{"id":157741,"date":"2025-07-21T00:55:59","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T00:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/atlanta-journalist-fights-deportation-from-ice-jail-despite-dropped-charges-im-seeing-what-absolute-power-can-do-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T00:55:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T00:55:59","slug":"atlanta-journalist-fights-deportation-from-ice-jail-despite-dropped-charges-im-seeing-what-absolute-power-can-do-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/atlanta-journalist-fights-deportation-from-ice-jail-despite-dropped-charges-im-seeing-what-absolute-power-can-do-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Atlanta journalist fights deportation from Ice jail despite dropped charges: \u2018I\u2019m seeing what absolute power can do\u2019 – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Salvadorian reporter with an audience of millions, Mario Guevara was arrested while livestreaming a protest against Trump in June \u2013 and is still struggling for freedom
P<\/span>rosecutors dropped the last remaining charges against Atlanta-area journalist Mario Guevara<\/a> last week after he was arrested while livestreaming a protest in June. But the influential Salvadorian reporter remains penned up in a south Georgia detention center, fending off a deportation case, jail house extortionists and despair, people familiar with his situation told the Guardian.
Donald Trump\u2019s administration<\/a> has been extreme in unprecedented ways <\/strong>to undocumented immigrants. But Guevara\u2019s treatment is a special case. Shuttled between five jail cells in Georgia since his arrest while covering the \u201cNo Kings Day\u201d protests, the 20-plus-years veteran journalist\u2019s sin was to document the undocumented and the way Trump\u2019s agents have been hunting them down.
Today, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, <\/strong>he\u2019s the only reporter in the United States sleeping in a prison cell for doing his job.
\u201cFor the first time in my life, I\u2019m seeing what absolute power can do,\u201d said Guevara\u2019s attorney, Giovanni D\u00edaz. \u201cPower that doesn\u2019t care about optics. Power that doesn\u2019t care about the damage to human lives to achieve a result I\u2019ve only heard about as some abstract thing that we heard about in the past, usually talking about other governments in the way that they persecute individuals. This is powerful.\u201d
Around Atlanta, Guevara has been the person that immigrants call when they see an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid going down in their neighborhood.
Guevara had been working for La Prensa Gr\u00e1fica, one of El Salvador\u2019s main newspapers, when he was attacked at a protest rally held by the leftwing group Farabundo Mart\u00ed National Liberation Front<\/a> (FMLN) in <\/strong>2003. The former paramilitary organization viewed reporters from his paper as aligned with the rightwing government, and threatened his life. He fled to the United States in 2004, seeking asylum with his wife and daughter, entering legally on a tourist visa.
He has been reporting for Spanish-language media in the United States ever since, riding a wave of Latino immigration to the Atlanta suburbs to career success and community accolades. He began reporting on immigration crackdowns under the Obama administration, one of the few reporters to note a tripling of noncriminal immigration arrests in the Atlanta area, as noted in a 2019 New York Times video profile<\/a> of his work.. He meticulously documented cases and interviewed the families of arrestees. People around Atlanta began to recognize him on the street as the journalist chasing la migra<\/em>.
His work continued through the Trump administration, drawing an audience of millions that followed him from Mundo Hisp\u00e1nico to the startup news operation he founded last year: MGNews or Noticias MG.<\/a>
\u201cIt\u2019s a unique niche that was met by Mario\u2019s innovation and entrepreneurialism, if you will,\u201d said Jerry Gonzales, executive director of the Georgia<\/a> Association of Latino Elected Officials and GALEO Latino Community Development Fund. \u201cHe developed a really strong relationship with the community. He developed significant trust with much of that community. And because of that, his eyeballs started increasing.\u201d
An immigration court judge denied Guevara\u2019s asylum claim in 2012 and issued a deportation order. Guevara\u2019s lawyers appealed, and the court granted administrative closure of the case. He wasn\u2019t being deported. But he wasn\u2019t given legal residency either. Instead, the government issued him a work permit, his lawyer said. With a shrug, he went back to work.
Guevara is arguably the most-watched journalist covering Ice operations in the United States, a story that the English-language media had largely been missing, Gonzales said. And local police were well aware of his work. He has been negotiating with them for access to immigration enforcement scenes for more than a decade.
\u201cMario Guevara is well known \u2013 sometimes liked sometimes not \u2013 but definitely well known by law enforcement agencies, particularly in DeKalb county and Gwinnett county, and also with federal agents, and particularly immigration agents,\u201d Gonzales said.
Gonzales, among others, believes this put a target on his back in the current administration.
\u201cIt seems like law enforcement coordinated and colluded with the federal agents,\u201d Gonzales said. Gonzales points to the misdemeanor traffic charges laid by the Gwinnett county sheriff\u2019s office shortly after Guevara\u2019s arrest in DeKalb county by the Doraville police department as evidence.
\u201cThe facts and the timeline indicate that pretty clearly to anybody that\u2019s been following this,\u201d he claimed. \u201cIn this regard it\u2019s particularly troubling, given that he is a journalist and his situation. He had no reason to have been targeted for his arrest.\u201d
The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to a request for comment about their relationship with local law enforcement. The Gwinnett county sheriff\u2019s office said in a response to a lawmaker\u2019s inquiry that it cooperates with Ice when deemed \u201cmutually beneficial\u201d but has not responded to requests for additional comment.
Doraville\u2019s police chief, Chuck Atkinson, has not replied to an email seeking answers and fled from questions about the case at a city hearing. But Doraville\u2019s mayor, Joseph Geierman, denied a connection between Ice and Doraville\u2019s arrest of Guevara.
O<\/span>n 14 June, the day of his arrest, in Atlanta\u2019s DeKalb county, Guevara darted around a Doraville police truck. A group of riot cops nearby took note. One shouted \u201clast warning, sir! Get out of the road!\u201d
Guevara was helmeted and wearing a black vest over his red shirt with the word \u201cPRESS\u201d in white letters. James Talley, an officer with the Doraville police department, was wearing an olive drab Swat jumpsuit with a helmet and gas mask.
A masked demonstrator set off a smoke bomb near the cops. Guevara ran into the street with a stabilized camera in hand to capture the police reaction and the crowd scampering out of the way, as was shown on a police body camera video.
Police had issued a dispersal order and were kettling protesters out of Chamblee-Tucker Road. They chased the suspected bomb thrower into the crowd, to no avail. But Guevara was in front of them on a grassy slope.
Police from DeKalb county managing the raucous protest had been taking verbal abuse from demonstrators for a while \u2013 a sharp contrast from other protests around Atlanta held that day. The protest was winding down. Body camera video from the event suggests Talley was in an arresting mood.
\u201cKeep your eye on the guy in the red shirt,\u201d Talley said to another Swat officer from Doraville. \u201cIf he gets to the road, lock his ass up.\u201d
Talley pulled another police officer aside. \u201cIf he gets in the road, he\u2019s gone,\u201d Talley said. \u201cHe\u2019s been warned multiple times.\u201d
The other officer drew a finger across his chest. \u201cThe press?\u201d Yep, Talley replied.
The three of them waited about 50ft away as a DeKalb county police officer approached Guevara on the hill, ordering him to get on the sidewalk. Guevara backed away from the officer, his attention focused on the recording, took two steps into the street, and the Doraville police pounced.
Guevara pleaded for the police to be reasonable.
\u201cI\u2019m with the media, officer!\u201d Guevara said. \u201cLet me finish!\u201d
People shouted at the officers \u201cThat\u2019s the press!\u201d as they walked him handcuffed to a vehicle. \u201cWhy are you all taking him! He didn\u2019t do nothing.\u201d
More than one million people were watching Guevara\u2019s livestream<\/a> when he was arrested.
T<\/span>rump has stepped up his rhetorical attacks on journalists since his inauguration. Last week, he described a reporter asking about warnings and emergency response in the Texas flooding disaster as \u201can evil person\u201d, an epithet he has turned to with increasing frequency<\/a>.
The Guevara case is a sign of increasing hostility toward a free press, said Katherine Jacobsen, a program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. She traced<\/a> a through line from the Associated Press being barred from government briefings after it refused to accept the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the \u201cGulf of America\u201d, then lawsuits and investigations reopened against media companies, then attacks on journalists covering protests in Los Angeles, then Australian writer Alistair Kitchen\u2019s deportation<\/a> seemingly in relation to his reporting on student protests.
\u201cNext thing you know, we have Mario Guevara, a long time Spanish-language reporter in the Atlanta metro area, who is in Ice detention,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s growing increasingly concerning by the day.\u201d
Guevara\u2019s audience views it as more than an attack on press freedom, though. They view it as an attack on themselves.
\u201cHe\u2019s a test case to push the envelope for legal immigrants that have committed no crime, to trump up charges against them,\u201d GALEO\u2019s Gonzales said. \u201cAnd the second piece is how to target journalists.\u201d
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Guevara\u2019s arrest set off an immigration nightmare akin to the kind he has spent the last decade documenting.
His arrest on a Saturday led to a weekend in DeKalb county\u2019s decaying jail and a bond hearing that Monday. A magistrate court judge granted Guevara a no-dollar bond, but by then Ice had become aware of the arrest and placed Guevara on a hold. The jail released him into Ice custody, and held him briefly in a metro Atlanta facility.
The next day, Gwinnett county charged Guevara with three misdemeanor traffic offenses, claiming that they were related to Guevara livestreaming a law enforcement operation a month earlier. The charges would be sufficient to keep him in jail and provide Ice an argument for his deportation at a federal bond hearing. The Gwinnett county sheriff\u2019s office said Guevara\u2019s livestreaming \u201ccompromised\u201d investigations.
Guevara\u2019s attorneys tried to work quickly, Diaz said. \u201cThe detained dockets are so backed up, and the immigration detention centers are so overwhelmed that what used to take us two or three days to get a bond hearing now is taking about a week,\u201d he said.
Attorneys working for immigration enforcement argued in court that Guevara\u2019s reporting constituted a \u201cthreat\u201d to immigration operations.
Jacobsen with CPJ was listening to the hearing when the government made that argument.
\u201cWe felt a sense of alarm,\u201d she said. \u201cAlarm bells were raised by the government\u2019s argument, as well as the judge not necessarily pushing back against the government\u2019s argument that live streaming poses a danger to threaten law enforcement actions.\u201d
The immigration judge granted Guevara a $7,500 bond for the immigration case. But Guevara\u2019s family was not allowed to pay it because government attorneys appealed the bond order to the board of immigration appeals. But it took seven days for the court to issue a stay to the government\u2019s appeal. Meanwhile, Ice began playing musical jail cells with Guevara.
Over the course of the next three weeks, Ice shuttled Guevara between three different counties around Atlanta and eventually to the massive private prison Ice uses in Folkston, Georgia, 240 miles south-east of Atlanta on the Florida line.
\u201cWe weren\u2019t surprised that they appealed, because the government\u2019s reserving and in most cases appealing everything, even stuff where they shouldn\u2019t appeal because they\u2019re wasting everybody\u2019s time,\u201d Diaz said. \u201cBut we didn\u2019t really know the breadth of what they were trying to do to him.\u201d
Earlier this week, Todd Lyons, Ice\u2019s acting director, issued a memo<\/a> changing its policy on bond hearings, arguing that detainees are not entitled to those hearings before their deportation case is heard in court. Immigration advocates expect to challenge the move in court.
But Guevara is not facing a criminal charge. The Gwinnett county solicitor\u2019s office dropped the traffic charges last week, noting that two of them could not be prosecuted because they occurred on private property \u2013 the apartment complex \u2013 and the third lacked sufficient evidence for a conviction.
For now, Ice has mostly kept Guevara in medical wards in jails even though he is healthy, Diaz said. \u201cFrom the beginning, they\u2019ve been keeping Mario under a special segregation because they\u2019re claiming he\u2019s a public figure. They want to make sure nothing happened to him.\u201d
D<\/span>oraville is a municipality of about 10,800 in DeKalb county with a separate police force, and had been asked to assist managing the protest in the immigrant-heavy Embry Hills neighborhood nearby. Protests have become a regular occurrence in DeKalb county since the Trump administration\u2019s immigration raids began.
Doraville\u2019s cops have displayed a more cooperative relationship with immigration law enforcement than many other metro Atlanta departments, and observers have raised questions about whether its police department arrested Guevara to facilitate an Ice detainer.
Geierman, the mayor, denied those accusations.
\u201cThe Doraville police department was not operating under the direction of, or in coordination with, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the June 14th protest,\u201d he said in a statement. \u201cTo the department\u2019s knowledge, no Ice personnel were present at the event. Doraville officers were on site to support the DeKalb county sheriff\u2019s office as part of a coordinated public safety effort.\u201d
Observers have also questioned Guevara\u2019s charges from Gwinnett county \u2013 ignoring traffic signs, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving \u2013 that stemmed from an incident that occurred in May, a month before his arrest.
\u201cMario Guevara compromised operational integrity and jeopardized the safety of victims of the case, investigators, and Gwinnett county residents,\u201d the department said in a statement.
But Gwinnett\u2019s belated prosecution left his attorneys gobsmacked.
\u201cIn the narrative that they put out, they say he was livestreaming a police operation, and he was interfering,\u201d Diaz said. \u201cBut when they went to a judge to get warrants, the only warrants the magistrate was able to sign for them was for traffic violations. I mean, that\u2019s kind of telling.\u201d
\u201cI think the whole thing is suspicious,\u201d he added. \u201cFrom the beginning, just everything seemed they were really making efforts to make it difficult for him to go free.\u201d
Marvin Lim, a Filipino American state representative whose district contains the apartment complex in Gwinnett in Guevara\u2019s citation, has asked the sheriff\u2019s office a detailed set of questions about the department\u2019s relationship with federal immigration enforcement. He has not received an adequate response, he said in an open letter to the sheriff.
An array of six advocacy organizations challenged Gwinnett\u2019s sheriff, Keybo Taylor, in a letter<\/a> Tuesday over Guevara\u2019s arrest and the sheriff\u2019s posture toward immigration enforcement, demanding details about the relationship. GALEO, among them, also issued a separate letter<\/a> Wednesday calling on Taylor to be transparent about the Guevara arrest.
Guevara \u201cwas arrested while doing the vital work that journalists in a democracy do\u201d, GALEO\u2019s letter states. \u201cNot only do the circumstances surrounding his incarceration and subsequent immigration detainment stir serious civil rights concerns, but they also build upon an expanding sense of fear and confusion in Georgia\u2019s most diverse county.\u201d
\u201cI am being persecuted,\u201d Guevara wrote<\/a> in a 7 July letter seeking humanitarian intercession from, of all people, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador\u2019s rightwing president.
\u201cI am about to complete a month in jail, and I need to get out in order to continue with my life, return to my work, and support my family,\u201d Guevara wrote. \u201cI have lived in the United States for nearly 22 years. I had never been arrested before. In these past three weeks, I have been held in five different jails, and I believe the government is trying to tarnish my record in order to deport me as if I were a criminal.\u201d
Guevara\u2019s American-born son turned 21 this year, permitting him to sponsor Guevara\u2019s green card and eventual citizenship. His application is pending, Diaz said. It may not matter.
\u201cThis is the first time I\u2019ve ever seen a stay filed for someone who has no convictions, has almost no criminal history in 20 years, and only had pending traffic violations,\u201d Diaz said.
\u201cIt\u2019s clear that everybody\u2019s working really hard to keep him detained.\u201d<\/p>\n

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