A Texas couple has pleaded guilty to federal charges after prosecutors revealed they used social media to defraud dozens of homeowners out of nearly $5 million under the guise of custom homes and renovations. 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, Christopher and Raquelle Judge, a married couple from Fort Worth, admitted to carrying out an elaborate scheme to deceive customers through their home renovation business, Judge DFW LLC, between August 2020 and January 2023. 

The pair billed themselves as a one-stop shop for custom architecture, interior design and construction services, luring customers through social media to advertise their business while falsely claiming Christopher was an experienced architect. 

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“They came out to our house… and really pitched themselves as like this Chip and Joanna Gaines type of vibe,” Lane Simmons, one of the Judges’ clients, told WFAA.

Federal prosecutors revealed the couple would present clients with below-market bids to secure building contracts, before starting projects that were never finished and ultimately left victims with incomplete residences. 

In the town of Runaway Bay, Christopher Judge reportedly was slapped with a total of 424 citations for code enforcement violations, which ultimately led to the FBI taking up the case.

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“There were families whose kids did not get Christmas for a year or two,” Kalie Simmons, another victim of the Judges, told FOX 4. “There were families that filed bankruptcy.” 

Plea documents indicate the Judges defrauded over 40 victims throughout six Texas counties, involving at least 24 different construction projects.

Court documents also showed the pair commingled victims’ payments in their primary business account, often pulling installment payments from individuals to fund unrelated construction projects – amassing a total of around $4.8 million in losses. 

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Federal prosecutors say the pair then spent the money on mortgage payments, living expenses and even plastic surgery while evading questions from their victims regarding delays in construction and incomplete projects.

“You just need to be careful about who you give the money to,” Roper, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, told FOX 4. “If it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not true.”

“You gotta wonder what happened to the money,” Roper said.

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Last month, Christopher Judge pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years behind bars in federal prison. Raquelle Judge also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which has a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. 

Fox News Digital was unable to immediately locate Christopher Judge’s attorney for comment. Raquelle Judge’s attorney did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. 

The pair is scheduled to be sentenced separately later this year, according to federal prosecutors. 

A coalition of anti-Trump state attorneys general met “daily” during 2025 to brainstorm and organize ways to foil the administration, according to George Soros-backed New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who has been an active member of the group.

In an interview with Source New Mexico published on Dec. 31, Torrez said that he and other Democratic attorneys general “were meeting on a daily basis for the first 90 or so days” of President Donald Trump’s second term. Since then, Torrez told the outlet, “We have since taken that down to every other day.”

According to Source New Mexico, the result has been that Torrez has led or signed onto 36 legal challenges against the Trump administration since January 2025. This has included a challenge to the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., as well as contesting the Department of Government Efficiency and opposition to some of the administration’s immigration actions.   

In the interview, Torrez described this opposition to Trump as an enormous undertaking and an “ever-growing resource challenge to track and monitor the pending status of all that litigation.”

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Torrez has been New Mexico’s attorney general since 2023. He got his political start in 2016 when he successfully ran for Bernalillo County district attorney. During his 2016 campaign, he received the support of left-leaning super PAC New Mexico Safety & Justice, which was bankrolled by Soros.

According to a June 2016 expenditures and contributions report publicly available on the New Mexico Secretary of State’s website, New Mexico Safety & Justice received a $107,000 donation from Soros. The same filing shows the group spent $92,526.84 on media buys and media production costs in support of Torrez. The group also spent $9,555.00 on “In-Kind Polling to Progressive Champions NM PAC” and $1,951.40 on “polling.”

Torrez’s Republican opponent, Simon Kubiak, dropped out of the race after the contribution. According to 2016 reporting by the New Mexico Political Report, Kubiak cited Torrez’s campaign finances as the reason for his dropping out.

The outlet reported Kubiak saying that “New Mexicans cannot afford to challenge anyone who has unlimited resources and support from a multibillionaire from another country,” in an apparent reference to Soros, who is originally from Hungary and lives in New York.

After serving two terms as Bernalillo County district attorney, Torrez was elected attorney general of New Mexico in 2022. He took office in 2023.

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Torrez launched his first lawsuit against the administration one day after Trump returned to the Oval Office. On Jan. 21, Torrez joined 17 other state attorneys general and the attorney general of D.C. in challenging Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants.

In a statement released at the time, Torrez called Trump’s order “a direct attack on the Constitution and the fundamental rights it guarantees to every child born on American soil.” The order is currently blocked while the case is ongoing.

The next month, Torrez led a lawsuit against the Trump administration over DOGE, arguing that Elon Musk and the department were unlawfully granted authority to carry out the planned budget cuts.   

In April, Torrez joined 19 other attorneys general in a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

Then in September, Torrez filed an amicus brief in support of another lawsuit challenging the administration’s deployment of troops to D.C.

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According to the interview, Torrez and others in the coalition began preparing for a Trump administration in “early 2024.” Since then, Torrez said, “We have kept our foot on the gas.”

At the same time, Torrez lamented that “the sad part” is that “some of these actions that were pursued by the administration through executive orders are now being built into the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ so even if we win on the restoration of funding from the first fiscal year, we’ll be overtaken by federal legislation.”

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Torrez told the outlet that “none of the institutions in our government have been built to respond and react to the scale and speed of the destruction that’s being wrought by the Trump administration.”

Fox News Digital reached out to Torrez’s office and campaign and Soros’ Open Society Foundation for comment but did not immediately receive a response. 

Archaeologists and students recently uncovered an 18th-century Catholic mission in Texas — a discovery that clarifies a key chapter in the early history of the Lone Star State.

Excavators from Texas Tech University (TTU) unearthed remains belonging to Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo (Mission Our Lady of the Holy Spirit), an abandoned settlement in Jackson County. 

With the help of students, excavators discovered proof of the missing site, which resolves “decades of searching” and “fill[s] a long-standing gap in the historical record of early Texas,” the university said in a recent release.

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Pictures show excavators and archaeologists-in-training smiling at the site, located in southeastern Texas.

Excavation leader Tamra Walter, an associate professor of archaeology at TTU, told Fox News Digital this week that her team found numerous artifacts during the dig.

“We found lead shot and sprue, sourced to the mines in Boca de Leones in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, rose head nails — indicative of this time period — [and] parts of a copper kettle, including a handle,” she noted.

Her team also found pottery, plus fired clay and daub from the mud huts of the time — as well as brass trade rings, a part of a pair of scissors and “a number of as-yet unidentified objects.”

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The mission was related to Presidio La Bahía, a Spanish fort, and Fort St. Louis, a colony established by French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.

La Salle’s settlement, which failed, prompted Spain to reassert control over the region. The Spanish crown promptly launched expeditions, and Mission Espíritu Santo was part of Spain’s effort to “pay serious attention to Texas for the first time,” said Walter.

The religious settlement was only occupied from 1721 to 1725. The professor said that one of the main reasons for its early demise was difficulty in attracting Karankawa Native Americans to the mission.

“They relied heavily on the labor of Native converts, and without them, they didn’t have the manpower to establish and maintain crops and livestock to keep the operation going,” she said.

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“The local environment was also challenging. It was hot, the area was full of mosquitoes and there were alligators living in the nearby creek.”

The weather combined with difficulty surviving in mud huts led the missionaries to move westward to Goliad, Texas, to set up a new site.

What makes the mission’s remains so special is their rarity. Mission Espíritu Santo was “one of the earliest definitively located Spanish missions in Texas,” Walter said. 

She added that the excavation “helps to provide a rare, undisturbed snapshot of daily life on the Spanish frontier in the early 18th century.”

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“Without La Salle’s colony, this mission and presidio likely would not have existed, and the events that unfolded here helped change the course of Texas history,” she said.

Walter added that her students were “very excited” to be part of the search for the mission.

“They also had the opportunity to work with professional archaeologists from the Texas Historical Commission and even a team of researchers from New Mexico,” she added. 

“I think it is also pretty exciting for them to touch the same artifacts used by the mission occupants more than 300 years ago.”