Dear Friend of Press Freedom,
Rümeysa Öztürk has been facing deportation for 227 days for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, and the government hasn’t stopped targeting journalists for deportation. Read on for news from Illinois, our latest public records lawsuit, and how you can take action to protect journalism.
Enforce ICE restraining orders now
A federal judge in Chicago yesterday entered an order to stop federal immigration officers from targeting journalists and peaceful protesters, affirming journalists’ right to cover protests and their aftermath without being assaulted or arrested.
Judge Sara Ellis entered her ruling — which extended a similar prior order against Immigration and Customs Enforcement — in dramatic fashion, quoting everyone from Chicago journalist and poet Carl Sandburg to the Founding Fathers. But the real question is whether she’ll enforce the order when the feds violate it, as they surely will. After all, they violated the prior order repeatedly and egregiously.
Federal judges can fine and jail people who violate their orders. But they rarely use those powers, especially against the government. That needs to change when state thugs are tearing up the First Amendment on Chicago’s streets. We suspect Sandburg would agree.
Journalist Raven Geary of Unraveled Press summed it up at a press conference after the hearing: “If people think a reporter can’t be this opinionated, let them think that. I know what’s right and what’s wrong. I don’t feel an ounce of shame saying that this is wrong.”
Congratulations to Geary and the rest of the journalists and press organizations in Chicago and Los Angeles that are standing against those wrongs by taking the government to court and winning. Listen to Geary’s remarks here.
Journalists speak out about abductions from Gaza aid flotillas
We partnered with Defending Rights & Dissent to platform three U.S. journalists who were abducted from humanitarian flotillas bound for Gaza and detained by Israel.
They discussed the inaction from their own government in the aftermath of their abduction, shared their experiences while detained, and reflected on what drove them to take this risk while so many reporters are self-censoring.
We’ll have a write-up of the event soon, but it deserves to be seen in full. Watch it here.
FPF takes ICE to court over dangerous secrecy
We filed yet another Freedom of Information Act lawsuit this week — this time to uncover records on ICE’s efforts to curtail congressional access to immigration facilities.
“ICE loves to demand our papers but it seems they don’t like it as much when we demand theirs,” attorney Ginger Quintero-McCall of Free Information Group said.
If you are a FOIA lawyer who is interested in working with us pro bono or for a reduced fee on FOIA litigation, please email [email protected].
Read more about our latest lawsuit here.
If Big Tech can’t withstand jawboning, how can individual journalists?
Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz convened yet another congressional hearing on Biden-era “jawboning” of Big Tech companies. The message: Government officials leaning on these multibillion-dollar conglomerates to influence the views they platform was akin to censorship.
Sure, the Biden administration’s conduct is worth scrutinizing and learning from. But if you accept the premise that gigantic tech companies are susceptible to soft pressure from a censorial government, doesn’t it go without saying that so are individual journalists who lack anything close to those resources?
We wrote about the numerous instances of “jawboning” of individual reporters during the current administration that Senate Republicans failed to address at their hearing. Read more here.
Tell lawmakers from both parties to oppose Tim Burke prosecution
Conservatives are outraged at Tucker Carlson for throwing softballs to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. But the Trump administration is continuing its predecessor’s prosecution of journalist Tim Burke for exposing Tucker Carlson whitewashing another antisemite — Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
Lawmakers shouldn’t stand for this hypocrisy, regardless of political party. Tell them to speak up with our action center.
What we’re reading
FBI investigating recent incident involving feds in Evanston, tries to block city from releasing records (Evanston RoundTable). Apparently obstructing transparency at the federal level is no longer enough and the government now wants to meddle with municipal police departments’ responses to public records requests.
To preserve records, Homeland Security now relies on officials to take screenshots (The New York Times). The new policy “drastically increases the likelihood the agency isn’t complying with the Federal Records Act,” FPF’s Lauren Harper told the Times.
When your local reporter needs the same protection as a war correspondent (Poynter). Foreign war correspondents get “hostile environment training, security consultants, trauma counselors and legal teams. … Local newsrooms covering militarized federal operations in their own communities? Sometimes all we have is Google, group chats and each other.”
YouTube quietly erased more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations (The Intercept). “It is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view,” said Katherine Gallagher of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Plea to televise Charlie Kirk trial renews Senate talk of cameras in courtrooms (Courthouse News Service). It’s past time for cameras in courtrooms nationwide. None of the studies have ever substantiated whatever harms critics have claimed transparency would cause. Hopefully, the Kirk trial will make this a bipartisan issue.
When storytelling is called ‘terrorism’: How my friend and fellow journalist was targeted by ICE (The Barbed Wire). “The government is attempting to lay a foundation for dissenting political beliefs as grounds for terrorism. And people like Ya’akub — non-white [or] non-Christian — have been made its primary examples. Both journalists; like Mario Guevara … and civilians.”
