This may be the most important free speech story that you haven’t heard of this week.
In a week saturated with coverage of threats to free expression, the case of an Emmy Award-winning journalist facing possibly imminent deportation for filming law enforcement struggled to penetrate the news cycle.
Earlier this year, journalist Mario Guevara was arrested covering a “No Kings” protest for MG News, an independent outlet that he founded last year following a decades long career in journalism. He is the only known journalist detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on U.S. soil. His case immediately caught the attention of press freedom advocates and major publications like the New Yorker, which ran a profile of him. But the breaking development in his case barely resonated outside local outlets in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Ga., his longtime home since moving to the United States from El Salvador in 2003.
His American Civil Liberties Union attorney Scarlet Kim said that his case demonstrates the Trump administration’s use of immigration enforcement as a tool of censorship.
“I think just an under-told piece of that story is how it also uses immigration enforcement to suppress speech,” Kim said in a Substack Live interview on Saturday.
Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called filming immigration agents an act of “violence,” and Guevara’s case shows the consequences of that false and unconstitutional idea.
Since the “No Kings” protest on June 14, Guevara has spent nearly 100 days in custody, first awaiting criminal charges that quickly disintegrated and then in ICE lockup. To block his release, the Trump administration explicitly argued that Guevara’s taping law enforcement made him a danger to the community.
“Because of the government's refusal to release him on the basis that it is his reporting and live streaming that is dangerous, which are core First Amendment protected activities, we then filed a habeas petition in federal court in August seeking his release from immigration detention,” Kim said.
The ACLU says that Guevara has spent much of his time in solitary confinement with little contact with his wife and three children, who live far away from the facility where he is being held.
In the video, Kim describes more about Guevara’s career, his case, and possible action items for concerned members of the public.
Read Guevara’s letter from an ICE detention facility here, in the publication The Bitter Southerner. Photo of Mr. Guevara courtesy of MG News.
