Media

 New Yorker - “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.