US Postal Service Sued For Seizing ‘Defund Police’ Facemasks
from the 'we-thought-we-would-get-away-with-it'-is-not-a-valid-defense dept
Two years ago, just as the COVID pandemic was beginning to radically transform day-to-day life for nearly everyone on the planet, the United States Postal Service decided to protect cops from passive criticism. One month after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin personified America’s omnipresent racism by kneeling on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd until he was dead, the USPS stepped in to seize a shipment of face masks containing phrases like “Stop killing Black people” and “Defund police.”
Facemask suppliers were in short supply during the early months of the pandemic. Oakland screenprinter Movement Ink stepped up to fill the void, sending out functional masks featuring social justice-related slogans. The small business run by Oakland resident Rene Quinonez had never had any problems with the US Postal Service prior to the shipment of these masks. But the USPS suddenly decided it had a problem with his latest products and inexplicably decided to treat the First and Fourth Amendments as disposable.
The masks, ordered by activist group Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), ran the group nearly $10,000. The initial shipment of 500 masks somehow came to the attention of the US Postal Service’s investigative wing, which decided they could travel no further than the postal depot. The recipients and the sender were given no reason for the seizure. The only information they received was a notification on their tracking info that the packages had been “Seized by Law Enforcement.”
The US Postal Inspection Service never explained why it had seized these clearly not-illegal masks. The following morning, the USPS released the items — again without explanation — and refunded Movement Ink’s shipping fees. That release appeared to have been motivated solely by the bad press the USPS was racking up, and followed two days of the USPS sitting on the shipments while refusing to explain why it had flagged the products and prevented them from being received by the group that had purchased them.
This seizure may have been the move of a single dumbass employee who thought telling cops to stop killing black people was some sort of threat. More likely, it was a government agency inserting itself into a proxy discussion on police activity by deciding it should protect the powerful from criticism. And it’s likely going to cost the entire Postal Service a bit of cash. As Ryan Reilly reports for NBC News, the government is being sued for violating the Fourth Amendment by searching and seizing this shipment, as well as violating the First Amendment for trying to prevent the messages printed on the masks from being distributed.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday and shared first with NBC News, accuses U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Postal Inspection Service officials of violating constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment by improperly seizing the boxes without probable cause, a warrant, or even reasonable suspicion. The lawsuit also raises the possibility that officials violated the First Amendment by seizing the masks because of their political messaging.
Movement Ink owner René Quiñonez, who owns the screen-printing business in Oakland, California, that manufactured the masks, told NBC News that his small family business had been impacted by the seizure.
“For us as an organization, as a company, and as part of our community, our intent was to support the many activities that were going on across the country,” Quiñonez told NBC News.
As the lawsuit [PDF] notes, the USPS knew what was contained in the packages. And because it knew what words were contained in the boxes, its actions were highly suspect and most likely illegal.
As confirmed by the postal official Defendants’ internal notes memorializing the seizures and searches of those boxes, millions of packages shipped every year share the unexceptional characteristics of René’s and Movement Ink’s packages that Defendants relied on to justify their suspicionless, warrantless seizures and searches. And those same internal notes make clear that Defendants knew the packages coming from Movement Ink contained—in Defendants’ words—“BLM MASKS.” So Defendants appear to have violated not just the Fourth Amendment, but also the First Amendment, while committing several common law torts in the process.
This unexplained seizure — which followed three uneventful shipments of other masks containing similar slogans — negatively affected the small company’s business.
René and Movement Ink suffered severe reputational harm because of Defendants’ baseless seizures and searches of René’s and Movement Ink’s political mask shipments.Talks for future orders were terminated, and René could not even get a call back from many of his partners—including not only his new partners, but preexisting ones too.
For example, in addition to the recipients of the political mask shipments at issue in this case, who terminated talks for future orders, at least three other groups who had regularly ordered from and collaborated with René and Movement Ink ceased their partnerships and cut off all ties with René and Movement Ink.
According to the USPS, the packages were detained and searched for non-political reasons. Instead, they were searched for ridiculous reasons.
Defendants’ notes contend that the shipments were suspicious because of (1) “bulging contents,” (2) “frequently mailed parcels from the same sender/address,” (3) “parcel destination is a known drug trafficking area,” (4) “taped or glued on all seams,” and (5) “parcel mailed from a known drug source area.”
In other words, the packages looked like packages — sealed to prevent loss of merchandise and being sent from one area of the country to another. This justification is clearly specious. And even that belated justification is undercut by the USPS’s notes, which indicate inspectors had already determined the packages contained (in the USPS’s own words) “BLM masks.”
If the USPS moved forward with a search and seizure after determining the contents were masks with “political” slogans, it violated the First Amendment along with the Fourth Amendment. The Post Office’s “well maybe it was drugs” excuse is probably going to carry a bit of weight in the counterarguments because that’s just how the justice system works, but the rest of the allegations certainly make it appear the Post Office blocked this shipment because it didn’t like what was in the packages, not because it truly suspected what was in the packages was illegal.
Even if the Postal Service wins this lawsuit, it will still lose. The optics aren’t going to improve if the USPS can talk a judge into believing its vague statements about drug shipments add up to reasonable suspicion to investigate further, or actual probable cause for a seizure and search. What it will always look like — thanks in large part to the USPS’s own notes about “BLM masks” — is a politically motivated action that was supposed to keep people the government didn’t like from criticizing the government.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, black lives matter, free speech, masks, movement for black lives, protests, seizure, usps
Comments on “US Postal Service Sued For Seizing ‘Defund Police’ Facemasks”
Consider this a preëmptive strike.
Anyone who wants to argue that the USPS seizure talked about in this article wasn’t a form of censorship but someone getting banned from a single social media service for saying dumb bullshit is a form of censorship can kindly fuck off.
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But if the social media site is run by a government acency…
Oh look, an actual rights violation by an actual common carrier.
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But RICO it ain’t.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
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But the USPS isn’t a common carrier because it doesn’t send data packets anywhere. It’s really that simple.
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Your attempt at trolling is bad, now go sit under the bridge and ponder your faults.
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I don’t think that was trolling, I think that was Poe’s law at work.
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Since the AC specifically used Thors name it was an attempt at trolling.
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Parody of trolling = actual trolling like parody of Disney movie = movie produced by Disney. You feel me, bro?
Re: Re: 49 U.S.C. 11101(a).
California Farmers fought for the common carrier issue, replacing the state’s Constitution in their battle, 1878
https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/3636863
Until 1995, US railroads weren’t peddling packets:)
Re: Re: Re: railroads as carriers
Ahem, ``Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephon”, ca. 1978.
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Lol, but i don’t think that was packet-switched networking, even after Sprint was spun off. But they were peddling it!
Re: Re: Re:2 Gad, 850,000 words
https://cite.case.law/f-supp/556/825/
“Defendants [AT&T] began presenting their evidence, which included testimony of 1477 witnesses and introduction of over 7,900 exhibits on June 23, 1982, and concluded their case on July 2, 1982, after only eight trial days. Plaintiffs [SP] presented their evidence in rebuttal on July 9 and 12, 1982, through the testimony of nine witnesses. On July 13, 1982, plaintiffs introduced 326 rebuttal exhibits and defendants introduced 23. surrebuttal exhibits.”
(SP lost against AT&T)
Only way
they knew what was in it, was the destination.
As the Company sends Lots of packages.
The Problem I see, is the republican in charge(still from trump) or someone Inside the USPS was TOLD to Tag and bag the shipments.
The hard part is deciding WHO to fire.
The person who did it, or the person WHO TOLD them to do it.
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Why not both?
Well it only makes sense
That the USPS as a Federal Agency would act by any means possible to prevent a private party from stealing property they believed belonged to the Bureau of Land Management.
Remember that hypothetical situation I propounded a few weeks ago? I guess it’s no longer merely hypothetical. 🙁
'We keep beating them, why are they still so angry?!'
Because clearly if people are already rightly pissed off at authority figures in the form of the police the best way to calm them down is for another branch of the government to violate the constitution in order to protect the most fragile substance in existence, that being police egos.
Based on that justification, all packages from Amazon qualify for search and seizure.
Funny how that never happens.
*runs back in, drops YouTube link, scurries away*
State Power propagates morality
William Harrison Hays was US Postmaster General when Marcus Garvey, President of the Universal Negro Improvement Association was caught using the USPS to distribute literature with picture of a falsely named ship; after years of trial delays the picture was never presented to the federal Jury. Hays resigned the P.O. in 1922 (after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre) to become the first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America controlling the morality of America.
Garvey was convicted of “mail-fraud”, served almost three years and then deported. No surprise with the current US Postmaster General.
Disclamer: My father was forced to destroy miles of just-developed film because of the Hays Code. Eventually FDR sent Joe Kennedy to Hollywood to mediate.
The US Mail has been pushed through the door here, hours past darkness for the last few years, all by black Carriers. This is a 34 degrees North latitude, hardly the midnight sun. Pray for the safety of Louis DeJoy’s employees
I hope they get smacked down…
and its TOTES not because introducing the Nancy Reagan Forever Stamp in pride month is offensive on so many levels.
Okay maybe that is part of it to.
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…introducing the Nancy Reagan Forever Stamp in pride month is offensive on so many levels.
Why?
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Read up on the Reagan administration and its response to the AIDS crisis.
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And the shit sprinkles on top of the sundae is they were doing it for her centennially or someshit which isn’t until July.
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I have. Why haven’t you?
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I did read that. None of that changes the fact that the Reagan administration largely ignored the AIDS crisis until after Reagan had won his second term in office. Add in the blatant homophobia that marginalized AIDS victims and the apathy towards their suffering—such as Reagan’s press secretary continually mocking a reporter concerned about “the gay plague”—and you can see why queer people really don’t give a damn about how much the Reagans tried to redeem themselves on the matter. And if Nancy really did give a shit before her husband did, she should’ve spoken up sooner—and in public.
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It’s interesting to see how people who wasn’t affected totally lack the context to understand what was going on in stark contrast to those those who actually were affected.
And the worst part of that is that they have the gall to tell those who were affected that they are wrong in how they experienced it.
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This is what happens when we don’t teach the history of queer Americans—either by choice or by force of fascist law.
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You’re right, women had so much power in the early 1980s thanks to the activities of the feminist movement throughout the 50s and 60s. Q-/
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Except I already did. It’s that seems to have not done so.
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Maybe because the Reagans are racist shitlords who stoked the religious/racist right and rode that wave of shit into power, forever changing the Republican party for the worse.
Maybe. Maybe there are other reasons.
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Challenge: explain in what way a white non-straight person would be offended by the Reagans’ racism. Go!
Re: Re: Re:2
Because while Love is Love and Hate is Hate.
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It’s a ‘human’ thing. You wouldn’t understand.
Re: Re: Re:3
Nice mirror you got there, chump!
Spook(y)
Only one question really.
How did the fed know what was in the boxes before they were shipped out by the company?
Seems that would be an obvious question, but I noted no mention really.
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Because they had been selling these types of masks for a while, so I am sure DHS put out a terrorism alert that people might order them.
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This might be a South Central LA thing, but the USPS always asks what’s in the box.
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Never had the post office ask except for media mail.
Ups, on the other hand always asks!
Uh, no
The stamp prices will go up to cover it.