El Salvador-born Mario Guevara, arrested by Georgia police on Saturday, transferred to Ice officers after bond release
Mario Guevara, a prominent Spanish-language journalist in metro Atlanta who frequently covers Immigration and customs enforcement raids, will be turned over to Ice detention after being arrested by local police while covering the “No Kings” protests.
Guevara, 47, was born in El Salvador and has been in the United States for more than 20 years. He recorded his own arrest Saturday during a raucous street protest in the Embry Hills area of north DeKalb county, an Atlanta suburban neighborhood with a large Latino population. The protest ended with riot police throwing teargas and marching protesters down the street after declaring an unlawful assembly.
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Police charged Guevara as a pedestrian improperly entering a roadway, obstruction of a law enforcement officer and unlawful assembly. A municipal judge released Guevara on Monday on a recognisance bond – customary with misdemeanor charges. But jail staff said he would be transferred instead to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
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Ted Terry, a DeKalb county commissioner, asked the county’s staff to investigate the circumstances around the use of teargas at the event.
“The decision to deploy teargas – particularly in a neighborhood context with nearby homes and businesses – raises serious questions about the proportionality and justification of the county’s response to peaceful civil action,” he wrote.
A spokesperson for Ice in Atlanta could not immediately confirm the conditions of the immigration hold or whether Guevara faces deportation.
As a journalist with Diario CoLatino in El Salvador, he fled the country in 2004 one step ahead of threats from leftwing paramilitary groups. It took him seven years to get his first asylum hearing before a judge, the journalist told Spanish-language wire service Agencia EFE in the Los Angeles-based publication La Opinión in 2012. He described the arrest of his wife after an error in the immigration system. “The hardest part for me was seeing my three children cry as she was taken away, and me being powerless to give them the comfort and protection they need,” he said in Spanish in the interview.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/journalist-ice-protest-arrest-mario-guevara