NASHVILLE, TN– A Tennessee Spanish-language media reporter who claimed she was wrongly detained for more than two weeks was released Thursday after posting bail recently allowed by a judge, her lawyers said.
Stephanie Rodriguez Flores, A Nashville Noticias reporter who wrote stories critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was in ICE custody after she was arrested March 4 during a traffic stop. She was detained at the jail in Etowah County, Alabama, and then at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basil, Louisiana.
“We are grateful that Estefany has been able to leave behind her freedom to be with her family while she continues to fight for her right to remain in her community and in the United States,” Mike Holley, Rodriguez’s attorney, said in a statement.
Rodriguez, a Colombian citizen, entered the United States legally and has been living in the country for five years, according to court records provided by her attorney. She has a valid work permit and has applied for political asylum and legal status through her husband, who is a US citizen. She had no criminal history, an established employment record, connections to the community, and had a 7-year-old daughter at home, her attorneys said.
In a wrongful detention lawsuit aided by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, Rodriguez’s lawyers say she was targeted because her reporting was 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 said there was no such violation of what the agency’s discretionary decision to initiate deportation proceedings was, and said First Amendment rights “may not even apply to an illegal alien.”
A Louisiana immigration judge on Monday set bail at $10,000 for her release.
Holly said they plan to pursue the wrongful detention case and are working on not only her full release, “but also an order preventing ICE from mistreating her in a similar manner in the future.”
Rodriguez applied for asylum before her visa expired in September 2021, and remained in the country because she faced persecution in Colombia and because leaving the United States would mean abandoning her asylum claim, her lawyers wrote. She was granted a work permit while awaiting her asylum interview in February 2022.
Her lawyers say the arrest was an illegal seizure without a warrant and violated the Fourth Amendment because authorities had no reason to believe she was likely to flee before obtaining a warrant. Lawyers representing the federal government say they have a warrant for her arrest, but her lawyers were skeptical of its authenticity. It was dated two days before the arrest, handwritten, crumpled, did not contain her identification number, and left the service certificate section blank, they wrote. Another note was written on 4 March.
ICE twice rescheduled a meeting with Rodriguez about her case, first because the office was closed during a winter storm and a second time because the agent couldn’t find her appointment in the system, Rodriguez’s attorney said in court documents.
A new date was then set for the meeting on March 17.
Media said Rodriguez was with her husband in a car marked Nashville Noticias when she was surrounded by several other cars and taken to a detention center.
One of her attorneys, Joel Coxander, said it took more than 10 days before Rodriguez was allowed to speak to him.
Several newspaper associations have put forward their own legal brief, warning of the potential risks posed by the arrest of reporters who are not US citizens.
“The expected consequence of the arrest and detention of these individuals is to end this speech and suppress a significant amount of future speech, especially by non-citizen journalists who fear that aggressive reporting on sensitive topics will lead to their detention,” according to the brief led by the Journalists Committee for Freedom of the Press.
After her arrest, Rodriguez was transported to the Etowah County Jail in Alabama. After one day there, before being flown to Louisiana, an officer asked her if she had lice, and she was taken back to prison. She was held in isolation for approximately five days, then was forced to undress in a shower room where an officer poured a chemical liquid on her head, burning her eyes, the file said.
It was then transferred to Louisiana on March 12.