A premier legal team focusing on religious and other rights across America is warning the Houston bus authority that it is violating the U.S. Constitution with its scheme to censor the speech of a Christian.
It is the American Center for Law and Justice that confirmed it has sent a warning letter to the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County.
It concerns the attack on Howard Camp.
For nearly two years he “has ministered at an outdoor Houston bus terminal. His ministry is simple: preach, pray with people, hand out bottled water and food, offer encouragement, and share the hope of Christ with anyone who wants to hear it. No fees. No obstruction. No disruption. Just ministry.”
Then came Sept. 19. Officials dispatched authority police to order him to get a “permit.”
“When he questioned why he needed government permission to share his faith in a public space, the officers declared the bus terminal ‘private property.’ Moments later, they handcuffed him, detained him, and issued a criminal trespass warning. They told him that if he ever came back to preach the Gospel again, he would be arrested. They never cited a single rule he violated. They never gave him a written citation. And to this day, the trespass warning remains in effect,” the ACLJ explained.
The legal team’s new demand letter insists that METRO retract the unconstitutional trespass warning and restore Camp’s First Amendment rights.
Explains the letter, “Mr. Camp has already suffered irreparable injury as a result of METRO’s unconstitutional actions, and he continues to suffer ongoing harm so long as the trespass warning remains in effect. ‘The loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.’ Mr. Camp has been effectively banished from a public forum where he has a constitutional right to speak. He has been threatened with arrest and criminal prosecution if he returns to exercise his rights. This chilling effect on his speech is a direct and ongoing violation of the First Amendment.”
The ACLJ noted that the Constitution doesn’t simply vanish if someone steps onto government-owned transit property.
“Public sidewalks, streets, and outdoor terminals are places where Americans have always been free to speak, hand out literature, and share their faith. Religious speech lies at the very heart of what the First Amendment protects,” the legal team explained.
And METRO cannot simply call the terminal “private property.”
“Even if METRO wanted to regulate sound amplification, it must do so through clear, content-neutral rules – not by allowing officers to silence disfavored speech whenever they please. METRO has no such rule for outdoor areas. This was not policy enforcement. It was censorship,” the report charged.
“If it can ban Howard Camp from a public bus terminal because it doesn’t like what he’s saying, then any citizen – Christian or not – can be silenced the moment their message becomes inconvenient. That is not how the First Amendment works,” the ACLJ said.
