Duran’s detainment betrays our country’s values
Manuel Duran has a knack for being in the right place for his viewers and listeners, but at the wrong time for those who would prefer that they not see. Or hear.
Which is how it should be for any journalist.
He was in the right place more than a decade ago, as El Salvador was grappling with gang violence and a judicial system that was complicit in its spread. He was on the radio reporting on politics, said his partner, Melisa Valdez.
Duran was doing all that, though, at a time when he could be jailed or killed for it — and the fear of that happening is one reason he fled to the U.S. in 2007, she said.
“I think he left because the government was changing and he was with the wrong party,” Valdez said.
Duran was in the right place again on April 3. He was livestreaming an immigration detention protest downtown for the Spanish-language news website Memphis Noticias. But this time, the police arrested him and others for refusing to obey a com-
MPD rejects charge of retaliation in Duran case.
mand to clear the streets.
Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges against Duran, who his attorney, Michelle Lapointe of the Southern Poverty Law Center, says was covering a story and not protesting. But his name was turned over to immigration agents, who picked him up on a 2007 deportation order.
The order stems from what authorities say was his refusal to appear for a court date that year — a date that Duran says he was never notified about.
So now, he sits in a detention center in Jena, Louisiana, awaiting his fate. He’s waiting to see whether practicing the profession he loves will catapult him back to El Salvador where, according to Reporters Without Borders, several journalists have been physically attacked or killed since 2014. Few laws protect them, and officials often harass and threaten them for investigating the government. How ironic. And how wrong. “He has been interested in telling stories since he was 16 years old,” Valdez said. “So this is not new to him. He knows that the government sometimes doesn’t like his stories, but he’s always been committed to telling the truth to the community.”
While Memphis law enforcement officials deny it — reiterated on Tuesday by Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings — others believe that Duran’s journalism made him a target.
“Manuel’s reporting has been critical of local law enforcement,” Lapointe said. “He’s specifically written about collaboration between local law enforcement and ICE, he’s specifically written about police misconduct and allegations of police mishandling certain cases, so he was well known to the Memphis police and Shelby County sheriff ’s department …”
Lapointe also said there was no warrant and no probable cause to arrest Manuel for committing a crime.
“When the Memphis police and the Shelby County sheriff ’s department arrested him and held him in jail here in Memphis, and turned him over to ICE despite the charges being dropped, they violated Manuel’s Fourth Amendment rights and his due process rights to detain him without lawful process,” she said.
Even now, Duran, 42, is using his detainment to expose more injustice.
In a letter recently read to his supporters at a press conference, he wrote about fellow detainees like “Jorge,” who Duran said will leave three young children behind in the U.S. once he is deported. He also wrote about “Fernando,” a 64-year-old father of three children born in the U.S., who is also facing deportation.
But sadly, it looks like this may be the right place and the wrong time for Duran again.
These are times in which the U.S. president has demonized Latinos, Muslims and other immigrants. President Donald Trump also demonizes the media, mostly by name-calling journalists and media organizations that provide critical coverage of him and his administration. He also does this by lambasting their coverage as fake news, and by urging his supporters to get violent with them.
Duran is now among those caught up in the vortex of hostility and injustice toward immigrants and the media for, among other things, reporting about those injustices. And this should not be happening here, in a nation that is supposed to be above the way that oppressive regimes operate.
Or at least, it once tried to be.