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“Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.” — Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786.

The First Amendment – Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

By MARIA EUGENIA GUERRA
Publisher, LareDOS Newspaper
Special to the Texas Civil Rights Review

I am stung by the oddity that the Mayor of the City of Laredo chose to deal with our disparate points of view – his and mine — by ordering my newspaper removed from the City of Laredo Convention and Visitors Bureau puesto at Laredo International Airport, a spot at which I have left LareDOS every month for many, many years so that travelers and visitors to the airport can read up on the events of our community.

There are so many aspects to his actions to consider. There’s the irony that he was on his way to Anaheim to take part in Laredo’s nomination as an All American City when he instructed the CVB employee to remove the papers and committed so egregious an un-American act as censorship of the press. There is the issue of his actions in violation of the City Charter which expressly forbids him as an elected official to instruct any City employee to perform any task. As it turns out he had also earlier instructed a City of Laredo employee at City Hall to do the same, something confirmed to radio host Jay St. John who asked the Mayor if he had really had the paper removed from the CVB desk at the airport, to which the Mayor answered, “Yeah, and the ones at City Hall, too.”

There is the oddity that this elected public official, a former federal employee, an FBI agent, would have so little regard for the First Amendment (ratified in 1791) and my right to have an opinion, to be able to express it, and to be able to print and distribute a newspaper.

There is the oddity that he called me the day before he had my papers removed, and we discussed not the removal of my papers from City edifices, but his dog Princess. He is bothered that she made two cameo appearances on the cover of LareDOS in recent months and he considers this an attack on his family. It’s important, to me, to note that for all the years I have lived in this, the city of my birth, we have never had a “First Dog” or a “First Lady.” The currency of those odd coins were minted not by us but by the Mayor, and as such carry on their meaning a vain self-importance that has become repugnant to many.

There is the oddity that he would think for a nano second that ordering my papers removed from a public building paid for by my tax dollars and federal funds would for a second silence me in any measure.

My small staff of earnest writers and I have had so many thoughts about this affront to the Constitution, this affront to us. We work hard as a team to produce one of the best-written and most respected news journals from here to Austin. I say this with not a brag in my voice; others in the brethren of the noble trade of advocacy journalism – which seeks to inform, to give voice to issues and new ideas, to foment debate – have said it of us.

In the last few days we, as journalists, have all had an opinion about the Mayor’s trample on the First Amendment and specifically on our individual freedoms of expression. As we’ve conjured dictatorships that have quashed the free press – Papa Doc, Idi Amin, Sadaam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, to name just a few — we’ve no choice but to add Raul Salinas to that dishonorable company of paper thin-shelled tyrants.

One member of my staff made a very fine point of the malice in the mayor’s actions – that of having so little disregard for the relationship of our paper with our advertisers. The Mayor meant to harm us, that is clear.

It is incredible that the avowed leader of this city, a man who participates in huge decisions for a city and a country he professes so often to love, would lose sight of what makes this country great. All those God Bless America platitudes, all those unfocused soap box tirades about terrorism with which he consumes valuable City Council meeting time seem more than ever like hollow sentiments you use to fill up the air space when you are not really a leader, not really a visionary, not really respectful of the rights of others.

To what can we attribute his disdain for the First Amendment? Low blood sugar? Flight anxiety? The strains of the job? The excitement of a junket at which his city might be named All American? I can’t come up with an explanation that eclipses the importance of the role of the freedom of the press in the expectation that government and elected officials perform in the best interest of those they serve.

What was that trite campaign slogan of the Mayor’s – right man, right time? Mayor, wrong woman, wrong newspaper.

LareDOS on the web

Concluding paragraphs to a March 22 ruling issued by Austin Federal Judge Sam Sparks–gm

The court is troubled by the evidence presented at yesterday’s hearing, in particular by the evidence that Plaintiff’s right to private consultation with their attorneys is severely limited. Even in the penitentiary, lawyers can see their clients privately. Whatever the inconvenience may be to ICE, CCA, or any other organization in the alphabet soup responsible for the Hutto facility, this court finds it hard to imagine a legitimate reason for rules giving immigrant detainees fewer rights to counsel than federal felons.

IT IS ORDERED that the restrictions on the number of clients that an attorney can see per visit and the requirement that children attend their parents’ attorney visits be REMOVED immediately.

Dear Editor,

The Coppell Citizen’s Advocate lists the Texas Civil Rights Review website as a place to find more information regarding the Charanias.
However, it looks as if all of that information has been deleted and the articles are not on the website. This worries me as people are asking me where they are. If the articles cannot be put back on the website, is there an alternative place to go to find information?

Thank you,
Ashley Pitala

Dear Reader,

Yesterday [June 22] I received a request from the Charania family to promptly remove all items pertaining to their case from the Texas Civil Rights Review website. Let us hope this means that the end to their ordeal is near.

Sincerely,
Greg Moses
Editor
Texas Civil Rights Review

By Nick Braune

Here is a small incident, but another sign of the militarization of the border. Last Monday, April 23, Amy Goodman, a nationally respected reporter (“Democracy Now”), made a fast stop at South Texas College for a presentation on the media. Having a bit of time before flying out, she asked if she could be driven over to Raymondville to get some pictures of the immigration detention tents she had heard about. She was not planning anything public or planning on going in for interviews, or anything like that. But apparently, the car she was in got too close to the tents and she and the other passengers in a car were met by a man in a CCA (Corrections Corporation of America ) uniform holding a rifle (shotgun?) at their car and yelling at them. Jennifer Clark, who is a political science instructor and a leader in the Women’s Studies Committee at South Texas College , was driving the car.

Author: Jenny. Please tell me what happened at the fascistic Raymondville Detention Center last Monday. Did they know it was Amy Goodman?

Clark : I don’t think they knew it was her, I was driving in my car: Amy and I were in the front and John Jones [a progressive political scientist who runs Virtual Citizens, an internet newsletter] and Denis Moynihan (Amy’s outreach coordinator) were in the back. The guard in the truck came from nowhere and drove at us fast, stopping an inch or so from my car totally cutting me off from moving any further. He said that he thought we were “escaping” from the facility which did not make sense as we were driving towards not away. He literally escorted us off the premises with his gun pointed at us the whole time. There was no warning at all. When we got to the front gate a Raymondville police car had arrived. He accused us of trespassing and asked if we had not read the sign. We had not read seen the sign as we had approached the side of the facility.

**********

From Democracy Now! transcript, April 27, 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, I went down to Raymondville, Texas, to this vast tent detention camp right behind a prison. As soon as we got there, we were met by the security, and they cocked their guns at us, one of the men in the pickup truck saying we got to get off the property now. We reported on the Jonathan Hutto facility, where kids are held, hundreds of kids — the ACLU is suing now — and talked to a nine-year-old boy named Kevin, who said, “I just want to go home. I just want to be free.” What about these prisons?

DAVID BACON: Well, the Bush administration is privatizing the enforcement of immigration law. They’re building huge detention facilities, which are run by private corporations, like Halliburton, for instance. Halliburton has started to build these. And this is part of the increased enforcement program that the Bush administration has. This is sort of like the flipside of the guestworker programs, to say — you know, to try and negotiate or to establish new guestworker programs to bring people to the US as contract workers, and for anybody who’s not part of that program, to begin to arrest people, detain people, as we’re seeing in these raids, put them into these kinds of — you know, I would say they’re close to concentration camps, really, but that are also sort of private business giveaways to Bush cronies.