AUSTIN, Texas Texas Republican leaders face a new federal lawsuit over their attempt to question the voting rights of nearly 100,000 people, this one claiming they personally conspired to suppress the votes of naturalized citizens and racial minorities.

A lawsuit filed early Saturday morning in U.S. district court in Corpus Christi by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund accused several top Texas Republicans of conspiring to suppress suffrage rights by coordinating an unfounded voter purge campaign with threats of criminal prosecution aimed at naturalized citizen voters.

The complaint targets the states top GOP officials Gov. Greg Abbott, Secretary of State David Whitley and Attorney General Ken Paxton and seeks damages if a judge finds that their alleged conspiracy violates the Voting Rights Act.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of several Texas voters and three organizations that run voter registration projects, is the latest in a string of legal challenges seeking to overturn a controversial voter probe that Republican leaders cite as evidence of voter fraud, but critics deride as a thinly veiled attempt to suppress the vote of naturalized citizens, who are overwhelmingly of Latin American or Asian birth.

Its become clear as the purge effort has unraveled over the course of a week and the state officials have refused to withdraw the purge list that their real intentions are not related to maintaining the integrity of the voter rolls, MALDEF attorney Nina Perales told HuffPost, but instead are to take eligible voters off the rolls and intimidate naturalized citizens from voting.