The United States government, through Customs and Border Protection (CBP), agreed this Wednesday to issue new guidelines that prevent its agents from questioning journalists about their work when crossing the border between the United States and Mexico.

This measure responds to a historic legal agreement with five photojournalists who alleged violations of their rights protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution and the Privacy Act. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported that the settlement was reached as part of a lawsuit challenging what the journalists described as harassment and unlawful questioning by border agents between 2018 and 2019. According to the announcement, the plaintiffs, Bing Guan, Go Nakamura, Mark Abramson, Kitra Cahana, and Ariana Drehsler, are American photographers who traveled to Mexico between November 2018 and January 2019 to document the migrant caravans heading toward the southern border of the United States. Upon returning to the United States, these five journalists were detained and interrogated by CBP agents, who asked them for details about their sources, their reporting, and their observations on the ground. The photojournalists alleged that these actions were unjustified. legal and that its objective was to intimidate them into stopping their reporting on immigration issues.

A previous journalistic investigation had revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) maintained an intelligence database targeting journalists, activists, and lawyers, in which these reporters were identified to receive “additional scrutiny” at border crossings.

Despite this, the White House attempted to dismiss the lawsuit, but a federal court determined that the journalists had demonstrated that their First Amendment rights had been violated, allowing the case to proceed and culminate in this settlement.

“It is clear that the government's actions sought to instill fear in journalists like myself, to intimidate us and make us stop reporting on what is happening on the ground,” one of the plaintiffs said in a statement.

As part of the agreement, CBP will have to issue official guidelines based on the First Amendment and the Privacy Act that guide its agents on how to treat journalists at border crossings.

In doing so, it commits to ensuring that journalists' previous reporting is not used as a basis for future interrogations and to pay an amount to cover the plaintiffs' legal costs and attorney's fees.

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