Monroe County, Tenn. deputies arrested Facebook community-page operator Emma Berger over posting a public warrant

On March 13, 2026, Monroe County, Tennessee sheriff's deputies arrested Emma Berger, who runs a roughly 8,000-member community Facebook page called "Uncensored Voices of Monroe County Revamped," on a felony identity-theft-trafficking charge and seized her phone. The arrest followed Berger's March 11 post of a publicly-filed arrest warrant against Mitchell Cook, a registered sex offender, which briefly contained his unredacted Social Security number, driver's license number, and other personal information; Berger said she removed the post after realizing it was unredacted and re-posted a redacted version the same day, then publicly acknowledged the original error the next day. Sheriff Tommy Jones's office said an internal court-system audit found two individuals had accessed the document during the relevant window and forwarded its findings to prosecutors.

District Attorney Stephen Hatchett dismissed the identity-theft charge on March 23, 2026, calling it "legally flawed" and acknowledging that his own office had originally supplied the public warrant Berger posted. Berger has since sued Sheriff Jones in federal court, alleging false arrest and a violation of her First Amendment rights; her attorney, Tyler Weiss, said "Emma's speech was stopped. They arrested her for her speech," and separately alleged the sheriff had been targeting Berger for months before the arrest. As of the dismissal, a judge had ordered Berger's seized phone and computer held for an additional ten days pending review by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.