Mario Guevara, center standing, is a Georgia-based journalist originally from El Salvador who has been in immigrant detention following his arrest while covering a protest. He now faces imminent removal as his family remains in the United States.
Mario Guevara is a Georgia-based journalist originally from El Salvador who has been in immigrant detention following his arrest while covering a protest. He now faces imminent removal.

The United States deported a Georgia-based journalist to his native El Salvador, months after his arrest while streaming a protest.

Mario Guevara, 48, boarded a flight around 4 a.m. on Oct. 3. A federal appeals court earlier in the week denied his request to stop his removal, allowing his deportation to take place despite concerns raised by human rights, free speech and press freedom advocates.

In El Salvador, Guevara, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, emerged out of a Salvadoran Border Patrol truck along a roadway. Press flanked him as he returned to the country he left more than two decades ago.

“It’s not how I wanted to return to my country, but here I am,” he said, wiping away tears. His news outlet, MG News, was on scene streaming to tens of thousands of people on his Facebook page. A reporter immediately handed him a microphone.

“Am I live?” he asked, before taking questions from other reporters about his detention and deportation.

The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t respond to email requests for comment.

Guevara’s deportation has drawn scrutiny of threats to press freedoms in the United States during President Donald Trump's second term.

“Mario Guevara’s deportation is a troubling sign of the deteriorating freedom of the press under the Trump administration,” said Katherine Jacobsen, the North America program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, in a statement.

In a statement, Paul O'Brien, executive director of the human rights organization Amnesty International USA, called Guevara's deportation a “grave injustice and yet another attack by the Trump Administration on human rights, including press freedom, arbitrary detention, and the rule of law.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson previously told USA TODAY in a statement that Guevara's case had "absolutely nothing to do with the First Amendment and any suggestion otherwise is laughable."

"The Trump Administration will continue enforcing the law without apology," she said.

Arrested covering a protest

In June, Georgia police arrested Guevara while he covered a “No Kings” anti-Trump protest in metropolitan Atlanta, wearing a press vest and streaming on his phone.

Local law enforcement dropped all criminal charges against Guevara. However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued to hold him in custody as they began removal proceedings, saying he was in the country illegally and subject to removal.

The federal Board of Immigration Appeals allowed Guevara’s imminent removal based in part on Guevara not paying an immigration bond in 2012. Guevara’s lawyers, including the ACLU, disputed this, providing an ICE receipt showing he made a $500 bond payment as requested before ICE later cancelled the bond in 2015.

On Oct. 1, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Atlanta, denied his motion to stay his removal, though it affirmed all people within the United States, regardless of immigration status, are guaranteed “the rights to free speech, free assembly, and free press,” even if they are noncitizen immigrants.

Guevara entered the country on a visitor visa in 2004. His wife and children live in the United States, and his lawyers said he originally fled El Salvador after receiving death threats for his work as a journalist at a conservative newspaper.

After the Board of Immigration Appeals in 2012 ended removal proceedings against him, he obtained work authorization. He recently applied for a green card through his adult son, an American citizen, his lawyers said. However, federal appeals judges determined he could be deported since he didn't properly file to adjust his status in the country.

Guevara said he was treated as a criminal in detention because of his work as a journalist covering the country's immigration crackdown.

As thunder roared in El Salvador, he said he planned to continue reporting, including on migrants he met in detention. When Salvadoran authorities received him earlier in the day, he said more than a hundred others were also deported with him, many of them crying.

“There are a lot of human stories, mine isn’t the only one,” he said.

Guevara hoped to one day return the United States. He called it his second "patria," or homeland, where his children are.

Eduardo Cuevas is based in New York City. Reach him by email at emcuevas1@usatoday.com or on Signal at emcuevas.01.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Journalist deported to El Salvador after covering protest. Here's what he had to say.

Reporting by Eduardo Cuevas, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect