David Wallace-Wells writes:

Last Friday, the 48-year-old Emmy-winning reporter Mario Guevara was deported to El Salvador from an ICE detention facility in Folkston, Ga. He was held in detention there for over 100 days. The state’s filings concerning his detention seem to largely focus on the crime of committing journalism.

Guevara was arrested in June at a No Kings rally outside Atlanta, where, while filming the protest for his livestreaming platform MG News, he (clearly wearing a press vest and keeping his distance from both protesters and law enforcement) briefly stepped into a roadway. Within days, the charges against him were dropped. But instead of being released, he was transferred to ICE custody. And although an immigration judge granted him bond, finding him neither dangerous nor a flight risk, the government appealed it, arguing that his recording of law enforcement activity itself constituted a danger. And so Guevara — whose work primarily documents immigration enforcement actions, which he often livestreams to hundreds of thousands of followers — was kept in ICE detention. Meanwhile, his immigration case was reopened, and eventually deportation proceedings commenced.

When the Columbia activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil was detained in March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that Khalil’s participation in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza amounted to a deportable threat to American foreign policy. The administration appeared to offer a similar argument about Rumeysa Ozturk — seemingly confirming that she had been detained for activism, namely by being a writer of a campus opinion piece criticizing her university for its response to Israel’s war in Gaza, and that she should be deported for that speech crime.

Both of those First Amendment cases still hang in a kind of judicial limbo, though Khalil and Ozturk are — for now, at least — free. Guevara is not, having been sent from the country in which he raised a family and built a news organization for years back to the one he left fearing persecution for his reporting in 2004. “It’s a real frontal attack on journalism and freedom of the press,” said Jose Zamora of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “I think it also shows you how all these democratic institutions that take hundreds of years to build can be dismantled in a year.”

The immigration side of Guevara’s case is complicated. Technically, authorities are given broad discretion in deciding deportation cases. By contrast, the detention that enabled those deportation proceedings to begin again is not complicated. “There’s no real crime here. It’s just pretext,” said Adam Rose, the press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club and the deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “That was totally in retaliation for his reporting,” said the A.C.L.U’s Scarlet Kim, one of Guevara’s lawyers in his recent proceedings. “The government has made that explicitly clear.”

Over the past six months, federal officials have again and again declared that documenting immigration enforcement activities by ICE agents is, by definition, a form of doxxing, which they describe not only as a form of harassment or even effectively an incitement to violence but also as the equivalent of violence. Such activity, they promised, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Last month federal prosecutors made good on the threat, issuing an indictment against three activists for doxxing ICE agents in August.

Students of political theory sometimes define the state as the entity that exercises a monopoly on violence; under Trump, the state seems to want to claim a monopoly on anonymity, too. Rose called the logic Orwellian. “It’s almost like doublespeak to say that filming is violence,” he said. “That is absurd. What filming does isn’t violence. It documents violence. It actually proves what really happened.”

Of course, there has been real violence against journalists since Trump returned to office, as well, not just arguments about whether Jimmy Kimmel should be on the air. During the protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles this June, more than 30 incidents of police violence against members of the media were documented by the Los Angeles Press Club, which last month won a remarkable injunction in a Federal District Court in California, in which the judge, Hernán Vera, had to detail that law enforcement could not attack or assault members of the press just for documenting a raid or protest. Vera described the attacks during the protests as “savagery.”

And in recent weeks, the violence has seemed to enter a new phase or perhaps merely a more visible one. On Sept. 28 an ICE agent fired a pepper ball at the car of a television journalist surveying a detention facility for signs of protest, of which there were none. On Sept. 30 at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, ICE agents shoved journalists to the floor, sending one to the hospital, just a week after a similar episode at the same facility led to the suspension of one agent — and only briefly. [Continue reading…]