DOJ says journalist arrested by ICE in the U.S has no First Amendment rights

Minara Helen: A journalist in Nashville who was arrested by immigration officers earlier this month argues that the federal government violated her First Amendment rights by “retaliating” against her reporting on the local impacts of Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice, however, claim she has no such constitutional rights. Nashville Noticias reporter Estefany Rodriguez Florez, who is originally from Colombia, was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on March 4 while in a gym parking lot inside a car stamped with her network’s logo.

Her arrest — which sparked widespread outrage from press freedom groups and free speech advocates — amounts to unconstitutional “retaliation” for “exercising her First Amendment rights as a journalist reporting on ICE enforcement activities,” according to her attorneys.

But in their response on Tuesday, lawyers with the U.S. the Attorney's Office in Tennessee argue that the Supreme Court has never “explicitly ruled that undocumented immigrants or illegal aliens have protections under the First Amendment.”

Government lawyers said her attorneys “incorrectly represent” that she “clearly has First Amendment rights.”

“Neither history nor precedent indicates that the First Amendment definitively applies to illegal aliens,” they wrote. Rodriguez Florez legally entered the U.S. on a tourist visa in 2021 and is married to a U.S. citizen. She has a seven-year-old daughter.

She applied for asylum after fleeing threats against her as a journalist in her native Colombia, and she also has applied for a green card for lawful permanent status after marrying her husband Alejandro Medina.

With a work permit, Rodriguez Florez reported for Nashville Noticias on the state of the Trump administration’s “immigration nightmare,” her attorneys wrote in court filings. She alleges that the government “retaliated against her for her past protected speech and in order to prevent or chill the future speech of herself and other journalists who report critically on ICE,” according to her attorneys.

In January, Rodriguez Florez received an unexpected notice to appear at an ICE office, what she believed was a precursor to force her asylum claim through immigration court rather than present her case through her U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services interviews while pursuing a green card. When she showed up, the ICE office was closed for a snowstorm that day, according to her attorneys.

The next time she appeared, she was provided a note from an agent who could not find her name in the system, and rescheduled her next appointment to March 17, according to court filings.

She was arrested March 4 and held inside a county jail in Alabama.

ICE scheduled to fly her to a detention center in Louisiana the next day, but she was forced back to the local jail by an officer who was suspicious she had lice, which she did not, according to documents filed by her attorneys on Monday.

She was held in isolation for five days and forced to strip naked in a shower while an officer “poured some kind of chemical liquid on her head, which seemed to be something used to clean floors and burned her eyes,” according to her attorneys.

A woman assisting her in the shower “cried to see the abuse,” attorneys wrote. On Monday, an immigration court judge granted her release from custody on $10,000 bond, an unusually high sum, but she remains detained while ICE considers an appeal.

“The First Amendment clearly protects the past and future speech of Rodriguez, who entered this country lawfully, who has developed substantial connections to the community by residing here for five years and by marrying a U.S. citizen, and who works as a journalist, both informing community members and helping their stories reach the public discourse,” according to her attorneys.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said she should be released “without delay.”

“The Department of Homeland Security and its affiliates are increasingly being used to police First Amendment rights, including freedom of the press. Rodriguez’s arrest is the latest example in a troubling pattern,” said Katherine Jacobsen, the group’s U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator.

Medina, her husband, said he’s “heartbroken.”

“I’m hoping and praying Estefany comes home soon and we’re able to proceed for her to become a permanent resident and eventually a citizen,” he told reporters Monday.

“I have the same hope and prayer for everyone across the country who is in a similar situation with a loved one that is unjustly detained or who has been deported,” he said. “Our families belong together and this broken immigration system has deeply harmed thousands upon thousands of families across the country.”

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