DETROIT (LN) — A federal judge ruled Thursday that the City of Wyoming, Michigan, violated a resident's First Amendment rights by permanently banning him from its Facebook page and erasing his past comments after he posted a YouTube video criticizing city officials, while granting summary judgment to the two police officers who sought his arrest warrant on every other claim.
U.S. District Chief Judge Hala Y. Jarbou granted Robert Homrich partial summary judgment on his free-expression claim, holding that the city crossed a constitutional line when it blocked him entirely and deleted comments that complied with its own social media policy. The city's written policy authorized deletion of off-topic or repetitive posts — it said nothing about banning a user outright or wiping out previously compliant speech.
The dispute began in April 2022, when Homrich was hospitalized for a severe asthma attack at Metro West Hospital in Wyoming and got into an altercation with a security guard. After the city declined to prosecute the guard, Homrich began calling City Hall repeatedly to press his grievances.
A city call log showed he phoned various departments approximately 62 times between April and August 2022. On one day in June 2022, he called a city manager's assistant 9 times within two hours.
When city officials stopped answering, Homrich posted a YouTube video recounting his dispute and shared a link to it on the city's Facebook page. The video was picked up by a YouTube commentator with a large following, triggering a wave of calls and comments directed. City Attorney Scott Smith and Deputy City Manager John McCarter then instructed communications specialist Brianna Peña-Wojtanek to block Homrich entirely. His previous comments were also deleted.
Jarbou held that move went beyond what the city's own rules permitted. The social media policy allowed deletion of comments unrelated to city business or to the specific post at issue, but Homrich's video was plainly about city operations. The more natural reading of the policy, Jarbou wrote, is that a comment need be related to either the post or the city — not both — meaning Homrich's link did not violate the on-topic rule. And the policy said nothing about a permanent ban or retroactive deletion of compliant posts.
Whether the city would have banned Homrich regardless of his phone calls and the broader online backlash — a mixed-motive question — remains for a jury. Peña-Wojtanek testified that the decision was driven in part calls and the behavior of Homrich's online supporters, not solely by Facebook policy violations, creating a factual dispute the court declined to resolve at summary judgment.
On the arrest-related claims, Jarbou ruled for the officers. Deputy Police Chief Kip Snyder and Officer Chad Lynn sought and obtained a warrant for Homrich's arrest under a city ordinance barring repeated calls intended to harass. Homrich was ultimately arrested by the Ottawa County Sheriff's Office in October 2022. Jarbou held that both officers had arguable probable cause — enough to trigger qualified immunity — because the call records showed a pattern of repeated contact with city staff who had already answered Homrich's questions, and because Homrich called a city employee again immediately after Snyder warned him he could face criminal charges. The charges were ultimately dismissed by stipulation in September 2023.
Jarbou also rejected Homrich's retaliatory arrest claims, addressing a circuit split over whether arguable probable cause — rather than actual probable cause — is enough to defeat a First Amendment retaliation claim under qualified immunity. She sided with the majority of circuits that have addressed the question, concluding that because the Supreme Court has not clearly resolved whether the probable-cause bar in retaliatory arrest cases limits the underlying right or merely the available remedy, officers who reasonably believed probable cause existed cannot be held liable regardless of their motives.
With all claims against Snyder and Lynn resolved, Jarbou dismissed both officers from the case entirely.
The remaining question — whether the city's deletion of Homrich's allegedly noncompliant posts also violated the First Amendment — goes to trial, where a jury will decide whether city officials would have acted the same way based on policy violations alone.