ICE, Georgia Sheriff’s Office Combine Forces To Keep A Salvadoran Journalist Locked Up Indefinitely

Legal Issues

from the America-hates-foreigners-for-their-freedom dept

This too will be swept away by this administration’s steady stream of injustices, but it’s still worth highlighting before it’s buried by even worse news later.

The mass deportation program enacted by Trump — one that intends to turn ICE into the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency — has already seen innocent foreigners declared “gang members,” college students arrested for opinion pieces they wrote for the school paper, and streets, businesses, homeless shelters, and courtrooms invaded by people in masks everyone is just supposed to assume work for the US government and have the legal authority to do the things they’re doing.

Due process rights have been universally ignored, along with a whole lot of other constitutional rights, ranging from free speech protections to warrant requirements for ICE officers.

Now, there’s this: another inexplicable — and apparently unending — violation of constitutional rights the US has extended to foreign-born residents and visitors for most of its history as an independent nation.

Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist imprisoned in a south Georgia immigration detention center after being arrested covering a “No Kings Day” protest in June, is being “punished for his journalism”, first amendment rights groups said.

“The charges were dropped, yet he remains detained by Ice,” said José Zamora, the regional director for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists, during a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Georgia capitol with Guevara’s attorneys and family. “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He is now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting.”

And there it is: Guevara was arrested for reporting on a “No Kings Day” protest — the nationwide protests that pissed in Trump’s birthday Cheerios so hard he immediately walked back earlier comments suggesting he’d no longer target the hardworking migrants employed by so many of his big business supporters.

Everything happening to journalist Mario Guevara right now is extremely vindictive, which is extremely on-brand for the Trump administration and the dozens of local law enforcement agencies willing to be even worse than they are already just to score some brownie points with the current regime.

Guevara was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of “pedestrian in roadway” while documenting a “No Kings” protest in Doraville, Georgia. When he was arrested, he was streaming his coverage to more than 1 million Spanish-speaking followers on Facebook.

Law enforcement officers (after a lot of fucking him around) seized his phone and tossed him into a nearby ICE detention center — one currently “supported” by “mass deportations give us a money boner” private prison firm, GEO Group. This all happened despite the arresting agency dropping the charges against Guevara.

Rather than allow Guevara — who is apparently in this country legally while his green card process continues — to return to the streets, another law enforcement agency stepped in to keep him locked up.

Though charges from the protest were quickly dropped, the sheriff of nearby Gwinnett county laid a second set of unrelated misdemeanor traffic charges shortly after Guevara’s arrest. The Gwinnett county solicitor subsequently dropped those charges as well, but not before Gwinnett’s sheriff’s office seized his cell phone with a search warrant.

Given that the charges brought (and dropped) against Guevara by the Gwinnett County sheriff’s office were traffic-related, there cannot possibly be any probable cause to support the seizure of his phone, much less his continued detention at the ICE facility in Folkston, Georgia.

According to Guevara’s lawyer, no agency — federal or local — is capable or willing to explain what happened to his phone, nor whose possession it’s in when (or if) he’s given a chance to retrieve it.

“Everybody’s saying we don’t see a warrant in the system,” Diaz said, describing his office’s inquiries with the sheriff and other agencies. “So, one of two things happened. Some other agency that hasn’t contacted us took it – US attorney’s [office], Ice, somebody else has it – or the phone was just plain stolen.

The rationale for this phone seizure — as well as Guevara’s continued detention (which included a brief stay in general population at an Atlanta federal prison) — appears to be nothing more than “Because fuck you, that’s why.” That’s the standard operating procedure for ICE, something that’s only become more common and more emboldened under Trump and his compliant band of bigots.

All of this will likely stay buried by ICE and its local enablers for as long as possible. And there’s no guarantee anyone involved with this will actually comply with any order from any court involved in the litigation that will inevitably follow Guevara’s release. The administration has made it clear it doesn’t believe courts have the power to stop it from doing whatever it wants. And that attitude is certainly going to spread to every local law enforcement agency that aids and abets the administration’s unconstitutional activities.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, 5th amendment, 6th amendment, dhs, due process, free speech, georgia, ice, mario guevara, mass deportation
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