Mario Guevara, the Salvadoran reporter and immigration raid hunter caught in the clutches of ICE

Mario Guevara has recorded and livestreamed countless immigration raids in recent years. On June 14th, he did the same with his own arrest. While covering a demonstration against President Donald Trump in the small, predominantly Latino town of Chamblee, Georgia—one of thousands of marches held across the country that day—we see the exact moment when the phone Guevara is using to record falls to the ground and the Salvadoran journalist, who has lived and worked in the United States for 21 years, addresses the riot police who had been approaching on screen moments before. “Officer! Officer! I am a member of the media,” he can be heard saying, reaffirming what his clearly marked helmet and vest should already have made clear. From the ground, the video continues to broadcast on that sunny Saturday.

While he’s being handcuffed, Guevara manages to get an officer to pick up his cell phone and put it in his backpack. The recording continues from inside. Once inside the patrol car, the detained reporter asks for a window to be rolled down and, aware that there’s a possibility his livestream might still be working, speaks out loud in Spanish to ask his thousands of followers to contact his lawyer. This recording is the last public testimony available from Guevara.

Since then, 21 days have elapsed during which he has been charged with several offenses, held in at least three different prison facilities, and, this week, released only to be re-arrested moments later. The US Press Freedom Tracker lists him as the only journalist currently detained in the United States.

Guevara’s initial arrest by police in DeKalb County, which includes part of Atlanta, was on three charges: unlawful assembly, obstructing law enforcement officers, and pedestrian improperly entering a roadway. On June 18, however, Guevara was handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), accused of being in the country illegally. He was also hit with three additional misdemeanor charges —ignoring signals, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving—filed without photographic evidence and without testimony from the prosecuting officers, whose names were also withheld, and which allegedly occurred on May 20. Two days later, Guevara was transferred to the Folkston Immigration Detention Center in southern Georgia, and formal deportation proceedings began. These proceedings continue despite the DeKalb district attorney’s dismissal on June 25 of the initial charges from the day of the demonstration.

Last Monday, June 30, an immigration court granted him bail of $7,500 after rejecting the government’s arguments that he was a “threat to the community.” But when Guevara was released on Wednesday, after the 48 hours of additional custody requested by ICE, he was immediately detained for the alleged traffic violations and taken back into the custody of local police, who recorded his arrest on Thursday morning. That same night, it was confirmed that Guevara was once again in ICE custody at the Floyd County Jail without bail.

Although he is accused of having entered and remained in the United States illegally, Guevara’s lawyers maintain that the journalist entered legally in 2004 with a tourist visa and has held a work permit for years. Furthermore, after his asylum request was rejected due to lack of conclusive evidence that he would be at risk if he returned to El Salvador, in 2012 he began the process of obtaining permanent residency as an immediate relative of a U.S. citizen: his two children were born in the country. That process remains open.

Guevara fled his native country with his wife in early 2004 after working at La Prensa Gráfica, covering, among other things, protests against the local government. For that work, he was accused by some sectors of being an undercover state agent and attacked twice. He also received death threats. It was then that he decided to move to the United States, where he settled in Atlanta.

There, he got a job at a now-defunct local Spanish-language newspaper called Atlanta Latino. In 2007 he started working for Mundo Hispánico, a media outlet owned by Cox Enterprises, which also owns the city’s largest daily newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In the following years, Mundo Hispánico grew tremendously, establishing itself as the largest Spanish-language media outlet in Georgia, with numbers that even rivaled English-language outlets. The boom coincided with the rapid increase in Atlanta’s Latino population, which grew by 30% between 2010 and 2020.

During Barack Obama’s administration, an alliance between ICE and local police expanded immigration enforcement in the state, and the number of arrests grew rapidly. Guevara launched into covering the issue. Shortly before Donald Trump’s first term, the reporter began noticing abandoned vans on the streets, often with ladders tied to the roofs and packed lunches still intact inside. He realized that ICE was targeting construction workers, so he began hitting the streets in the early morning hours, when construction workers were on their way to work, to hunt for immigration raids. Thus began the reports that would become the company’s trademark: live broadcasts of ICE operations.

Through this intrepid work, Guevara built a huge and loyal audience on social media. He currently has nearly 1.5 million followers across all platforms, including 784,000 on Facebook. There, he has built a direct relationship with his followers, responding to their comments and speaking with them, as well as being a constant presence in his neighborhoods, where he knows many residents personally. Last year, he decided to launch his own media outlet, MGNews, whose audience includes many of the people who have been informed by his work for years.

It was precisely this high profile that caused him to be placed in solitary confinement for the 11 days he spent at the Folkston ICE detention center. There, his colleague and friend, local journalist Rafael Navarro, managed to speak with him and recorded the encounter. “When they brought me in, they told me that they were going to put me in this place because I was a well-known person and they didn’t want anyone to try to harm me, but this is where they bring people who are punished; these are the punishment cells,” he told Navarro.

His solitary confinement cell was permanently lit. “But I have my own private bathroom,” he joked with his friend. The other three hours of the day were spent washing his clothes and exercising. One night, he told Navarro, he woke up and, despite the bright lights, saw only blackness around him and suffered what appeared to be a panic attack. “I’m going crazy,” he confessed to his friend. The psychologist who visited him in his cell told him it was simply the stress of incarceration and that meditation or prayer would do him good.

Currently, the conditions under which he is being held are unknown, but the ordeal he has endured in recent weeks, which seems to have no clear end, is confirming the worst fears. On June 20, the Committee to Protect Journalists, along with a civil and media coalition, expressed its alarm over Guevara’s detention in a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

“If Guevara’s case proceeds, it would represent a grim erosion of both freedom of the press and the rule of law. Journalists who are not U.S. citizens could be at risk of deportation solely because local law enforcement filed misdemeanor charges against them in retaliation for reporting without those charges ever being tried in court,” the letter states. Likewise, several local Spanish-language media outlets across the country have reported intimidation and an increase in the racist and xenophobic messages they receive.

Despite his professional zeal, Guevara has long had that cloud hanging over his head. In a short documentary that The New York Times made about him a few years ago called Boca del Lobo (“Mouth of the Wolf”) Guevara spoke about fear. “There are people who don’t go to work or send their children to school after an operation in their neighborhood. That fear doesn’t let them continue with their normal lives. I understand fear. Sometimes I think I’m going to be next.”

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