Castle Hills councilwoman’s arrest makes it to US Supreme Court

A small Texas town in the middle of San Antonio is making major national waves, and it’s all tied to what a former city councilwoman is calling a corrupt system that targeted her for speaking out. The matter has made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which will hear arguments Wednesday, March 20.

The issue at hand centers around whether or not a woman can individually sue the Castle Hills Mayor Edward “JR” Trevino. It’s all tied to what former Castle Hills City Councilwoman Sylvia Gonzalez says was an arrest made in retaliation against her for speaking out against the city manager. By law, public figures have qualified immunity which protects them from lawsuits when performing discretionary functions; however, Gonzalez says the mayor violated her constitutional rights in having her arrested.

While Gonzalez, 77, says she was arrested in retaliation for her opposing viewpoints and for simply mistakenly taking a government document, the city asserts she intentionally took the document and tried to feign innocence by saying it was a mistake.

Back in 2019, Sylvia Gonzalez won a contentious race for a seat on the Castle Hills City Council. She ran after neighbors vented to her about a lackadaisical city manager who failed to fix a single street in the city, according to Gonzalez.

“I was the first Hispanic woman to be on Castle Hills City Council. So, when I campaigned, I went to 500 households, and I heard people complain about the city manager,” Gonzalez told MySA. “So, one week before my first meeting, I found out we would be evaluating him. So, we brought up a petition…. We’d gotten over 300 signatures.”

Some of the issues Gonzalez says people had with the city manager: He failed to call residents back despite working in a relatively tight-knit, small community, and he failed to fix deteriorating streets in the Texas town. This petition would ultimately lead to Gonzalez’s forced removal from city council and ignite what has been a years-long fight against what she calls the Castle Hills “Gestapo.”

First, Gonzalez says her fellow city officials tried to remove her from council by saying Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar was not qualified to swear her in. When the Castle Hills city attorney pulled the group into executive session during Gonzalez’s third council meeting, she was told she was no longer on city council and all her previous votes were null and void. However, a Bexar County Judge overturned this, informing the city attorney they were not qualified to remove someone from office, says Gonzalez.

Next, Gonzalez says she was accused of forging the 300 signatures – a claim she says city officials enlisted the local police to check on, knocking on the doors of those who signed and realizing she had not forged the hundreds of resident signatures. On the other hand, residents did speak out during a May 2019 meeting after the petition was submitted, accusing Gonzalez of coercing them into signing or into signing on behalf of residents who weren’t home.

About two months after she presented the petition opposing the city manager to city council, Gonzalez was arrested for the Class A misdemeanor charge of removing a government document. Gonzalez says she mistakenly took the document from a pile of documents on the city council dais and placed it with her other belongings in her binder. However, city officials say they have video surveillance that shows she intentionally took the petition, which was now filed as an official government document, from the mayor’s spot at the dais and attempted to conceal it.

“I just took all these papers that were around me – I kept all these papers,” Gonzalez told MySA. “So, I just put them – I tapped them on the desk to get them in order – and then I stuck them in my folder.”

This very debate over whether Gonzalez intentionally took the documents or took them by mistake is at the core of the argument heading to the U.S. Supreme Court: Was the city justified in its arrest of Gonzalez, and did they assert probable cause?

An initial judge in the U.S. District Court judge in the Western District of Texas initially sided with Gonzalez, saying she did in fact show retaliation and that the city had cracked down on free speech against residents who spoke out in opposition, according to court documents filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the city appealed the decision to the Fifth Circuit where a split decision sided mostly with the city, saying Gonzalez had failed to prove she was arrested without probable cause.

Now, the argument goes to the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether a mayor or city official can be individually sued while acting in their official capacity – namely the court will decide whether or not there was probable cause for Gonzalez’s arrest in 2019, and, if so, whether a retaliation accusation can still be made.

“The argument is that just because probable cause could exist for a violation of some sort of crime doesn’t mean that courts must blind themselves to other evidence of retaliation,” Gozalez’s attorney Anya Bidwell told MySA. “The arrest actually happened not because, in this case, Sylvia took this piece of paper from one place on the dais and put it in the other place on the dais. But that really, it’s because they did not like that she petitioned the government to challenge the city manager. And we present a lot of evidence of that.”

MySA reached out to every city council member in Castle Hills and Trevino, but either received no response or was told they don’t comment on pending cases.

Oral arguments begin at 9 a.m. and will be streamed live here.