By Matt Agorist
Laredo, TX — If you report a story before the police department is scheduled to release it to local media, you can and will be arrested and charged with a felony. For those who seek proof that alternative media is under attack, one needn’t look any further than the case of Priscilla Villarreal.
Villarreal runs an alternative media platform out of Laredo and operates it on a news page on Facebook called LaGordiloca. Earlier this month, Villarreal was arrested and charged with two counts of “misuse of official information,” a third-degree felony for operating that page.
As Texas Monthly reports, Villarreal, 32, turned herself in to Laredo police on December 13 after being charged with two felony counts of “misuse of official information,” stemming from her reporting on a Border Patrol agent’s suicide last April. Villarreal denies that she did anything illegal, and her attorney says the police department is simply trying to silence her because it does not like the way she reports. She often swears while she narrates her live-streamed footage, and she sometimes captures graphic images. She has been known to verbally spar with police officers in public.
Villarreal did nothing illegal. She stole no secrets, was not some NSA whistleblower and the information she reported did not cause anyone harm nor place anyone in danger. Villarreal, who runs the Facebook page LaGordiloca—with nearly 84,000 fans—simply published the same information the police department published publicly—only before they did.
Yes, that is all she did and the police actually admit this is all she did.