A federal appeals court shot down Mario Guevara’s appeal trying to head off what he believes to be his looming deportation, saying the illegal immigrant journalist didn’t show the immigration courts were wrong.

Mr. Guevara says he was targeted for deportation after reporting critically on Trump administration immigration policies.

But the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that issue wasn’t before them at this time. Instead, Mr. Guevara filed a specific request to stay his deportation, and the three-judge panel said its precedents preclude that ruling.

Judge Embry Kidd, a Biden appointee to the court, suggested Mr. Guevara might still have other arguments but he agreed with colleagues that the demand to stay deportation failed at this point.

Reporters Without Borders decried the ruling.

“Mario Guevara’s deportation would be an outrageous miscarriage of justice and a devastating blow to American press freedom,” the organization said.

It said Mr. Guevara was targeted for arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement because of his reporting.

“The government thinks it can intimidate the international media to discourage critical coverage. Deporting journalists is what authoritarian countries do, and it should never happen in the country of the First Amendment,” the organization said.

Mr. Guevara, a citizen of El Salvador, came to the U.S. in 2004 on a visitor’s visa. He applied for asylum and a withholding of deportation the next year but was denied, and in 2012 he was ordered deported.

He appealed and the case lingered, unresolved, until the new Trump administration.

He was arrested by local authorities while covering an anti-ICE protest in Atlanta in June for MGNews, his Spanish-language outlet. He said they were “minor traffic violations” which the county dropped.

ICE then took custody and his deportation ordeal began.

In a letter posted last week by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is arguing his case, Mr. Guevara complained he was “locked up as if I were a criminal.”

“Life is not always fair. If I am deported, I will leave with my head held high, because I am convinced it will be for doing my work as a journalist and not for committing crimes,” he wrote.

He has a wife and two children here. One of the children is a U.S. citizen who earlier this year petitioned to certify a qualifying relationship to apply for a green card, signifying permanent legal residency. But, Judge Kidd said, no petition for adjustment of status had been filed yet.

Without that application Mr. Guevara doesn’t have a prima facie case of eligibility for adjustment, which ties the circuit court’s hands, the judge said.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.