Priscilla Villarreal built a following in the way modern news often grows now. Not through printing presses or broadcast towers, but through a Facebook page that drew more than 200,000 people into its orbit.
In Laredo, Texas, under the name La Gordiloca, she reported quickly, conversationally, sometimes uncomfortably close to the raw edge of events.
In 2017, she texted a police officer to confirm the identities of two victims, one from a suicide, one from a car accident. She received answers. She published them.
Months later, she was arrested.
The law used against her had been sitting unused for 23 years. It makes it a felony to solicit nonpublic information from a government official “with intent to obtain a benefit.”
In Villarreal’s case, authorities argued that the benefit was popularity, more followers, more attention, more reach.
In other words, doing well at the job became the job’s alleged crime.
A state judge dismissed the charges, finding the statute too vague to stand. That might have sounded like a resolution, the system correcting itself in the end.
Instead, it became the beginning of a second act.
Villarreal filed a civil rights lawsuit against the officials involved in her arrest. The response was immediate and familiar within legal circles: “Qualified immunity.”
The doctrine protects government officials from liability unless there is already a court decision declaring nearly identical conduct unconstitutional.
No case had ever addressed the idea of arresting a journalist for asking a question over text.
A three-judge panel initially sided with Villarreal, stating, “If the First Amendment means anything, it surely means that a citizen journalist has the right to ask a public official a question, without fear of being imprisoned. Yet that is exactly what happened here: Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question. If that is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it’s hard to imagine what would be.”
The clarity of that statement did not last.
Hellbound and Down 