Mario Guevara, the journalist arrested at a June 14 protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was transferred to the federal agency’s custody today. Now, his attorney said, his whereabouts are unknown.
Guevara is a prominent independent journalist in metro-Atlanta, known for his Spanish-language coverage of ICE and the Latino community. He was arrested by the Doraville Police Department last Saturday, while covering an anti-ICE protest on Chamblee Tucker Road in northeast Atlanta.
When he was arrested, Guevara was wearing a vest clearly marked “PRESS” and a helmet, while holding his phone to livestream the protest and police response. During his arrest, which he captured on his Facebook feed, Guevara can be heard calmly telling officers he is a member of the media.
During the protest, Atlanta Civic Circle reporters witnessed police in riot gear deploy tear gas on protestors at least three times and indiscriminately threaten to arrest both demonstrators and journalists who were standing on the sidewalk or in the parking lot of the Embry Village strip mall where the rally took place.
Guevara is an El Salvadorian national who holds legal authorization to reside and work in the United States, where he’s lived for over 25 years, according to his attorney, Giovanni Díaz.
Doraville police charged him with unlawful assembly, improperly entering a roadway, and obstruction of law enforcement on Saturday, when they booked him into the DeKalb County Jail. He was set to be released on Sunday on a signature bond until ICE issued a detainer hold. This morning, the police released him into ICE custody.
Guevara’s whereabouts are currently unknown. A search for his name in ICE’s online detainee locator system returned no results, and ICE’s Atlanta Field Office did not reply to a request for comment.
DeKalb County Super District 6 Commissioner Ted Terry in comments to Atlanta Civic Circle today said that, based on the videos of Guevara’s June 14 arrest that he’s seen, it shouldn’t have happened.
“If a person clearly has ‘media’ or ‘press’ visible on their vest and was complying with police orders, they should not have been arrested,” Terry said. “What I saw on videos sent to me by constituents makes me believe the arrest was unnecessary.”
Terry said that he has called for “a review of the police actions” last Saturday — and that he personally will be reviewing the after-action report.
Meanwhile, press freedom groups have condemned Guevara’s arrest and called for his release. “[H]e should not have been prevented from doing his job, much less taken into custody,” Society of Professional Journalists president Emily Bloch said in a June 16 statement to Atlanta Civic Circle.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has also called for his release. “We are alarmed to learn that reporter Mario Guevara — who has work authorization in the United States — was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention after being arrested on [Saturday] while covering a protest. Guevara must be released without delay,” said CPJ official Katherine Jacobsen in a statement Wednesday. “His ongoing detention signals a frightening erosion of press freedom in the U.S.”
Jacobsen also sent a letter to DeKalb County CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson on Tuesday, urging DeKalb to drop the charges against him. “These charges are not justified given that he was reporting at the time and in no way obstructing law enforcement activity,” Jacobsen said in her letter.
The CPJ official emphasized that arresting Guevara while he was covering an anti-ICE protest likely violates his First Amendment rights. “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, it could create a pathway to deport a man who has been a valuable member of the Atlanta community for over 20 years,” Jacobsen wrote in her letter.
“CPJ research shows that it is exceedingly rare for journalists in the United States to be arrested and charged in relation to their work, given the protections they enjoy under the First Amendment,” the letter said. “In the unusual cases in which journalists have been charged in relation to their protest coverage, the legal costs– at taxpayer expense– have been high, the court battles lengthy, and the results in favor of the reporters.”
Cochran-Johnson has not responded to the CPJ letter, the group said. Neither DeKalb County, nor the Doraville Police Department have responded to requests for comment.
At least eight other journalists have been arrested while covering anti-ICE protests this year, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Is there a fundraiser to help with Guevara’s legal fees?