A journalist known for covering immigration arrests in Georgia was taken into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody on Wednesday after he was arrested while reporting on a protest against the Trump administration’s immigration policies over the weekend.
The journalist, Mario Guevara, is originally from El Salvador and has been in the United States for more than 20 years, one of his lawyers, Zach Gaeta, said. Mr. Guevara was not a legal permanent resident or citizen, but he had a work permit and a Social Security number, Mr. Gaeta said.
It was not clear where Mr. Guevara was on Wednesday morning after he was released from the DeKalb County Jail, Mr. Gaeta said. Mr. Guevara had been jailed since he was arrested on Saturday at a protest about 15 miles northeast of Atlanta. Mr. Gaeta said that Mr. Guevara’s legal team planned to challenge his detention and to try to find him a path to legal status.
“We do think that he has a defendable case and we’re still remaining optimistic about his release,” Mr. Gaeta said.
Mr. Guevara, who built a large following covering immigration issues in Georgia, was best known for documenting immigration arrests. He was the subject of an Op-Doc mini documentary produced by The New York Times’s Opinion department in 2019.
He said in the documentary that he was attacked and threatened while working as a reporter in El Salvador, so he sought asylum in the United States. He has been living in Georgia since 2004, Mr. Gaeta said.
Mr. Guevara worked at Mundo Hispánico, a Spanish-language news organization, for several years before starting his own news organization, MGNews. He has a large following on social media, including more than 405,000 followers on TikTok and more than 782,000 on Facebook as of Tuesday morning.
On Saturday, he was livestreaming a “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration’s immigration policies when he was arrested.
The footage shows Mr. Guevara standing in a group of people when police officers start moving toward him. Suddenly, his camera is covered and Mr. Guevara can be heard saying, “Officer, officer, I’m a member of the media, officer.”
The recording continues for about 20 more minutes. The footage is obscured most of that time and it is not clear from the sound what was happening or why Mr. Guevara was arrested.
“If law enforcement was coming and walking toward him, in my opinion, it wasn’t anything that anybody was doing wrong,” Mr. Gaeta said. “All of a sudden, the officer just decided, ‘If you’re still here, I’m going to arrest you.’”
Mr. Guevara was arrested on charges of a pedestrian improperly entering roadway and obstruction of law enforcement officers, according to jail records. A third charge, unlawful assembly, was added on Monday, Mr. Gaeta said.
The Doraville Police Department and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.
An arrest warrant issued by the Police Department said Mr. Guevara ignored repeated instructions from police officers to move off a roadway, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Atlanta Civic Circle, a nonprofit news site, said its reporters were “a few steps” from Mr. Guevara when he was detained.
Just before Mr. Guevara was arrested, officers had deployed tear gas for a third time and were trying to move reporters away from the protest site, Atlanta Civic Circle reported. Officers said they would arrest journalists and protesters if they did not leave, and Mr. Guevara was complying with orders to move back, the news site reported. He was closer to the police officers than other members of the press, the news site said.
Katherine Jacobsen, the U.S., Canada, and Caribbean program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement that Mr. Guevara should be released. “His ongoing detention signals a frightening erosion of press freedom in the U.S.,” she said.
Ms. Jacobsen also wrote to DeKalb County officials asking them to drop the charges. “Continuing to pursue these charges against Guevara would not only set off a costly legal battle about journalists’ established First Amendment rights to report matters of public interest,” she said in the letter, “it could create a pathway to deport a man who has been a valuable member of the Atlanta community for over 20 years.”
Giovanni Diaz, one of Mr. Guevara’s lawyers, said at a news conference on Tuesday night that Mr. Guevara was the only reporter arrested at the protest.
Mr. Guevara’s daughter, Katherine Guevara, said at the news conference that after her father was arrested on Saturday, her family expected he would be released on Sunday. The family prepared to welcome him home on Father’s Day with decorations and a specially ordered cake.
“To find out it wasn’t going to happen, it was very, very sad,” Ms. Guevara said. “We just had to bring everything down and cancel the cake order.”
Amanda Holpuch covers breaking news and other topics.
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