{"id":1851,"date":"2019-02-22T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T10:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/?p=1851"},"modified":"2019-02-19T01:00:14","modified_gmt":"2019-02-19T01:00:14","slug":"prelude-to-the-end-of-culture-texas-born-citizen-detained-for-speaking-spanish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/2019\/02\/22\/prelude-to-the-end-of-culture-texas-born-citizen-detained-for-speaking-spanish\/","title":{"rendered":"Prelude to the end of culture: Texas-born citizen detained for speaking Spanish"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Two Montana women were detained at a gas station by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol last May simply because they were speaking Spanish.
According to Vox<\/em>, Ana Suda and Martha Hernandez were questioned by a uniformed officer as they waited in line to buy milk and eggs at a convenience store in Havre, Montana \u2014 a tiny town 35 miles from the U.S. border with Canada. The officer then detained the two women, who are American citizens, for 30 to 40 minutes outside by his patrol car.
Now the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit on their behalf, accusing Customs and Border Protection of violating their constitutional rights.
These types of incidents are becoming ever prevalent in a pattern of abuse of power by Customs and Border Patrol.
\u201cThe problem with that is that there are millions and millions of people who are Spanish speakers who are U.S. citizens or who are otherwise lawfully in the U.S., so knowing that somebody speaks Spanish doesn\u2019t tell you anything about whether they are or not undocumented,\u201d said Cody Wofsy, a lawyer with the ACLU, Immigrants\u2019 Rights Project in San Francisco. \u201cThat is exactly the kind of assumption that this case shows is problematic.\u201d
The Border Patrol agent justified his decision around the fact that they were speaking Spanish in a store in a state that predominately speaks English.
\u201cMs. Hernandez and Ms. Suda no longer feel comfortable speaking Spanish in public, and fear that if they do so, or otherwise express their Latinx identity, they will be stopped and questioned by CBP agents,\u201d their lawyer, Alex Rate, wrote in the complaint.
That is part of the real issue.
If Customs and Border Patrol do not play their cards very carefully, people will start to think that the government is trying to erase other cultures in another white-washing attempt.
It would be hard not to think so.
Suda and Hernandez, born in Texas and California respectively, were speaking Spanish, a perfectly normal thing to do, and they were profiled for it.
\u201cThere was no legitimate reason for Agent O\u2019Neal and other CBP agents to detain Ms. Suda and Ms. Hernandez. Speaking Spanish does not establish reasonable suspicion to justify a stop and detention, much less probable cause for an arrest,\u201d Rate said.
In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce<\/em>, a 1975 Supreme Court case, the Court ruled that it was a violation of the Fourth Amendment for Border Patrol agents to stop a car only because the driver looked Mexican. But while the Court agreed that \u201capparent Mexican ancestry\u201d does not, on its own, justify reasonable suspicion that a person is undocumented, the justices did rule that it is a \u201crelevant factor.\u201d
It seems likely that Suda and Hernandez will win their case. However, with the current Supreme Court leaning I would not be surprised if they lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two Montana women were detained at a gas station by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol last May simply because they were speaking Spanish. According to… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[160],"class_list":["post-1851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"aioseo_notices":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"authors":[{"term_id":160,"user_id":6,"is_guest":0,"slug":"christopher-n","display_name":"Christopher Neal","avatar_url":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/wp-content\/litespeed\/avatar\/317b48bd3fc6b7bc409e99ad28e2c4e1.jpg?ver=1778637593","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1852,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1851\/revisions\/1852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1851"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=1851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}