A former student editor is suing administrators at the University of Texas at Dallas, alleging they violated his First Amendment rights when the university found he had discriminated against a student by editing their letter to the editor and publishing it with a disclaimer.
Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, a UTD senior who remains under a two-year deferred suspension, filed the lawsuit Sept. 16 in federal court. A second discrimination complaint against him, over a story quoting the same student’s public statements, is pending in UTD’s disciplinary process and could prompt the suspension to take effect.
“I know that this kind of case is going to send waves to other student journalists,” Olivares Gutierrez said. “That’s why I’m suing, because other student journalists shouldn’t be subjected to the ridiculous charade I was put in by the university here. We as journalists, as student journalists at the collegiate level, are able to exercise our First Amendment rights to the freedom of press, the freedom of speech.”
The case may not be resolved by the time Olivares Gutierrez is scheduled to graduate next spring. Still, if he wins, the court could clear his record, bar the university from further punishing him for his journalism, and order the administrators to pay nominal damages and his attorneys’ fees, according to Student Press Law Center Senior Staff Attorney Jonathan Gaston-Falk.
The lawsuit alleges UTD punished Olivares Gutierrez “for practicing journalism” and that the deferred suspension was intended to chill his speech and reporting. It argues his decision to publish the letter with a disclaimer was a protected editorial choice.
UTD officials did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
Olivares Gutierrez’s tension with administrators really started on May 1, 2024: the day he began his tenure as editor-in-chief of The Mercury, the official student newspaper.
That same day, UTD students formed an encampment on campus in support of Palestine. The school’s response — including a police raid on the encampment and the arrests students and faculty — led The Mercury’s editorial team to make tough decisions about how to cover what transpired. Ultimately, the paper published a special edition focused on the encampment, the university’s response and the arrests that were made.
The lawsuit’s complaint alleges that Olivares Gutierrez’s reporting that summer “made him a persistent thorn in UTD’s side.”
“When something like this happens,” Olivares Gutierrez said, “our concern as journalists isn’t, ‘Oh no, are the university administrators that called in snipers going to be pleased with our choice to talk about that?’ It’s, ‘Are our community members going to appreciate the factual information we’ve collected?’”
About two months after the special issue’s publication, a UTD student submitted a letter to the editor discussing antisemitism and Zionism on campus and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Olivares Gutierrez believed the author, who was president of UTD’s Student Hillel Board, was missing sources to support some of their claims. After two rounds of edits, with varying acceptance, Olivares Gutierrez said the letter was on the line of what The Mercury was willing to publish.
“If we are going to be presenting this to our audience of like 30,000 UTD students and whoever else reads it, we want to make sure that we’re presenting factual information,” Olivares Gutierrez said.
Olivares Gutierrez decided to publish the letter but add a disclaimer before the article. The disclaimer quoted a United Nations commission’s statement about Israel’s actions and shared that requests to substantiate the author’s claims went unanswered, concluding that the piece “does not meet the journalistic standards of The Mercury.”
The decision to publish the letter was influenced by Olivares Gutierrez’s desire to showcase varying perspectives.
“We always think it’s better to have more student opinions than fewer,” Olivares Gutierrez said. “We want to still be faithful to our audience — to our reader base — by showing: yes, this might not meet our standards, but this is why we are publishing it; this is this person’s opinion. It might not be fully accurate on the facts at the start, but we still think they should be able to express their opinion.”
The day after the letter’s publication on Aug. 19, 2024, the author filed an incident report alleging Olivares Gutierrez had discriminated against them because he had provided editorial feedback and added the disclaimer. UTD moved the report into the student conduct process but did not inform Olivares Gutierrez, according to the lawsuit’s complaint.
Less than a month after the letter’s publication, the university removed Olivares Gutierrez, still unaware of the discrimination investigation, from his position at The Mercury for alleged policy violations, a move sharply criticized by the Student Press Law Center, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and others.
The Mercury staff went on strike and rallied behind him, and UTD later fired them as well. Together, they started a new, independent publication, The Retrograde, with Olivares Gutierrez as editor-in-chief. For their efforts, they won SPLC’s 2025 Reveille Seven Courage in Student Journalism Award.
UTD informed Olivares Gutierrez of the student conduct investigation in October 2024. Over the next two weeks, he met with university officials, submitted a written response and sat for an interview. More than a year later, in November 2025, Olivares Gutierrez received a letter from the university informing him that he would be placed under a two-year deferred suspension.
After public pushback, including from FIRE, UTD scheduled a disciplinary hearing for February 2026.
The lawsuit alleges that the only evidence of discrimination presented was that the author felt discriminated against and that the published letter included a similar number of hyperlinks to two other pieces published in The Mercury that did not include disclaimers.
Olivares Gutierrez defended the request for more hyperlinks, saying that the editors had to weigh the importance of the issue with what sources were cited.
A month after the hearing, the UTD panel decided that Olivares Gutierrez discriminated by publishing the letter to the editor with the disclaimer and engaging in an editing process that “exceeded ordinary editorial suggestions.” The panel reaffirmed the two-year deferred suspension.
Since then, Olivares Gutierrez published a piece in The Retrograde that quoted public statements by the letter’s author. The student once again filed a discrimination complaint, which UTD took to the student conduct disciplinary process. Should Olivares Gutierrez be found guilty again, his suspension would take effect automatically, according to the lawsuit’s complaint.
Attorneys at Sbaiti & Company are representing Olivares Gutierrez in the lawsuit. It comes more than two years after he was removed from his role as editor-in-chief of The Mercury.
“It’s been a draining and frustrating experience,” Olivares Gutierrez said. “I still have all the other stuff I have to do for school going on in the background … I still need to go to work. I still need to do the newspaper, and then I have to go and explain basic journalism concepts to university administrators.”
But Olivares Gutierrez said he has persisted in the years-long battle with administrators, throughout which he’s worked with attorneys at SPLC and FIRE, to stand up for student press freedom.
“This sort of thing happens a lot more than we know about, just because students are scared to talk about it,” Olivares Gutierrez said. “This sort of thing isn’t uncommon; it’s unfortunately too common. But making sure that it doesn’t become even more prevalent, that it can’t be done without consequences for universities, is important because we’re seeing the rights of journalists — both on the student collegiate level and at the national level — erode.”
For more news like this on student journalism and the law, subscribe to the Student Press Law Center’s newsletter.