Guevara v. Warden, Folkston ICE Processing Center

Court: U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia

Date Filed: Sept. 4, 2025

Background: On June 14, 2025, Mario Guevara, an El Salvadoran journalist residing in the United States, was arrested while reporting on a public protest near Atlanta. Days later, he was transferred into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, where he has remained during his immigration proceedings. 

Guevara filed a habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, asking it to review whether his detention was legal. 

The government sought to dismiss Guevara’s petition, arguing that the court didn’t have jurisdiction to hear the habeas claim based on the administration’s interpretation of provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act. 

In response to the district court’s request for supplemental briefs on the question of jurisdiction, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed this friend-of-the-court brief. 

Our Position: The district court should reject the government’s argument and hold that Guevara has the right to immediately challenge the constitutionality of his detention.

• The government’s jurisdiction-stripping arguments, if credited, would chill constitutionally-protected newsgathering and reporting.

• Non-citizen journalists perform important public interest newsgathering and reporting every day, and often have special skills crucial to covering certain beats.

From the Brief: “The government is claiming unfettered power to detain non-citizens, even when such detention is based on First Amendment-protected speech, without any immediate judicial recourse. That is not the law, and it is essential that federal district courts be able to quickly entertain a habeas petition alleging the retaliatory detention of a non-citizen journalist.”

Related: In August, the Reporters Committee filed a similar friend-of-the-court brief in support of Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk’s right to challenge the constitutionality of her detention. As we recently explained in The Nuance, our monthly newsletter analyzing the legal and policy issues at the forefront of a free press, crediting the government’s theory in these cases “would chill an enormous amount of newsgathering and reporting in the public interest.”