The imprisoned journalist Mario Guevara is facing imminent deportation after an immigration appeals court closed the case and ordered his removal.
Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) say the El Salvador native could be put on a plane at any moment, despite an immigration judge’s initial order to grant his release on bond and a clear legal path to residency. His attorney said they were filing an emergency petition seeking relief.
Local police in suburban Atlanta arrested Guevara at a “No Kings Day” protest in June on charges of failing to disperse and standing in the roadway. While those charges, and other unrelated traffic charges laid later, were dropped almost immediately, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has held him in detention while seeking his deportation. The Committee to Protect Journalists noted that his detention and potential deportation was a result of his reporting on immigration and he had been detained in direct retaliation for his reporting.
Guevara has been in the US for more than 20 years. While his petition for asylum was rejected in 2012, his deportation was administratively closed in an appeal, and he has both a work permit and a pending application for a green card, his attorney Giovanni Diaz said.
He has been held for more than three months at the Folkston Ice processing center in south Georgia, the same detention facility Ice held 475 workers at a battery plant construction site earlier this month.
Though granted a bond, immigration officials appealed against the bond order. The order of deportation makes the bond case moot, but the ACLU has a habeas corpus petition pending before the federal court in south Georgia. Lawyers have filed an emergency appeal in that court, they said.
