Texas Briefly
Prosecutors: Dallas man arrested in smuggling of 41 migrants
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A Dallas man has been arrested on a charge of smuggling migrants after more than three dozen people were found in and around a big rig that was stopped in San Antonio, federal prosecutors said Friday.
Aron Bernard Griffin, 49, was arrested Thursday night at a gas station after local police received reports from resident who said they saw people in the back of the tractor-trailer he was driving, prosecutors said in a statement. Police initially reported finding 29 at the scene and federal immigration agents ultimately detained 41 migrants who were in the U.S. without legal permission, according to prosecutors.
Griffin was being held in San Antonio ahead of an initial court appearance Friday, prosecutors said. It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer who could for him.
Prosecutors said Griffin told federal agents that he had made an agreement with another person to pick up the migrants in Laredo and transport them to San Antonio for money.
One of the migrants was taken to a hospital for dehydration, San Antonio Fire Department spokesperson Joe Arrington said Thursday. A Homeland Security Investigations spokeswoman did not immediately respond to questions about the health and age of the migrants Friday.
The smuggling of migrants in trucks is a common practice and can become deadly in the intense heat of Texas summers.
In July 2017, authorities said they found more than three dozen people, including nine who were dead, in a truck’s trailer after an employee at the San Antonio Walmart where it was parked overnight called the police.
Attorneys: Texas AG unblocks Twitter critics after lawsuit
AUSTIN, (AP) — Nine Twitter users who sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for blocking them on the social media platform have regained access to the Republican’s posts, their attorneys said Thursday.
The users blocked by Paxton included college students, a journalist, a U.S. Army veteran and the leader of a progressive political group. All said in a lawsuit filed last month that Paxton denied them access to his tweets after they criticized his policies.
They were represented by the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which cheered Paxton’s reversal.
“It shouldn’t take a lawsuit for Attorney General Paxton to comply with the Constitution,” Kate Huddleston, an attorney for the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement.
Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
A federal appeals court ruled in 2019 that former President Donald Trump’s tweets were overwhelmingly official in nature and that he violated the First Amendment whenever he blocked a critic to silence a viewpoint. Twitter banned Trump from the platform two days after the deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
In March, Twitter sued Paxton alleging Texas’ top law enforcement officer was trying to retaliate against the company for banning Trump. It came after Paxton’s office demanded that Twitter and other tech companies hand over content moderation policies and troves of internal communications.
