struggle over the future direction of Texas Republican politics.
Yet the record from Hunts time on the Harris Center board shows that the institutions ideological drift extended well beyond JSP. At a 2019 meeting that Hunt attended, the board approved a contract amendment worth an additional $40,000 for the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Greater Houston to provide staff training for the Jail Diversion Program, even as NAMIs 2019 legislative review was saturated with progressive buzzwords such as racial injustice, lived experience, inclusive and culturally competent care, and racial profiling, and highlighted the stigma and discrimination faced by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQI+ communities.
In 2020, Hunt was again present when the board unanimously renewed NAMIs contract for nearly $90,000. Shortly thereafter, NAMI Greater Houston promoted Minority resources for Unlearning and Transforming Racism, which, according to an archived version of its website, directed users to a site declaring that the phrase All Lives Matter was problematic and offering links for Deconstructing White Privilege and understanding racism in America, a package of materials that aligns squarely with the lefts racial grievance industry.
By May 2020, NAMI Greater Houston was describing racism as a public health crisis. Nationally, NAMI has embraced a sweeping social-justice agenda, openly advocating efforts to address disparities in [mental health and substance use disorder] services and trauma for people of color LGBTQ+ persons, children in foster care, and other groups, and its website promotes resources for LGBTQ+ and Transgender youth, including talklines and chatrooms for minors under 19 to discuss sexual orientation or gender identity/expression issues, while endorsing Culturally Competent Care that explicitly centers race.
The Harris Centers embrace of intersectional ideology was not limited to outside contractors. In a February 2020 meeting attended by Hunt, the board unanimously voted to appoint Gabriel Cazares to the Intellectual Developmental Disabilities Public Advisory Council (IDD-PAC) as an Organizational Representative, according to meeting documents. At the time, Cazares served as director of the Mayors Office for People with Disabilities, where he used his position to embe[d] equity and access across all departments to ensure full civic participation for BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, immigrant, and low-income disabled communities, and to deliver disability rights training through a justice-oriented, intersectional lens, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Cazares background included work with The Latino Racial Justice Circle, which he said financially supports individuals facing immigration-related legal costs and seeks to educate the public about undocumented communities by centering their voices and experiences, again reflecting a progressive, activist orientation. In a 2020 Q&A with Equality Texas, Cazares was described as a queer, disabled Latin x person who is particularly drawn to intersectional movements that center the voices of queer, disabled, and immigrant people of color, and he told the organization that wokeness must go beyond social media, asking, What are you doing on a daily basis to examine your privilege, the ways you benefit from White supremacy, and what steps are you taking to dismantle those systems of oppression?
Beyond personnel and training, the Harris Centers most consequential ideological experiment may have been its jail diversion program, which predated Hunts board service but continued under his oversight. In 2018, before Hunt joined, the Center partnered with Kim Ogg, the first Soros-backed district attorney in Texas, to create a diversion initiative for mentally ill offenders that allowed more than 6,000 individuals to avoid incarceration before formal charges and to leave the program at will in order to avoid booking people in the jail entirely, a model critics argue prioritizes ideology over public safety.
Soros reportedly spent more than half a million dollars to elect Ogg in 2016, part of a nationwide effort to install progressive prosecutors who favor decarceration and lenient treatment of offenders. A Harris Center slideshow presentation indicated that most participants in the diversion program had committed Class B misdemeanorsthe second most serious misdemeanor category in Texasincluding criminal mischief, DWI, property theft, and criminal trespassing, while a smaller share had Class A misdemeanors such as domestic assault, DWI, criminal trespassing, property theft up to $2,500, vehicular burglary, and resisting arrest, offenses that can carry up to a year in jail and fines of up to $4,000.
Despite the serious nature of many of these crimes, the diversion programs outcomes raised red flags. As of 2019, about 47 percent of individuals brought into the Harris Centers diversion program went on to reoffend, with some returning more than 20 times and one individual reportedly brought back around 80 times, according to the organizations CEO, who spoke to the Texas Observer in 2023, underscoring the risks of replacing firm consequences with revolving-door social services.
The human cost of such policies was illustrated in a case highlighted by The New York Times involving a Harris County woman arrested in 2020 for methamphetamine possession, who then spent two years cycling between jail, diversion programs, and mental health treatment. Despite being declared unfit to stand trial due to severe and abnormal mental health, emotional or physical distress, she was allowed to visit her newborn daughter and was soon charged with stomping, kicking and striking her, a tragic example of what can happen when ideological leniency overrides basic safeguards.
While Hunt participated in several votes that advanced DEI-aligned contracts and appointments, he was conspicuously absent from other pivotal decisions that further entrenched the Harris Centers progressive agenda. The Lone Star Project reported that Hunt missed more than 70 percent of the boards meetings from January 2019 to October 2020, and his attendance record in Congress has drawn similar scrutiny, with Hunt missing more votes than any other Republican in 2025, including more than Democratic Arizona Rep. Ral Grijalva, who died in March.
At one 2019 meeting that Hunt did not attend, the board approved a two-year Cultural Competency and Diversity Plan described as a framework to embed cultural diversity in all the departments services, programs and policies. The plan defined cultural competence as staying open-minded and committed the Center to annual diversity and cultural competency training for all staff, including instruction on gender, sexual orientation, spiritual beliefs, and other identity factors, with a stated emphasis on promoting inclusion, effectively institutionalizing DEI doctrine throughout the agency.
The Harris Centers fiscal year 202122 budget further touted its formal Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) strategy, which it uses to track meaningful D&I metrics and for attracting diverse candidates, and highlighted a staff-composed Diversity and Inclusion council, known as the Harris Center Inclusion Hub. The budget also listed Montrose Counseling as a key external stakeholder, an LGBTQ+ organization that conducts Gender and Sexuality Alliance trainings and publicly opposes bans on sex-change procedures for minors.
Montrose made its stance explicit following a Texas Supreme Court ruling upholding the states prohibition on sex changes for children. To our trans youth, I want to say this: We see you. We love you. We are here for you, the group wrote, underscoring the ideological chasm between such advocacy and the views of many Texas conservatives who support the states efforts to protect minors from irreversible medical interventions.
Hunts entanglement with DEI initiatives is not limited to the Harris Center. The Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported his ties to Houstons elite St. Johns School, where he appeared to play a role in making DEI foundational to the institutions policies and curriculum, another example of how progressive ideology has seeped into even the most prestigious educational environments.
Politically, Hunts trajectory has been rapid despite these controversies. He first ran for Congress in 2020, winning the Republican nomination but losing to Democratic incumbent Lizzie Fletcher, then captured Texas newly created 38th Congressional District in 2023 and secured reelection in 2024, positioning himself as a prominent conservative voice on cultural and educational issues.
For conservatives, the record emerging from Hunts time at the Harris Center raises difficult but necessary questions about how deeply DEI and intersectional ideology have penetrated public institutionsand how even Republican officials can find themselves entangled in structures that advance left-wing priorities.
Hunts allies argue that his experience on the board served as a wake-up call that sharpened his resolve to fight these ideas in Congress, while critics contend that his votes and absences reflect a troubling inconsistency between his rhetoric and his record, a tension that Texas voters and the broader conservative movement will have to weigh as he continues to climb the political ladder.
Login