Evangelist David Hoffman is pushing back after he says police demanded he go to a “remote speech zone” while sharing the Gospel during a holiday festival last year in Tucson, Arizona.
First Liberty, a First Amendment legal advocacy firm, is taking on his case and pushing back against what it calls “open hostility to religious speech” that is “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Attorney Garrett Bell sent a demand letter asking the city to step back, arguing that what happened at the Winterhaven Festival of Lights was improper.
“I run an outreach and evangelism ministry called Kingdom Enterprises,” Hoffman told CBN News. “We do U.S.-based street ministry and evangelism. We’re based in Tucson, Arizona, and … there’s a winter event that we have traditionally gone to pretty much every year over the past 10 years — except for COVID — and we go, and we have conversations with people.”
The team hands out Gospel tracts and shares about Jesus. He said this became a problem in 2025, when they went to the event, and police officers approached them before they were fully set up.
“Police approached us, and they told us that, if we continued within the event, we would be ticketed and arrested,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman recalled asking the police questions and said cops affirmed they had the authority to arrest him, which left him concerned about continuing to push back. So, he listened to the authorities and went to the free speech zone. Then, he later reached out to First Liberty.
Bell said this alleged interaction amounted to censorship, adding that the push to send people to supposed “free speech zones” is deeply problematic.
“We like to just call it a ‘designated speech area,’ because there’s nothing free about it,” Bell said. “They’re largely unconstitutional.”
Bell said it was also troubling that Hoffman had been to the event many times before without incident, and added that this was the first year festival organizers received a permit from the city of Tucson that included this free speech policy — one purportedly dictating that there could be “no religious messaging or materials distributed.”
“You have to be in this designated speech area, and that area is outside of the main footprint of the event,” Bell said. “And it’s sort of this small, confined, barricaded space where Hoffman and his group were pretty well separated from anyone they really wanted to reach.”
The entire ordeal left Hoffman shocked, because he said the event is public. In his view, the suggestion he and his group should be disallowed is wrong.
Bell filed a complaint and a motion for preliminary injunction, but the first step they took was to send a demand letter to the city.
“To this day, they [have] not responded [to our letter] and, because the Winterhaven Festival is right around the corner for 2026, we filed that complaint and preliminary injunction,” Hoffman said. “And, as of now, have not received an answer or response from the city.”
CBN News will continue to cover the story as it unfolds. A request for comment from the city has not been returned.
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