Women leave Montana town over Border Patrol lawsuit backlash
HELENA, Mont. — A woman who is suing the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol after an agent questioned her and a friend for speaking Spanish in a convenience store said Friday the backlash to their lawsuit has forced them to move away from their small Montana city.
Ana Suda and her family have been harassed by neighbors, strangers and even schoolchildren in the city of Havre ever since a video of a Border Pa t ro l agent questioning her and Martha “Mimi” Hernandez was uploaded to YouTube, Suda said in a phone interview with
The Associated
Press. One version of the video has been viewed more than 123,000 times since February.
Suda and her two children have been living with relatives in El Paso, Texas, for the past 11⁄
2 months while her husband — a Customs and Border Patrol employee himself — is seeking a job transfer to join them.
“I can’t take it anymore,” Suda said. “Our lives are not the same, it’s not the same anymore. These guys destroyed everything we have.”
Hernandez has been living in Great Falls but still commutes to her job in Havre, said their attorney, Alex Rate of the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana.
The women, who were born in the U.S. and are citizens, said in their lawsuit that they were speaking to one another in Spanish while standing in line to buy eggs and milk in a convenience store in Havre. The agent, Paul O’Neill, entered the store, overheard them and kept them in the parking lot for approximately 40 minutes while he checked their identifications.
“Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,” O’Neill said in the video.
Suda was born in Texas and moved to Montana with her husband in 2014. Hernandez was born in California and has been living in Montana since 2010. Suda did not recognize O’Neill as a colleague of her husband, nor did she say that her husband worked for the same agency.
Havre is a city of nearly 10,000 people about 30 miles from the U.S.-Canada border and near two Native American reservations. The city’s population is mostly white and about 4% Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census.
The women filed their lawsuit in February, saying they were detained in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizures and the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause.