JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The mayor’s office is pushing back after Florida’s Attorney General dropped a criminal subpoena on the administration Monday morning.
That subpoena seeks communications from the city’s Hispanic Outreach Coordinator, Yanira Cardona, who was temporarily put on leave after sparking controversy with a social media livestream in January.
“We could be looking at RICO. There could be some federal angles, but first and foremost, again, we got a law on the books, passed last February. Local officials have a duty to help the federal government carry out the law,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said during a Monday morning news conference in Green Cove Springs.
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The subpoena seeks slideshows, references to methods used to evade law enforcement, and references to Jennifer Cruz, the woman accused of assaulting law enforcement agents during local immigration operations in January.
It also seeks communications related to local activist Gamble Scott, who recently started an initiative that aims to help immigrant parents get their kids to school if they fear leaving their homes.
The subpoena comes about a month after Cardona was put on leave following a livestream she posted on social media, in which she encouraged people to stay home during local immigration enforcement operations and warned people where those operations were occurring.
Cardona also called on residents to comply with immigration enforcement officers multiple times throughout the stream.
In a statement, the mayor’s office characterized the subpoena as a “hyper-partisan fishing exercise”, but said it would fully comply with the subpoena.
“We are confident that a review of the facts will show the administration acted lawfully, as we always do,” a spokesperson with the mayor’s office wrote.
In January, after announcing Cardona’s brief suspension, Mayor Donna Deegan indicated, aside from violating her office’s social media policy, she didn’t believe Cardona did anything wrong.
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“I cleared this through the General Counsel’s Office, there was nothing she said that was illegal. And frankly, if you watched what she said it simply came from a place of compassion,” said Deegan.
But Uthmeier suggested Cardona identifying the location of law enforcement operations could violate state laws surrounding the doxxing of law enforcement officers, though that statute specifically speaks to the release of officers’ personal addresses and phone numbers.
“If you wanna flag personal information, location, details about law enforcement officers to try to harass them, scare them, threaten them, or impede law enforcement operations, that is a crime,” said Uthmeier.
Councilmember Matt Carlucci (R-Group 4 At Large) said he believes the mayor’s administration will come out on top.
“It seems like there’s always someone trying to ‘gotcha’ the mayor, whether it’s local or whether it’s state, and it always backfires every time,” said Carlucci.
Action News Jax did attempt to contact Cardona directly via social media and by calling her office number.
We also reached out to Scott, the local activist whose name appears in the subpoena.
We did not hear back from either of them.
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