Headlines

Screen Printing Company Sues US Postal Service

After the Postal Service seized boxes of merchandise with political messaging, the shop is alleging its Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

Published

2 years ago

June 6, 2022

Screen Printing Staff

Movement Ink (Oakland, CA) has filed a lawsuit against the US Postal Service for seizing shipments of masks with messaging that supported the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, NBC News reports.

The masks were being shipped to Minneapolis, St. Louis, New York City and Washington, DC, when four boxes containing about 500 masks each were seized, delaying their shipment by more than 24 hours, the article says.

The lawsuit alleges that the Postal Service violated the shop’s Fourth Amendment rights by seizing the boxes without probable cause or a warrant. It also suggests Movement Ink’s First Amendent right was infringed upon.

Shop owner René Quiñonez told the outlet that the seizure negatively impacted his business.

“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.”

For its part, the Postal Service claimed in June 2020 that the parcels “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.”

Read more at NBC News.

Screen Printing Staff

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