Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
In 2017, police in Laredo, Texas, issued an arrest warrant for Priscilla Villarreal Treviño, a citizen journalist who runs a bilingual Facebook page with more than two hundred thousand followers—nearly as many people as live in the city.
Villarreal is known locally as La Gordiloca, which roughly translates to “the chubby crazy lady,” though it has a more affectionate connotation in Spanish. ( “Everything sounds better in Spanish,” she told me.) She’s known for spitfire Spanglish livestreams and videos of local crime and corruption. In a 2019 profile, the New York Times described her as “the swearing muckraker upending border journalism.”
Villarreal’s aggressive style and criticism of police had made her unpopular with local authorities. Things came to a head in 2017, when she asked a police source to confirm tips she’d received about the victims of a fatal car crash and the name of a border patrol officer who’d committed suicide. That December, police charged her under a state law that makes it a felony to solicit nonpublic official information “with intent to obtain a benefit,” which they argued Villarreal was doing by promoting the information on her Facebook page.
The law was created to undercut corruption and insider dealing on government contracts, not to target journalists, and no one has ever been convicted of it, according to Reason, a libertarian magazine that has reported extensively on this case. Using it in this way seems to be a pretty clear First Amendment violation. Asking public officials for not-yet-public information is a basic and fundamental part of reporting, and criminalizing it would essentially criminalize basic journalism.
Villarreal alleges that when she was arrested, police created a “circus.” She felt “dragged through the mud, made fun of, humiliated,” she told me.
Villarreal found a lawyer and petitioned for the charges against her to be thrown out. After a Texas district court judge granted this, the state didn’t appeal and let the charges drop. She then sued the officers, the city, and the county for violating her First and Fourth Amendment rights.
Villarreal’s attorney JT Morris, of the libertarian-leaning free speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that they sued “to ensure that every citizen journalist and everyday Americans alike have the right to ask government officials questions without having to fear arrest for it”—and to have recourse if their constitutional rights are trampled.
The case has been wending its way through the courts for years. A district court judge dismissed Villarreal’s case and argued that the officers were protected by qualified immunity—a legal concept that protects police and other government officials from lawsuits unless it’s proven they violated “clearly established” constitutional or statutory rights.
Villarreal appealed, and a panel on the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in her favor. But when her case came before the full circuit court, the nation’s most hard-right and aggressively activist, it ruled in a closely divided opinion that she can’t sue. By a 9–6 split, the majority determined that there was no “obvious Unconstitutionality” to what happened to her.
But a number of judges didn’t agree—including some of the court’s most conservative members. “Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question,” Judge James Ho, who was appointed to the court by President Trump, wrote in a dissenting opinion. “If that is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it’s hard to imagine what would be.”
Villarreal’s lawyers have appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court. Her case has drawn support from numerous news organizations and groups from across the ideological spectrum. Amicus briefs have been filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and twenty-one news organizations including the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, NBC News, ProPublica, Slate, and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, as well as libertarian and conservative groups like the CATO Institute, Manhattan Institute, and the Charles Koch–backed Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
The Supreme Court, in case you missed it, is leaning pretty hard to the right itself these days. And its justices have generally taken a pretty sweeping view of qualified immunity in the past.
But the Fifth Circuit Court has at times gone too far even for those justices. In recent months, SCOTUS has paused Fifth Circuit rulings that would have prevented the Biden administration from removing razor wire installed at the border by Texas officials, blocked federal gun restrictions, and limited the administration’s ability to communicate with social media companies.
The Villarreal case won’t come up anytime soon. The Supreme Court’s dance card is full for this year, so if they decide to pick it up at all, it won’t be until 2025.
But let’s hope this is another case where the Supreme Court decides to rein in the lower court—and to protect journalists and the First Amendment.
“I hope that they understand that what was done to me was not right, and some people need to be held accountable for their actions,” Villarreal said. “Because, you know, it will only get worse.”
Other notable stories:
- Donald Trump’s conviction in the New York hush money case continued to dominate headlines through the weekend. On Friday, Trump reacted to the verdict at Trump Tower in Manhattan; MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News aired his remarks live—as did NBC, cutting into scheduled programming—but all except Fox cut away around twenty minutes in, as the event “devolved into a rambling and misleading speech,” in the Times’ words. In other news about the verdict and the press, the Times’ Jacob Bernstein profiled Barry Levine, a longtime former journalist at the National Enquirer who describes the publication’s fealty to Trump—as (further) exposed during his trial—as a “tragedy.” And Politico’s Adam Wren visited an Indiana museum dedicated to Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist who ran for president from jail in 1920 and is currently having a media moment.
- Overnight, dramatic news broke out of the Washington Post: Sally Buzbee, the executive editor since 2021, is abruptly stepping down; Matt Murray, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, will succeed her through the presidential election, at which point Robert Winnett, an editor at the British newspaper the Telegraph, will assume responsibility for the Post’s core newsroom and Murray will move to oversee a so-called “third newsroom” that will produce news for people “who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed.” (Got all that?) Both Murray and Winnett have previously worked with Will Lewis, who took over this year as the Post’s publisher and CEO. NPR’s David Folkenflik has an informative X thread on the changes and the reaction inside the Post.
- In April, Semafor’s Max Tani reported on a sharp funding crunch and internal tensions at The Intercept. Tani now reports that since his last story, those tensions “have stretched the organization to the breaking point”: its board has yet to reach an agreement with a high-level donor who has reportedly offered to support the organization, while unionized staffers have written to the board demanding changes including the firing of the CEO and chief strategy officer. Per Tani, bosses have accused staffers of singling out women executives; staffers dismissed that charge as “insulting.” Tani also reports that Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill, two high-profile Intercept journalists, seem poised to leave.
- The Intercept’s P. Nick Curran and Akela Lacy make the case that coverage of campus protests in solidarity with Gaza focused disproportionately on elite coastal schools; they argue that national news organizations have largely ignored demonstrations organized by working- and middle-class students at universities in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. “The focus on elite, coastal universities has overshadowed the breadth of the brutal police crackdowns and impunity for attacks on pro-Palestinian demonstrators,” they write, with violence against students in Rust Belt states going “largely unrecognized.”
- And—after the Broadway star Jonathan Groff was nominated for a Tony for his performance in Merrily We Roll Along, a Sondheim musical that charts its characters’ lives in reverse chronological order—The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman interviewed Groff about his own life, also in reverse. “That person who brings you here does diminish,” Groff said at the end of the interview, about his arrival in New York. “The whole reason that I’m here now is because of that person, but that person no longer exists.”
ICYMI: Trial by pundit
Cameron Joseph is a freelance political reporter with recent work in The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and Politico Magazine. A recipient of the 2023 National Press Foundation Dirksen Award for distinguished reporting of Congress and the 2020 National Press Club award for excellence in political journalism, he previously worked for VICE News, Talking Points Memo, the New York Daily News, The Hill and National Journal.