‘La Gordiloca’ Lost at the Supreme Court but Won in Laredo

It’s the day after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive her lawsuit against the local officials who orchestrated her arrest nearly a decade ago, and Laredo citizen-journalist Priscilla Villarreal is on Facebook Live to deliver a much-awaited statement.

For several minutes, viewers are treated to little more than the radio playing in the background and a scowl that would be the envy of an old-school cop shop reporter. The delay is a tactic; Villarreal is waiting until enough people have started watching to begin her stream-of-consciousness diatribe. Then, the music changes to English band Chumbawamba’s 1997 hit “Tubthumping,” with its on-the-nose refrain of “You’re not ever gonna keep me down.” 

Despite the dire concern about press freedoms that the ruling in her case has created among mainstream journalists and First Amendment experts, the social media personality and provocateur known as “La Gordiloca” is defiant, as she explains the prosecution had only managed to raise her profile.

“I’m already in the lawbooks; that’s enough for me,” Villarreal said on the March 24 livestream before switching into expletive-filled Spanish. “This was a fucking nine-year squeeze that had everybody shitting themselves. And if you mess with me again, we’ll go back to fucking court.”

Villarreal’s oft-recounted origin story is that in 2015, she livestreamed the aftermath of a murder-suicide on her Facebook page, garnering her attention across Laredo and unexpectedly launching her journalism career. As La Gordiloca, which translates to something like “the chubby, crazy lady,” her Facebook following has topped 200,000 as she operates in a border city of only 250,000. But her penchant for inventively foul language isn’t all that separates Villarreal from more buttoned-up journalists. She often violates industry ethics: The disturbing video of police carrying dead children out of a building that launched her career is something most outlets would think long and hard about publishing, and she openly casts her lot for or against local officials.

This has put her crosswise with some of those officials, including in 2017 when, after she’d  criticized the Laredo Police Department and the Webb County district attorney, she called a police officer to confirm the names of people who’d died in very public incidents. For this, she was arrested under a state law that makes it a crime if someone “solicits or receives from a public servant information that: the public servant has access to by means of his office or employment; and has not been made public” and the person does so “with intent to obtain a benefit.” A local judge tossed out the criminal charges, but Villarreal filed a civil suit in federal court. 

In 2024, a majority opinion throwing out Villarreal’s case, written by Fifth Circuit appeals court judge Edith Jones, raised concerns among First Amendment advocates across the country. Jones wrote that the officials were entitled to qualified immunity, a judicial doctrine that protects most government employees from lawsuits related to their on-the-job actions, because police and prosecutors were reasonable in thinking Villarreal broke the law. The Texas Observer reported on Villarreal’s story and highlighted the implications for journalism of Jones’ opinion in 2024.

The U.S. Supreme Court then told the Fifth Circuit to reconsider Villarreal’s case in light of the top court’s decision in favor of a former Castle Hills City Council member who was arguing she’d also been arrested as political retaliation, another case the Observer covered in depth, but in April 2025, the Fifth Circuit stood by its decision to grant qualified immunity. Then, last month, the high court declined to hear Villarreal’s appeal.

First Amendment experts say this decision sends the message that if police make a bad-faith or far-fetched interpretation of a law in a way that violates someone’s constitutional rights, including those of journalists or protesters, the courts will protect the cops and prosecutors from consequences.

“It is kind of crazy that a journalist can be arrested for doing her job, and there’s nothing she can do about it in terms of bringing officers who arrested her into the court and having to answer for what they did,” said Anya Bidwell, a senior attorney at the libertarian-leaning public interest law firm the Institute for Justice. “It’s a bit disturbing, especially in the context of what’s happening in America today, where we do have ICE agents across the country, exercising excessive force, but also punishing people for recording them and punishing people for criticizing them.”

In response to an Observer request for comment, Webb County District Attorney Isidro “Chilo” Alaniz said: “Qualified immunity is critical in order for law enforcement and prosecutors to do their job. Everything that was done by law enforcement and prosecution on this case was proper and within the law.”

Increasingly, Americans are getting their news from alternative sources, with the border region especially being a wild west of influencers and indie media, and—though they’re entitled to the same protections as anyone else whether they follow traditional journalism ethics or not— Villarreal and her local nontraditional competitors are some of the most exposed by the Supreme Court ruling, added Daxton “Chip” Stewart, a journalism professor and assistant provost at Texas Christian University. 

“Until a journalist is actually able to bring a civil rights lawsuit to trial against the government for violating their First Amendment rights, it’s open season on anyone doing journalism, and especially those without an in-house lawyer handy,” Stewart said.

Though Jones’ 2024 opinion never explicitly stated that what the officials did was constitutional, she wrote that the government has an interest in preventing Americans from learning certain information, and that the officials who arrested Villarreal were acting reasonably in believing Texas law could criminalize asking questions of public officials. The decision is currently limited to the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but the Trump administration recently used a similar argument elsewhere.

In a March filing, as part of a Washington, D.C., federal court lawsuit against the Pentagon’s restrictions on reporters covering the Defense Department, Justice Department lawyers wrote that a journalist “does solicit the commission of a criminal act, and that solicitation is not protected by the First Amendment, when he or she solicits (classified information) or other non-public information from individuals who are legally obligated not to disclose that information.”

Both Jones’ opinion and the Trump administration’s argument are trying to work around a 1970s Supreme Court ruling that found “Reporters remain free to seek news from any source by means within the law.” JT Morris, Villarreal’s lawyer and a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the Observer: “To have officials in Laredo do that is bad enough, but now that federal attorneys are echoing that same line of thinking, that’s a really dangerous result for the First Amendment.”

Still, local observers in Laredo think Villarreal’s defiant response to the Supreme Court’s decision is probably well-founded. Her drawn-out legal fight with the officials who had her arrested was embarrassing and time-consuming for them. 

“Regardless of what the Supreme Court said, or what they didn’t do, [local officials] looked bad for doing it,” said Joey Tellez, a Laredo attorney who helped Villarreal fight the criminal charges after her 2017 arrest. “At the local level, I think everyone thinks you put your hand on the hot stove and you got burned.”

The local judge who threw out Villarreal’s criminal charges also declared the statute used to arrest her unconstitutional—though that ruling is limited to Webb County. Villarreal’s relationship with the current Laredo police leadership has also vastly improved. She attributes that in part to department brass acknowledging that, to update an old journalism adage, it’s best not to pick a fight with someone who gets Facebook views by the barrel. 

Still, in an April interview, Villarreal struck a more nuanced tone than in her initial bombastic video.

“Now that I had a couple of days to think, it was disappointing obviously,” she said. “It not only affected me, it affected everybody nationwide … because that only makes people think cops can do as they please and not get punished for it.”

These days, Villarreal isn’t as journalistically active as before. She’s raising four children, the oldest of which is five years old. She lost access to her old Facebook page with 200,000-plus followers, and her new profile, “Lagordiloca fan club,” has a more modest 44,000 followers. Local police news and invectives against Laredo politicians make up less of her Facebook feed than they used to, while there are posts about national news, used vehicles for sale, and an ad offering “Promote with Lagordiloca!”

Meanwhile, she’s spawned a wave of local competition, including Laredo Hood News and Hammrod News.

“I’m not going to lie, she opened the door for a lot of us,” said Abraham Rodriguez, who runs Hammrod News and posts content across multiple social media platforms. “She took the biggest bullet out of all of us. If it wasn’t for her, then the police department would be a lot more strict on us independent journalists.”

The post ‘La Gordiloca’ Lost at the Supreme Court but Won in Laredo appeared first on The Texas Observer.