The FBI and CIA launched surveillance operations on civil rights movements in the 1960s. San Antonio Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro and California Congressman Jimmy Gomez led an effort last March to release classified documents on these surveillance efforts on the Latino civil rights movement.
Castro, who also serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asked CIA Director William Burns and FBI Director Christopher Wray for their cooperation in releasing those documents. The CIA released 55 documents related to its surveillance on Latino civil rights organizations last month. Castro has not yet heard a response from the FBI.
Castro recently spoke to TPR about this topic. He first explained why Latino civil rights organizations were considered a threat to national security.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Joaquin Castro: Well, unfortunately, in the 1960s and `70s, during the height of the civil rights movement, the African American civil rights movement, the Latino civil rights movement, the government perceived them as threats rather than seeing them for what they were, which was peaceful, organizing and protesting and mobilizing people to vote in the spirit of democracy within democratic institutions. And because they were perceived as a threat, they were often surveilled and disrupted in their goals, and that included organizations and also, oftentimes, high profile individuals. And that's what we see in the release of CIA documents that Jimmy Gomez and I requested about nine months ago. As you see, [there's] more evidence that not only was the FBI involved, but the CIA was also involved in that surveillance.
Norma Martinez: So right now, the CIA has stepped up and released some of these documents, but yet the FBI has stalled. So you and Congressman Jimmy Gomez and other members of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus have written a letter to President Biden. So what are you asking the president to do?
Castro: We are asking President Biden to order the declassification of the documents from the 1960s and early `70s regarding the surveillance and disruption of Latino organizations and individuals at the time, in the same manner that the CIA has come forward in the spirit of transparency. And I want to say thank you to Director Burns, who, from the beginning, pledged to work with us and ultimately release these documents, and that's exactly what the CIA did.
Martinez: And what I thought was interesting is, I heard some audio from that March 2024 committee hearing where you asked the directors of the CIA and FBI to ask to work with you, and you got one “yes,” and another, “we'll see.” So I'm assuming that “we'll see” came from…
Castro: (laughs) That one's still pending.
Martinez: So the FBI, I understand, is asking members of Congress instead to submit a Freedom of Information Request.
Castro: Yeah, I've sat on the Intelligence Committee now for about eight and a half years, and I've never heard that as a response. And the message that I've tried to get across, in addition to the fact that this is important for posterity, for the public record, but also for public trust — if an organization can't be transparent and honest about what it did 50 years ago, then it undermines public trust in its current operations. Releasing documents and coming clean is never easy for an organization or for a person, but this should be fairly easy, I think, given the fact that there are decades now that have gone by, and the people in charge back then are obviously not the people in charge now. And those operations from back then no longer exist. Those are all closed operations. And so for all those reasons, I hope that Director Wray will release these files by Jan. 20, and that the president will order them released.
Martinez: Well, we know that Director Wray is on his way out. He already submitted his resignation three years before his term should have been completed. There are only days left in President Biden's time in office. Do you think that this letter might spur some last-minute action, which I'm assuming President Biden is going to be doing on many issues, not just this one.
Castro: The president certainly has his hands full and his plate [is] full before he leaves on Jan. 20, but this is important for a lot of people and for the Latino community in the United States and for the historical record. And so I hope the administration will step up in the spirit of transparency and release these documents. And we will keep pushing. Obviously, I hope this happens by Jan. 20, but regardless, we will keep pushing for the release of this information.
Martinez: The FBI is very famous for its surveillance, like you mentioned earlier on the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez was also famously surveilled by the FBI. So again, those documents that have been released, Jose Angel Gutierrez was pretty important in releasing some of those in some of his books that he's written in the past. He's a Chicano Movement veteran….
Castro: Some of that information has been released. You're right. There's still tranches of information that hasn't. And as you know, it's got to be more than 50 years old to compel the release. And so every year, there's a new window that opens for more information to be released.
Martinez: So now that these documents have been released from the CIA, there are 55 of them. They're not easy reading, I will tell you that. When you open them, it looks like one run-on sentence, and there's just some sort of some mystery characters in the actual typeset. So it's not easy reading. But what have you gleaned so far from these documents?
Castro: Well, that there was vast surveillance by, of course, we know, by the FBI, but also by the CIA. The reason the CIA is interesting is because when it was created, the CIA was meant to conduct intelligence operations overseas and abroad, not domestically within the United States. But here you have the CIA taking part in surveilling and monitoring people within the United States and usually they got involved where there was some purported connection between an international group or person and an organization within the United States.
But as you can see, there's an example where the University of Arizona had an agreement with the CIA to monitor students who were petitioning for the university to create a Mexican American Studies program at the University of Arizona. And in college campuses across the country, students for decades have been pushing their universities to adopt ethnic studies or start a Mexican American studies program or African American studies program. Well, in this instance, the CIA had an agreement with the university so that the university was singling out those folks, those students, and reporting back on what they were doing to the United States government.
Martinez: I'm curious as to what you think the future of surveillance is going to be under this next administration. President-elect Trump is famously not very fond of many civil rights movements, etc., as was made clear during the George Floyd protests. But do you see, maybe, any future surveillance being conducted by these agencies under this new administration?
Castro: My concern is with the people that he's chosen, most of whom, I think by any objective measure, are unqualified for the positions they've been nominated to, but also some of them have expressed a lot of hostilities, outright hostilities, towards different groups, different ideologies. And I am concerned that there will be abuse of surveillance within the United States over the next four years. I hope that doesn't come to pass. But again, I've served on the Intelligence Committee for eight and a half years, and there are excesses at times. They do go overboard at times, and I'm concerned that that's going to happen more and more over the next four years.
Martinez: Well, going back to asking for the FBI cooperation, is there anything the public can do in case they want to put some pressure on releasing these documents prior to Jan. 20?
Castro: Yeah. I think they should reach out to their members of Congress and to the White House and be involved as citizens in this push. Members of the public are also welcome to submit Freedom of Information Act requests of the different intelligence agencies on these documents. We've requested them as members of Congress, but the public has every right to make these requests as well.
Martinez: Well, Congressman Castro, any final words before we let you go?
Castro: Only that this is an incredibly important issue because these movements, they were acting within our democracy. They were about getting people to vote, about peacefully protesting, registering people to vote. And we need to make sure that we learn the lessons of the past, that our agencies don't go overboard, that they don't try to do too much, that they don't stifle democratic action. And hopefully, by getting total transparency, we can make sure that doesn't happen again.
Read the Congressional Hispanic Caucus' letter to President Biden below: