The New York Times has falsely suggested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested an “immigration reporter” because he covered a far-left protest against the Trump administration.
In fact, Salvadoran Mario Guevara was arrested and detained by ICE after the “No Kings” protest just outside Atlanta, Georgia, for a different reason. He is an illegal alien, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed.
That isn’t the only time the far-left Mainstream Media has purposely spun a story to smear the Trump administration. Just as they and far-left Democrats portrayed the deported Salvadoran illegal, gangbanger, and wife-beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a “Maryland husband and father,” a news station in Tennessee has portrayed a Mexican illegal-alien thug as a “father deported after a traffic stop.”
To the Times, Guevara — no relation to communist Cuban mass murderer Che Guevara, one hopes — is a “journalist known for covering immigration arrests in Georgia.”
But the evil Trump administration arrested him while he was “reporting on a protest against the … administration’s immigration policies over the weekend,” the Times continued:
The journalist, Mario Guevara, is originally from El Salvador and has been in the United States for more than 20 years, one of his lawyers, Zach Gaeta, said. Mr. Guevara was not a legal permanent resident or citizen, but he had a work permit and a Social Security number, Mr. Gaeta said.
Guevara is such a star that he has 405,000 followers on TikTok and 782,000 on Facebook. He was even “the subject of an Op-Doc mini documentary produced by The New York Times’s Opinion department in 2019.”
Guevara claimed in that hagiography that “he was attacked and threatened while working as a reporter in El Salvador, so he sought asylum in the United States.”
He was live-streaming the “No Kings” protest when he was arrested, the Times reported:
The footage shows Mr. Guevara standing in a group of people when police officers start moving toward him. Suddenly, his camera is covered and Mr. Guevara can be heard saying, “Officer, officer, I’m a member of the media, officer.”
The recording continues for about 20 more minutes. The footage is obscured most of that time and it is not clear from the sound what was happening or why Mr. Guevara was arrested.
“If law enforcement was coming and walking toward him, in my opinion, it wasn’t anything that anybody was doing wrong,” Mr. Gaeta said. “All of a sudden, the officer just decided, ‘If you’re still here, I’m going to arrest you.’”
Mr. Guevara was arrested on charges of a pedestrian improperly entering [a] roadway and obstruction of law enforcement officers, according to jail records. A third charge, unlawful assembly, was added on Monday, Mr. Gaeta said.
Members of the far-left media have rushed to Guevara’s legal defense, the Times continued. The newspaper dutifully ran off to his daughter to get the obligatory lachrymose tale of woe:
Mr. Guevara’s daughter, Katherine Guevara, said at the news conference that after her father was arrested on Saturday, her family expected he would be released on Sunday. The family prepared to welcome him home on Father’s Day with decorations and a specially ordered cake.
“To find out it wasn’t going to happen, it was very, very sad,” Ms. Guevara said. “We just had to bring everything down and cancel the cake order.”
However many tears that story evokes, DHS has something of a different take on Guevara and his presence in the United States.
“FALSE. Accusations that Mario Guevara was arrested by ICE because he is a journalist are completely untrue,” the agency wrote on X:
Mario Guevera was arrested by Dekalb County, Georgia police for willful obstruction after he refused to comply with local police orders to move out of the middle of the street. Following his arrest by local authorities, ICE placed a detainer on him. Following his release, he was turned over to ICE custody and has been placed in removal proceedings.
This El Salvador national is in ICE custody because he entered the country illegally in 2004.
Illegal aliens can take control of their departure with the CBP Home App.
On Tuesday, WKRN.com in Nashville, Tennessee, spun another pro-illegal-alien yarn for gullible readers.
“Father deported after traffic stop in Robertson County; Family torn apart,” the headline reported of Hilario Martinez Garcia:
A family has been left in shambles after a husband and father was deported to Mexico.
He was detained during a traffic stop in Robertson County. His wife, an American citizen, was reportedly behind the wheel. She’s now been left to raise their children on her own.
A neighbor chimed in that Garcia is a super-duper guy. “He is a father, a husband and a hard worker,” the neighbor gushed. And Señora Garcia has “has three adorable children, 11, 9 and 6. She is also pregnant with another child, so her hands are full.”
Maybe, but the rest of Garcia’s impeccable curriculum vitae comes from DHS. The website did include it, to its credit, but only at the end — in a story under a misleading headline.
“Why does the media continue to do the bidding of these violent criminal illegal aliens?” DHS asked on X:
Hilario Martinez Garcia is a criminal illegal alien whose rap sheet includes domestic violence and felony burglary charges. Attempts to cast him as [a] sympathetic figure ignore the facts and insult the victims of his crimes. He was deported and is no longer a threat to the safety of Americans.
President Trump and [DHS] Secretary [Kristi] Noem have been clear: criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S. Criminal illegal aliens should LEAVE NOW. If not, we will find you, arrest you, and deport you. That’s a promise.
The website could have published a story with this headline: “Violent Illegal-alien Burglar Deported to Mexico.”
But the good “father” narrative used to bash the Trump administration was too good to pass up.
“Maryland husband and father” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, by the way, is back in the United States. He is charged with smuggling illegal aliens into the country.