Sawt Falasteen - Salvadoran journalist deported from US says punished for migrant coverage

Mario Guevara -- he himself had been living in the US without residency papers or a valid visa -- was arrested in the southern state of Georgia in June while reporting live for his online MG News channel on a protests over President Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies.

In an email Friday to AFP, the Department of Homeland Security called Guevara an "illegal alien" with a removal order from an immigration judge pending since 2012.

"I was deported not for being a criminal," the 48-year-old journalist, who won an Emmy award for his reporting in 2023, said on arriving back in El Salvador, visibly exhausted, his eyes filling with tears.

What "cost me," he said, was "the fact that I reported on...the injust arrests (of migrants) that were taking place."

Guevara arrived in El Salvador without luggage, wearing only the helmet and protective vest marked "Press" that he was wearing on the day of his arrest.

He was deported with 117 other citizens of El Salvador, whose iron-fisted President Nayib Bukele has cheered Trump's migrant policy and caused an outcry by interning a group of deported Venezuelans in a brutal anti-gang prison for months.

In an unusual move, local authorities separated Guevara from the rest of the deportees at San Salvador airport and drove him to the nearby town of Olocuilta, where his relatives were waiting.

His father, Rodil Gomez, 68, said he was happy to see his son in good health.

Katherine Jacobsen, a representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Guevara's expulsion was the first documented case of a deportation from the United States "as retaliation related to reporting activity."

She slammed the case as "a troubling sign of the deteriorating freedom of the press under the Trump administration."

A specialist in immigration issues, Guevara arrived in the United States in 2004 on a temporary visa and subsequently attempted to obtain full residency but at the time of his arrest had not yet succeeded, according to court documents.

In the email Friday to AFP, the Department of Homeland Security said of Guevara, "If you come to our country and break our laws, we will arrest you and you will NEVER return."

He was arrested near Georgia's state capital of Atlanta on June 14 while covering the local chapter of the "No Kings" demonstrations, the largest protests against Trump since his return to the White House.

Guevara was initially charged with misdemeanor offenses related to his work, including unlawful assembly and obstruction, but those charges were later dropped, according to court documents.

N.Awad--SF-PST