A San Antonio man's offer to serve as a detention officer was rescinded by the Bexar County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) due to his wife’s devotion to La Santa Muerte, sparking a lawsuit alleging a breach of First Amendment rights. As reported by KSAT, the man, Luis Borges, had successfully traversed the application gauntlet, including a polygraph and a background check, only to have his employment opportunity vanish because of his wife's personal beliefs.
Despite having been told to put in his two-week notice, Borges received a call just two days before his start date at the academy stating that he had been disqualified, following an in-home visit where deputies took photos of his wife Stephany's altar to La Santa Muerte, which she described as part of her spiritual path to "live more authentically," according to a KSAT Investigates interview. A message from a recruiting deputy reportedly told Borges that the decision to disqualify him was made by Sheriff Javier Salazar and couldn't be reversed, a detail supported by text messages obtained by the publication.
The suit, filed by Borges against BCSO and Sheriff Salazar, is represented by attorney Mark Anthony Sanchez, who highlighted the wider issue of the Sheriff's Office violating the First Amendment, asserting,“The First Amendment provides protection for political thought and for religious thought. A religious belief is one that is simply sincerely held,” Sanchez told KSAT Investigates. The BCSO declined to comment to KSAT, redirecting inquiries to the District Attorney's Office, which does not comment on personnel matters.
Furthermore, after Borges filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission this summer, he received an official response from an assistant district attorney that referred to him as a Roman Catholic without addressing his wife's religious practices or her devotion to La Santa Muerte, an omission that Borges and his attorney argue is incongruent with the BCSO's justification for his disqualification, as noted in the Headtopics article that initially detailed the incident. In an interesting turn, Sanchez has offered to provide Salazar and his staff with free legal training on First Amendment compliance, a proposition derived from a previous successful settlement he secured over similar grounds.
