NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A reporter for a Spanish-language news outlet in Tennessee who contends she was wrongly held in detention for more than two weeks was released Thursday after paying a bond recently allowed by a judge, her attorneys said.
Estefany Rodríguez Flórez, a reporter for Nashville Noticias who has done stories critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had been in ICE custody after her arrest on March 4 during a traffic stop.
She was held in jail in Etowah County, Alabama, then in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana.
“We are grateful that Estefany is able to walk away with her freedom to be with her family as she continues to fight for her right to remain in her community and in the US," Mike Holley, an attorney for Rodríguez, said in a statement.
Rodríguez, a Colombian citizen, entered the U.S. lawfully and has been living in the country for the past five years, according to court records filed by her lawyer. She has a valid work permit, and she has applied for political asylum and legal status through her husband, who is a U.S. citizen. She had no criminal history, a steady employment record, ties to the community, and a 7-year-old daughter at home, her attorneys said.
In a wrongful detention court challenge aided by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, Rodríguez's attorneys argue she was targeted because her reporting has been critical of ICE's practices under President Donald Trump's administration, saying her First Amendment rights and Fifth Amendment due process rights were violated.
The government has said there was no such violation for what was the agency's discretionary decision to begin removal proceedings and said First Amendment rights “may not even be applicable to an illegal alien.”
On Monday, an immigration judge in Louisiana set a $10,000 bond for her release.
Holley said they plan to continue with the wrongful detention case and are working for not only her full release, "but an order prohibiting ICE from mistreating her in a similar way in the future.”
Rodríguez applied for asylum before her visa expired in September 2021, and she has remained in the country because she faced persecution in Colombia and because leaving the U.S. would mean abandoning her asylum application, her attorneys wrote. Her permit to work while awaiting an asylum interview was granted in February 2022.
Her attorneys say the arrest was an unlawful, warrantless seizure that violated the Fourth Amendment because authorities did not have a reason to think she was likely to escape before a warrant could be obtained. Attorneys representing the federal government say they had an arrest warrant, but her attorneys were skeptical of its validity. It was dated two days before the arrest, handwritten, crumpled, lacked her identification number and left the certificate of service section blank, they wrote. Another warrant was typed up and dated March 4.
Rodríguez’s lawyer said in court documents that ICE had twice rescheduled a meeting with Rodríguez on her case, first because the office was closed during a winter storm and the second time because an agent couldn’t find her appointment in the system.
A new meeting was then set for March 17.
Rodríguez was with her husband in a marked Nashville Noticias vehicle when it was surrounded by several other vehicles and she was taken to a detention center, the news outlet has said.
One of her attorneys, Joel Coxander, said it was more than 10 days before Rodríguez was allowed to speak with him.
Several press associations have put forth their own legal brief, warning of potential pitfalls from arresting reporters who are not U.S. citizens.
“The predictable consequence of the arrest and detention of these individuals is to end that speech and to chill a vast amount of future speech, especially by non-citizen journalists fearful that hard-hitting reporting on sensitive topics could lead to their detention,” according to the brief led by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
After her arrest, Rodríguez was moved to a county jail in Etowah in Alabama. Following a day there, before she could be flown to Louisiana an officer asked if she had lice, and she was taken back to the jail. She was held in isolation for about five days, then forced to strip in a shower room where an officer poured a chemical liquid on her head that burned her eyes, the filing says.
She was then moved to Louisiana on March 12.
