*The U.S. Postal Service is being sued by a California screen printer for seizing shipments of Black Lives Matter masks intended for demonstrators following the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd.
The cloth masks were purchased by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and were intended to be shipped to Washington, D.C., St. Louis, New York City and Minneapolis, NBC News reports. About 500 masks had slogans like “Stop killing Black people” and “Defund police,” and were marked as “Seized by law enforcement” according to the lawsuit.
The shipment was delayed more than 24 hours. The owner of Movement Ink, the screen-printing business in Oakland, said the seizure greatly impacted his small family business.
“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,” René Quiñonez, who owns the company, told NBC News.
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Here’s more from the report:
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.
Quiñonez, his family, and at least a dozen employees and volunteers “worked around the clock” to produce and pack the masks in the first week of June 2020, according to the lawsuit filed on his behalf by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning nonprofit law firm. The lawsuit states that Movement Ink carved out a niche by building relationships “with activist movements, organizations, nonprofits, and individual organizers, who relied on René and Movement Ink for various screen-printing needs.”
“When there’s an organization or a company that now has a reputation for being a target of law enforcement, people don’t want to do business with them,” Quiñonez said. “Even the people that are like-minded, that know that there are fundamental flaws in the way that we address things, they need to protect their interests. So we lost business.”
The seizure of the masks “created a pall of suspicion, distraction, uncertainty, and confusion around René and Movement Ink,” the lawsuit states, per the report.
The lawsuit also noted that the “baseless seizures and searches,” caused Quiñonez great distress “not just because of his and Movement Ink’s financial and reputational hits, but because he and Movement Ink have been effectively shut out of a movement and a community that they spent (and continue to spend) years investing their time and energy in.”
“Instead of focusing on printing and shipping political Covid-protective masks and other apparel, René and Movement Ink had to waste time figuring out why their innocuous packages were in the hands of law enforcement, and how to get them released, while also fielding questions, concerns, and even accusations from partners, community members, and social media commenters,” the lawsuit reads. “René, Movement Ink, and their partners were left wondering why these Covid- protective political masks were in the hands of law enforcement officials instead of on the faces of political protestors.”
According to the report, the Postal Service claimed in a letter to Rep. Barbara Lee that the masks “were detained solely because the external physical characteristics of the parcels were consistent with parcels in other non-related instances that were confirmed to contain nonmailable matter, specifically controlled substances.”
The lawsuit disputes this, noting that the “neatly taped, nondescript brown boxes” had clear labels.
“It is not clear whether Defendants knew that the packages contained — in Defendants’ words — ‘BLM MASKS’ before seizing the packages,” the lawsuit states. “If Defendants knew that the packages contained — in Defendants’ words — ‘BLM MASKS’ before seizing the packages, Defendants violated the First Amendment by seizing packages because of their political messages.”
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