Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed a federal lawsuit against the University of New Mexico (UNM) on behalf of a conservative student chapter and the Leadership Institute (LI) following an unconstitutional demand for security fees based on the viewpoint of the students and their invited speaker, Riley Gaines.
The student chapter of Turning Point USA at the University of New Mexico (TP-UNM) is the only chartered student organization with conservative views on campus. The students enjoy discussing current affairs, socialism, modern day feminism, self-defense, and biological sex, gender, and gender ideology. They requested to host an event featuring speaker Riley Gaines, a Division I college athlete who advocates for the protection of women in sports. But when UNM found out about the event, it told the students that if they wanted to hold the event they would first have to pay a security fee and provided an initial quote of over $10,000. Rather than meet its duty to staff security with money from its multi-million dollar endowment, to protect the students, and to remove any potential hecklers from the crowd, UNM instead imposed a hefty fee on the students that they surely would not be able to afford.
SLF filed a First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of TP-UNM and LI, a nonprofit organization that aids students with planning and funding events, challenging the excessive security fees and asking the court to strike down the policies that allow UNM officials to impose such high fees on students and speakers.
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UNM informed the student members of TP-UNM that—even though Ms. Gaines had her own privately funded security—they needed to agree to have UNM security officers present at the event and that the student chapter would be responsible for paying that fee. Then UNM told the students that it intended to staff the event with every single officer it had, and it provided an initial quote of over $10,000.
UNM officials were able to get away with this because the university maintains a policy that allows them to subjectively assess events on a case-by-case basis. That means administrators have the sole authority to decide whether an event is “controversial”—thus requiring more security—or “uncontroversial.”
As SLF explains in its complaint, this is unconstitutional viewpoint and content discrimination because the university is making judgments about Ms. Gaines’ speech. The university even admitted as much, telling the students that it made its security assessment based on “the individual” and that if other students were to show the Barbie movie, UNM would not require them to pay for any security because they were “not worried about the Barbie move.”
On behalf of TP-UNM and LI, SLF is requesting injunctive relief to prevent the university from collecting the security fees and enforcing the security fee policy on future events.