A federal judge held an emergency hearing over the deportation risk “at any moment” for Atlanta journalist Mario Guevara on Friday at the urging of his legal team from the American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Georgia.
The ACLU asked US Magistrate Judge Benjamin Cheesbro for the emergency 4 p.m. hearing and a temporary restraining order after the Board of Immigration Appeals earlier on Friday reopened Guevara’s 13-year old removal case – improperly, the ACLU contends — so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can deport him to El Salvador.
The ACLU called on the judge to order Guevara’s release from ICE detention and ensure he is not deported. Cheesbro has given ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and Attorney General Pam Bondi until Oct. 3 to respond to Guevara’s emergency motion for a temporary restraining order.
“Mr. Guevara should not even be in immigration detention, but the government has kept him there for months because of his crucial reporting on law enforcement activity,” said one of his lawyers, ACLU senior staff attorney Scarlet Kim in a statement.
“The fact that he may now be put on a plane to El Salvador, a country he fled out of fear, at any moment, despite a clear path to becoming a permanent resident is despicable,” Kim added.
Guevara has been jailed at the Folkston ICE Processing Center since June 18, even though the Salvadoran national is authorized to work in the United States while his green card application is pending.
The emergency hearing was for the habeas petition that Guevara filed on Aug. 21 challenging his ongoing detention. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Georgia, accuses ICE of retaliatory detention to silence his reporting, violating his First Amendment rights. It demands his immediate release.
Guevara ended up in ICE custody on June 18, after Dekalb County police arrested him June 14 while livestreaming a “No Kings” protest for his Spanish-language news outlet MG News. Dekalb later dropped the misdemeanor obstruction charges. Even so, the DeKalb Sheriff’s Office handed him over to ICE.
A federal immigration judge granted Guevara bond on July 1, but the Department of Homeland Security appealed.
Board of Immigration Appeals reopens old case
In a surprise development, the Board of Immigration Appeals on Friday dismissed DHS’s appeal of the bond order, saying it was moot because the appeals board had just granted the government’s motion to reopen his removal case from over a decade ago.
According to the Sept. 20 ruling, authored by Appellate Immigration Judge Marcos Gemoets, there is an outstanding removal order against Guevara from the 2012 case, because an immigration judge at that time had ordered Guevara to be deported and the Board of Immigration Appeals had dismissed his appeal.
However, the ACLU says Gemoets’ ruling incorrectly misstates that an immigration judge ordered Guevara’s deportation in 2012. Rather, the judge granted Guevara voluntary departure – and the government subsequently administratively closed the removal case. Since then, it has allowed him to live and work in the United States for over a decade, while his green card application is pending.
The Board of Immigration Appeals also denied Guevara’s demand to send the reopened removal proceeding back to the immigration judge to decide his green card application. He is eligible for a green card through his son, a US citizen, according to the ACLU.
Gemoets was just appointed to the Board of Immigration Appeals in August by Attorney General Pam Bondi after serving on the Houston Immigration Court since 2017. Over his eight-year tenure as an immigration judge, Gemoets denied asylum in 91.7% of the almost 900 petitions he heard from people fleeing persecution in other countries, according to TRAC at Syracuse University.
Guevara has been jailed for 98 days, the fourth-longest of any journalist in US history.
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