Today, Atlanta journalist Mario Guevara becomes the fifth-longest-jailed journalist in US history, unseating William Farr of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, who was jailed for 46 days for refusing to reveal sources connected to the Charles Manson murder trial in 1972.
But what makes Guevara’s detention unprecedented is that he’s the only journalist to be jailed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The other nine journalists making the top 10 list for time behind bars all were jailed for refusing to divulge sources or testify before a grand jury. Their incarcerations have ranged from 18 to 226 days.
Guevara is also the only journalist who’s currently incarcerated as a result of doing their job, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. He is currently being held at the Folkston ICE Processing Center in South Georgia, after ICE successfully blocked an immigration judge’s July 1 order to grant him bond.
These days, journalists are most likely to be arrested while covering demonstrations, not for protecting sources, according to US Press Freedom Tracker. Guevara’s June 14 arrest at an anti-ICE protest in DeKalb County on misdemeanor obstruction charges is part of that trend. Typically, those journalists are released quickly — but not Guevara, a Salvadoran national legally authorized to work in the United States, while awaiting a green card.
The DeKalb Sheriff’s Office was about to release Guevara on a signature bond, when ICE issued a detainer hold. DeKalb agreed to jail him an extra two days, so ICE could take him into custody on June 18. Since then, he has languished in five county jails and federal immigration prisons, even though the local authorities have dropped all charges.
Press freedom advocates and Guevara’s attorneys say that his continued incarceration is not due solely to his immigration case. Rather, they argue, the federal government is attempting to silence non-citizen journalists – especially if, like Guevara, they are covering ICE activity.
Although Guevara was granted bond 30 days ago, ICE, in a highly unusual twist, moved to stay his release while it appeals the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. Guevara will remain in ICE custody until the appeal is decided. And that could be weeks away.
Here’s a look at the 10 journalists who’ve faced the longest US imprisonments on record:
- 226 days: In 2006, Josh Wolf, a freelance journalist and blogger, was jailed for refusing to hand over video footage of an anarchist protest in San Francisco to a grand jury investigating the incident.
- 168 days: In 2001, Vanessa Leggett, a Houston-based freelancer, was jailed for refusing to give a federal grand jury the research materials she’d collected for a book about the 1997 murder of Doris Angleton.
- 116 days: Mark Knops, the publisher of an underground newspaper, the Madison Kaleidescope, served nearly four months of a six month sentence in 1970 for refusing to answer grand jury questions about his interviews with the alleged perpetrators of a bombing at the University of Wisconsin, which killed a young researcher.
- 85 days: Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times was jailed in 2005 for refusing to reveal her source or to testify for a federal investigation into her outing of a CIA agent’s identity.
- 47 days: Mario Guevara, the proprietor of MG News, has been jailed by ICE since June 14 after local police arrested him on misdemeanor obstruction charges while covering an anti-ICE protest in DeKalb County.
- 46 days: William Farr, a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, was jailed for refusing to reveal sources connected to the Charles Manson murder trial in 1972.
- 30 days: Reuben Clein was a boxer from Georgia before he became the publisher of the tabloid Miami Life — which he reportedly won in a game of blackjack in 1931. He was jailed multiple times for contempt of court over refusing to give up his sources. His longest stint, for 30 days in 1950, was for refusing to reveal the source of bribery accusations against a Miami city councilman.
- 22 days: Lisa Abraham, a reporter for the Tribune-Chronicle in Warren, Ohio, was jailed in 1994 for refusing to testify about an official under a grand jury investigation whom she had interviewed.
- 21 days: Peter Bridge, a reporter for the Newark Evening News, was jailed in 1972 after he refused to answer questions from an Essex County grand jury about the identity of someone whom he’d reported allegedly tried to bribe a Newark Housing Authority commissioner for a top job.
- 18 days: Tim Roche, a reporter for Stuart News in Florida, was jailed in 1993 for protecting his sources for a 1990 story about the murder of a three-year-old child that exposed system failures by Florida’s social services.
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