Before Muslims pray, they perform wudu — rinsing hands and feet. It takes a couple of minutes and it needs a place to sit and a tap at the right height. Airports around the world install them for the same reason they install chapels, water fountains and nursing rooms: people are in the building for hours.

Houston's airport has had an ablution room at its international terminal since 2024, described as for use by people of all faiths. Dallas Fort Worth has had a station inside its Terminal D interfaith chapel since 2019 — "seven years of one of these stations with no issues or concerns that we're aware of," a DFW spokesperson told KERA.

On Friday, Greg Abbott announced he is reviewing every state and federal grant dollar going to both airports because of them.

What Abbott actually did

He sent a letter to DFW's CEO Christopher McLaughlin and to the mayors of Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth, saying his office is reviewing all grant funds for facilities at their airports — and that funding would be revoked if the ablution facilities stayed in use.

He also referred both airports to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for federal investigations.

His stated reason, from the news release:

"These ablution facilities appear designed to single out one subset of the population for special treatment based on religion. That is illegal. Both airports are government-owned facilities. The federal and state constitutions prohibit government from facilitating this sort of discrimination. Just as the government cannot favor the secular over the sacred, it also cannot favor one religious view over all others."

Hold that argument up to the light. Abbott's position is that a public airport providing a washing station violates the Constitution by favoring one religion — while Houston describes its room as available to all and DFW's sits inside the airport's interfaith chapel.

By that logic, an airport chapel is unconstitutional. A kosher or halal food vendor is unconstitutional. A quiet room is unconstitutional. Abbott is not, of course, reviewing grant funding over any of those.

The rule he's applying only has one religion in it.

It worked immediately

Shortly after Abbott's announcement, a DFW spokesperson said plans for the facility had been cancelled, because it "would not deliver the originally anticipated operational benefits."

That is what an airport says when a governor threatens its grant funding on a Friday afternoon. Nobody at DFW ran a fresh cost-benefit analysis in the hour after the press release. They read the threat and complied.

Note also what state Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, who chairs the state Senate's transportation committee, sent DFW the day before Abbott's letters: six questions for the airport's board, among them "Who approved this? Who wrote the check?"

There was no check. The "private donation" everyone was chasing came from a state permit filing that the design firm, Ghafari Associates, had filled out wrong. DFW says the two proposed stations would have been paid for out of the airport's own money — concessions, parking and airline landing fees. "While we are a public facility, it would not be taxpayer dollars," a spokesperson said. The airport also put the cost nearer $120,000 than the $300,000 on the filing.

So a state senator demanded to know who was secretly funding a washing station, and the answer was: the airport, out of parking revenue, for a project the airport had not yet approved.

This is a habit, not a principle

Abbott has a documented method: find a city doing something the Republican base dislikes, then threaten its money until it stops.

• He threatened $530,000 in grants for Grand Prairie unless the city cancelled an event at a water park that had initially been advertised as a "Muslims only" gathering.
• He threatened cities' transportation funding last year unless they removed rainbow crosswalks supporting LGBTQ+ communities.
• And now: all grant funds at the two biggest airports in Texas, over foot-washing stations.

None of these are votes. None went through the Legislature. This is one man using the state's checkbook to make local governments do what he wants, on subjects he chooses.

The broader campaign

This didn't come out of nowhere. Anti-Islamic rhetoric has been at the forefront of Texas Republican messaging through the year, with GOP leaders railing for months about ending the so-called "Islamification" of Texas.

We've traced where that panic actually comes from. In Little Rock, the supposed "Sharia takeover" that mobilized a governor, an attorney general, a state bill and a 50-member congressional caucus turned out to be five houses in a subdivision that had been there nearly two decades — two of them occupied by Christians. The story originated in a hate group's blog post.

Abbott himself is a direct participant. Texas Monthly reviewed 1,300 pages of emails and found that twelve of the thirteen reasons in Abbott's proclamation declaring CAIR a terrorist organization matched a report written by a fellow at a think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group — including a claim about the FBI that appears to be false.

So the pattern is: an outside group writes the material, Abbott issues the order, and Texas institutions fall in line.

Who this actually costs

Muslim Texans — most of them American citizens, many of them flying through DFW and Bush Intercontinental every week — just watched their governor put the state's grant funding on the line to stop an airport from installing a place to wash before prayer. A facility the airport was going to pay for out of its own parking and concession revenue.

And the practical outcome is a chill that runs well past one room. Every city manager and airport board in Texas now knows the price of accommodating Muslim travelers is a funding review and a federal referral. That is the point of doing it in public.

Abbott says the Constitution forbids government from favoring one religious view over all others. He should read it again.

Source

Ayden Runnels, "Abbott threatens Texas airports' funding over Islamic facilities," The Texas Tribune, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo: Image of Sport/Sipa USA via Reuters, courtesy The Texas Tribune.