Tag: 14th amendment

A Jury Approves Damages After 2 Texas Cops Snatched a Supposedly ‘Abandoned’ Girl From Her Home

More than seven years after two Texas cops kidnapped a teenaged girl they falsely claimed had been “abandoned,” a federal jury has concluded that the officers violated her Fourth Amendment rights by unreasonably seizing her from her home. In a verdict delivered last week, the jurors said that seizure also violated her parents’ due process rights under the 14th Amendment. And they agreed that one of the officers had violated the Fourth Amendment by searching the family’s kitchen without a warrant, consent, or exigent circumstances. In the second phase of the trial, the jurors approved $175,000 in compensatory damages and $125,000 in punitive damages.

The verdict validates constitutional claims that Megan and Adam McMurry made in a  federal lawsuit they filed in October 2020, two years after Officers Alexandra Weaver and Kevin Brunner, both of whom worked for the Midland Independent School District, visited their apartment and left with their daughter, Jade, then 14. That intervention, the jury concluded, was not justified in the circumstances, since Jade was not in any danger. The verdict “was vindicating after having our lives turned upside down and trampled through for the past seven and a half years,” Megan McMurry told KMID, the ABC affiliate in Midland.

The bizarre episode at the center of the case happened when Adam McMurry, then a member of the National Guard, was deployed to the Middle East, and Megan McMurry, a special education teacher at Abell Junior High School in Midland, was in Kuwait looking into a job that would have allowed the family to live near him. Megan McMurry had alerted her colleagues to her trip and had asked two neighbors, Vanessa and Gabe Vallejos, to keep an eye on Jade and her brother, Connor, then 12, who was a student at the school where McMurry worked.

On October 26, 2018, the guidance counselor who was supposed to take Connor to school was ill, so she texted Weaver, who lived in the neighborhood, asking if she could give Connor a ride. Although another Abell employee ended up bringing Connor to school, Weaver’s involvement did not end there.

Weaver was convinced that Jade had been “abandoned” and was in urgent need of a “welfare check.” Brunner, her supervisor, agreed, which is how they both ended up at the McMurrys’ apartment that morning.

Jade, who was homeschooled and in the midst of her online studies, did not understand what the cops were doing there. But within a minute, they had decided she needed to be rescued.

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Fifth Circuit Affirms Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in Cloud Storage in Dropbox Case

A federal appeals court has ruled that state officials violated the Fourth Amendment when they orchestrated the covert retrieval of documents from a nonprofit’s Dropbox folder, an outcome that significantly strengthens legal protections for digital privacy in cloud-based environments.

In a 25-page decision issued May 28, 2025, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that The Heidi Group, a Texas-based pro-life healthcare organization, had a reasonable expectation of privacy in its digital files and that a state investigator’s role in acquiring them without judicial authorization amounted to an unconstitutional search.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

Writing for the court, Judge Andrew S. Oldham emphasized that the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches extends to “the content of stored electronic communications,” including files housed in commercial cloud platforms.

“Heidi has a reasonable expectation of privacy in its documents and files uploaded to Dropbox,” the opinion stated. “Heidi’s records are analogous to letters, phone calls, emails, and social media messages: Each contains information content transmitted through or stored with an intermediary that is not intended to ‘be broadcast to the world.’”

The controversy arose after Phyllis Morgan, a former employee of The Heidi Group, exploited her lingering access to the organization’s Dropbox folder for nearly a year after being terminated.

Rather than reporting the breach or seeking lawful channels to obtain the data, a senior investigator from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), Gaylon Dacus, allegedly encouraged the ex-employee to continue accessing the nonprofit’s confidential materials and forward them to the state.

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Understanding the 14th Amendment

In his efforts to get illegal immigration resolved and/or reversed, President Elect Trump has recently hinted of an executive action to repeal birthright citizenship. This seems to indicate a multiple level of misunderstanding the Constitution of the United States. First is his premise of overriding a Constitutional provision via executive or legislative action. When will our elected officials stop with the efforts to ignore or rewrite a Constitutional provision without taking it to the States?

Secondly, Trump could accomplish his goal by ABIDING by the 14th Amendment. In an excellent article by Professor Edward J. Erler in July of 2008, he helps us to understand the original intent behind the citizenship clause. Section one of the Amendment (which contains the citizenship clause) begins as, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Professor Erler states,

“…during the debate of the [14th A]mendment, Senator Jacob Howard of Ohio, the author of the citizenship clause, attempted to assure skeptical colleagues that the new language was not intended to make Indians citizens of the U.S. Indians, Howard conceded, were born within the nation’s geographical limits, but he steadfastly maintained that they were not subject to its jurisdiction because they owed allegiance to their tribes. Senator Lyman Trumbull, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, rose to support his colleague, arguing that ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ meant ‘not owing allegiance to anybody else and being subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.’ Jurisdiction understood as allegiance, Senator Howard interjected, excludes not only Indians but ‘persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.’ Thus ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ does not simply mean, as is commonly thought today, subject to American laws or American courts. It means owing exclusive political allegiance to the U.S.”

In the past there has been support from the Mexican government itself for asserting this argument as applied to illegal aliens in the U.S. of any nationality. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon helped us better understand this provision of the 14th Amendment in 2008 while attending the opening of a Mexican Consulate in New Orleans. A report of the event notes,

“At the opening of the consulate, President Calderon, said Mexico wants to assist and protect its citizens in the states of Louisiana and Mississippi that the consulate will serve,” and further quotes the former president: “With the reopening of this consulate, we will be able to guarantee those Mexicans who live and work in Louisiana and Mississippi that they will have the support of the Mexican government. It is my commitment that no matter where there is a Mexican citizen, he or she will also have the support of our government.”

Author asserts that these are basically re-statements of the Constitutional provisions as explained in Professor Erler’s article, courtesy of the then president of Mexico.

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Birthright Citizenship: The 14th Amendment Does Not Apply to Illegal Aliens

America is about to go to war over whether the government has the power to deport entire families of illegal aliens. That question involves “birthright citizenship”—that is, whether a child born in the U.S. to illegal alien parents is automatically a U.S. citizen and, thus, an “anchor baby?”

The answer, by any fair reading of the Constitution and history, is “No.”

Our nation must have complete control of our borders. No illegal alien should be able to circumvent the laws of our nation. English common law, the basis for U.S. law, did not allow such people, the children of “hostile occupiers,” to become citizens by virtue of birth. Moreover, the 14th Amendment, which was passed to cure the ill of slavery, establishes a two-part test for citizenship that seemingly codifies English common law and is clearly meant to apply to those who came here against their will and their descendants, not to criminal invaders.

The anchor baby problem is significant. Donald Trump recently said that the Biden administration has “abolished what remained of America’s borders and turned the United States into a dumping ground for illegal aliens from all over the world.” A lowball guess is that Biden’s lawless conduct allowed in at eight least million illegal aliens, although the number could easily be twice that.

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