UPDATE (Oct. 3, 2025, 7:42 p.m. ET): Mario Guevara has been deported to El Salvador, the Associated Press reports.
Any moment now, my father, Mario Guevara, could be sent to El Salvador. Already, he has been held for over 100 days in five different facilities, and I risk losing him from the country as you read this article.
My father is a prominent Atlanta journalist who runs his own, independent Spanish media outlet, MG News, where he livestreams major Georgia news.
In detention, my father has not always been safe.
Unfortunately, his coverage of law enforcement and ICE raids caught up to him at a “No Kings” protest over the summer. Local police arrested him while he was recording law enforcement alongside other journalists. Since then, prosecutors have dropped criminal charges related to his coverage of the protest and we have tried to pay bond multiple times. Regardless, for over 100 days, he’s been detained by ICE.
In the past week, the Board of Immigration Appeals has reopened my dad’s 13-year-old immigration case, which had been settled. And in an order we received Tuesday night, the BIA ordered my father be removed, asserting that his previous voluntary departure order was dissolved without bond payment.
This simply isn’t the case.
In 2012, the Board of Immigration Appeals granted my father voluntary departure, meaning he could leave the country on his own within 60 days on the basis of paying bond. Though he paid, he appealed to the board and landed on an agreement with the government that he could stay with work authorization, which my father had until the BIA reopened his case last week. He had never been issued a final removal order until Tuesday.
My father’s vocation is journalism. He is a storyteller, a truth-seeker, a man who believed — and still believes — that people deserve to know what’s happening in their communities, in their governments, and in the world around them. He is neither a threat nor a criminal.
As my father has been transferred from facility to facility, my siblings and I have tried to follow him wherever he goes. He has been transferred five times in total, from DeKalb County now to Folkston ICE Processing Center, nearly five hours away from us. We would make the drive anywhere and any day.
Without him here, I feel like part of me is missing.
In detention, my father has not always been safe. He was placed in solitary confinement. Known for his journalism, even by others inside, he has had inmates take photos of him and threaten to hurt him should my family not pay $60 a day. What else could we do? We paid.








