“La Boca del Lobo,” a 2019 Times short documentary, follows the work of Mario Guevara, a reporter based in the outskirts of Atlanta who has a large audience among Latino immigrants in the area. In one scene, a woman tells Guevara that her husband, who had just been detained by ICE agents, had walked into “la boca del lobo” (“into the wolf’s mouth,” an expression meaning “into the lion’s den”). The immigration-enforcement agency had more than quadrupled noncriminal arrests in Atlanta in the 2017 fiscal year and was causing havoc in Spanish-speaking communities. Guevara, a forty-seven-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, is the only reporter in Atlanta (and possibly in the United States) who has been covering these raids every day for years. “Mr. Guevara’s job, and his obsession, is to stalk the wolf,” Jesse Moss, the director of the video, wrote in an accompanying piece for the Times.
Now Guevara himself has been detained by ICE agents. On June 14th, he was arrested while live-streaming a No Kings protest near Atlanta, and he is currently being held in an immigration-detention center. His case highlights the particularly vulnerable position of immigrant journalists who report on immigration for immigrant communities. As attacks on press freedom mount, including the intimidation of journalists covering protests, reporters are becoming targets of the law-enforcement and immigration agencies that they cover.
Guevara’s career as a journalist in El Salvador was brief but deeply consequential. When he was in his early twenties, he joined the photojournalism desk at La Prensa Gráfica, one of the country’s main newspapers. “He was very young and very enthusiastic,” Francisco Campos, a renowned photojournalist who was then his editor, told me. Guevara lived in Apopa, a district north of San Salvador, the capital city, which was by then falling under the control of the maras—gangs that originated in Los Angeles and whose members were deported en masse to El Salvador in the nineteen-nineties—who routinely threatened those who didn’t pay them a renta (protection money). Guevara confided to Campos that he was afraid of them.
In 2003, Campos sent him to cover a mass protest in front of the national-government complex in San Salvador. The organizer was the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), a left-wing guerrilla organization during the civil war that had become a legitimate political party following the 1992 peace accords. Just over a decade had passed since the end of the brutal twelve-year-long conflict, and street protests often ended in violence. As a journalist with La Prensa Gráfica, Guevara was a target: F.M.L.N. sympathizers saw the paper as a political enemy, because it had supported the military through the war. A group of protesters attacked Guevara, who sought refuge at the nearby Ministry of Justice. He was then driven to a police station, where Campos picked him up later that day. Guevara later told CNN that he had received death threats during this period; in the documentary, he reiterates that he had “made some enemies” and was promised “two bullets in the chest.” In early 2004, Guevara, with his wife and young daughter, left El Salvador for the United States, reportedly arriving on a tourist visa. He settled in Atlanta and eventually requested asylum.
Guevara managed to get a job at a local, now defunct newspaper, Atlanta Latino. In 2007, he moved to Mundo Hispánico, an outlet owned at the time by Cox Enterprises, which also owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Mundo Hispánico became the leading Spanish-language news outlet in Georgia, with numbers rivalling those of English-language outlets: by 2020, it had 4.9 million followers on Facebook, while the Journal-Constitution had just 837,000. This growth coincided with a rapid rise in the state’s Latino population; according to the Atlanta Regional Commission, there was a more than thirty per cent increase in the Atlanta metro area between 2010 and 2020.
During the Obama Administration, a federal program that allows ICE to partner with state and local law enforcement expanded across the region, and the number of detentions ballooned. Guevara began covering them as they occurred, to document their personal and communal toll. Shortly before the start of the first Trump Administration, Guevara began noticing abandoned vans on the sides of roads, often with ladders attached to the roof and coffee thermoses left inside, and realized that ICE was targeting vans carrying migrant construction workers. He began driving around the Atlanta region at dawn, when ICE operations were most frequent, to catch and live-stream those raids.
Guevara built a huge immigrant audience on social media; he now has more than 1.4 million followers across all platforms, including almost nine hundred thousand on Facebook. He forged a direct relationship with them by answering their messages and by speaking to them, or by driving around their neighborhoods and introducing himself. They often sent him tips, which he pursued and turned into stories. “He had eyes and ears everywhere,” Lautaro Grinspan, a bilingual immigration reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, told me. When they had “trouble getting an official tally of immigration arrests in the area, the second-best source was Mario.” Grinspan, who profiled Guevara in May, just a few weeks before his arrest, added that it is “hard to overstate” his influence in the Spanish-language community. “He was a singular presence in our media ecosystem.” Now “he finds himself in the bowels of the immigration-detention system, experiencing firsthand something he used to write about.”
In “La Boca del Lobo,” Guevara recalls receiving a tip: ICE had surrounded a building and was knocking on the door. When Guevara arrived at the scene, officers had already cordoned off the area. He began live-streaming and, at one point, realized that the migrant they were after was watching the operation live on his Facebook page. The man contacted Guevara and asked him to mediate with the ICE agents so that they wouldn’t shoot him when he left the building. Guevara informed the officers that the man inside was afraid to come out, and they communicated with him—through Guevara—until he surrendered. In the same video, Guevara states that, as a reporter, he doesn’t take sides—he often interviews ICE agents and police officers for their perspective—but he notes that the raids create “a lot of fear and terror. A lot of panic. There are people who won’t go to work nor send their kids to school after a raid in their neighborhood. That fear is not letting them continue with their normal life.” He adds, “I understand that fear. Sometimes I think I’ll be next.”
By then, Guevara’s asylum request had been denied. In June, 2012, a judge had ordered him to leave the country within sixty days, but his lawyers obtained administrative closure, a procedure by which an immigration judge can temporarily pause removal proceedings. Guevara and his wife have two sons born in the U.S., and Guevara applied for a green card as an immediate relative of a citizen. According to one of his lawyers, Giovanni Díaz, he was granted a temporary work permit. His green-card request is still pending. In a recent press conference, Guevara’s daughter mentioned that one of her brothers, who is now twenty-one and is sponsoring his father’s request, had to undergo two surgeries to remove a brain tumor and depends on his father financially and emotionally.
Guevara continued reporting despite his legal vulnerability. He left Mundo Hispánico last year to launch his own operation, MGNews. On June 14th, wearing a red shirt, a helmet, and a black vest that read “PRESS” in large white letters on the front and back, he went to cover the No Kings protest. A group of local police officers closed in on him, and, while he loudly identified himself as “a member of the media,” they arrested him. He “is very, very well known in the community, even with these jurisdictions and these police officers . . . It’s hard to believe they didn’t know who he was,” Díaz, his lawyer, said during the press conference.
Guevara was taken to the DeKalb County Jail and charged with three misdemeanors: obstruction of law-enforcement officers, unlawful assembly, and pedestrian improperly entering roadway. A few days later, three additional misdemeanor charges were filed in Gwinnett County—for ignoring traffic signs, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving—which stemmed from an incident in May, in which, according to Díaz, Guevara was recording law-enforcement operations. (Dekalb County dropped the charges on June 25th, but the ones filed in Gwinnett County are still pending. Guevara’s lawyers said in a press release that “it is very uncommon for traffic warrants to be sought out after the alleged illegal activity. Nevertheless, we are working to obtain more information about these warrants and find out the reason why they were not brought earlier. Mr. Guevara is innocent until proven guilty.”) On June 18th, the police turned Guevara over to ICE, and he was transferred to the Folkston ICE Processing Center in southeastern Georgia. On Friday, June 20th, ICE announced that it had initiated deportation proceedings.
Francisco Campos, the photojournalist in El Salvador who was Guevara’s editor, and who has remained in touch with him, saw the news of the arrest on Guevara’s social-media accounts. “In these twenty-some years since he left, Mario has helped several people here,” he told me. About ten years ago, he said, Guevara came to the aid of a campesino in Sensuntepeque, a remote area near the border with Honduras. The man had been forced to mortgage his land after gang members had extorted him, and the bank was about to foreclose. Guevara raised the money, Campos said, which was deposited directly in the bank to cancel the man’s debt and to insure that he maintained the property title. Sending Guevara back to El Salvador “would be a very unfortunate situation,” Campos said. “Newsrooms have laid off about sixty per cent of their staff. Many journalists are unemployed. This is not a country where you can come and launch a successful news channel like the one he has there. For him, it would be personally devastating.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (where I serve as a board member), along with a coalition of civil-society and media organizations, expressed “alarm” at Guevara’s detention in a letter to Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and demanded his release. “If Guevara’s case proceeds, it would represent a grim erosion of both freedom of the press and the rule of law. Journalists who are not U.S. citizens could be at risk of deportation solely because local law enforcement filed misdemeanor charges against them in retaliation for reporting without those charges ever being tried in court,” the letter reads. (The Press Freedom Tracker has documented the arrest of eleven journalists since Trump’s Inauguration, including Guevara’s, all at anti-ICE protests, and is working to verify the arrest of four more.) In an X post from June 20th, the Department of Homeland Security denied that Guevara had been detained because of his work and said that he was in ICE custody because he had entered the country illegally in 2004. (Díaz reiterated to NPR that Guevara had entered the U.S. legally on a tourist visa.)
Maritza Félix, the founder and director of the Spanish-language news outlet Conecta Arizona, based in Phoenix, has known Guevara for years. She told me that news of his arrest compounded what has been a “traumatizing” few months for reporters, especially those who came to the U.S. seeking the freedom that they lacked in their home countries. “Today, it was Mario, but tomorrow it could be any one of us. We used to believe we were in a country where the law and the Constitution were respected.” She said that her team has seen an uptick in hate messages in e-mails and on social media—“Go back to your country,” “Speak English”—and have been forced to adopt safety measures she never imagined would be necessary here.