We know Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tracks the activities of immigration activists. When ICE detained Dreamer Daniela Vargas last year, it was shortly after she spoke at a press conference condemning deportations. “You know what we are here for,” agents told her as they cuffed her. Then there’s the journalists who report on ICE’s rampant abuses. It’s no exaggeration to say that ICE would probably like to deport many of them, because one Spanish-language journalist is facing the exact possibility:
On April 13, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed a petition calling for the release of journalist Manuel Duran from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, saying that his “arrest and detention were an effort to suppress his reporting.” Duran’s case follows the arrests of many other immigrants who have spoken out against ICE’s practices, spurring many observers to complain that the agency is retaliating to suppress criticism.
Duran, an experienced journalist and owner of the Spanish-language newspaper Memphis Noticias, was arrested on April 3 as he covered protests over ICE’s mistreatment of immigrants. Charges against Duran were dismissed, but Memphis police transferred him to ICE custody in response to a detainer request. On April 6, he was brought to an immigrant detention center in Louisiana where he’s still being held.
According to Media Matters, “Duran’s paper has published a number of articles critical of ICE, and even though he has never been arrested for a felony—and thus likely would not have been kept in detention prior to the Trump administration—new policies have increased deportation proceedings in cases like his.” Spanish-language media has already been bearing the brunt of immigration reporting for years, “but Duran’s arrest opens up yet another obstacle these journalists and activists face in speaking truth to power.”
USA Today: “Though prosecutors dropped criminal charges against Duran, immigration agents picked him up at the local jail. The government aims to send him to El Salvador based on a 2007 deportation order”:
[A legal filing in support of Duran] says Memphis police retaliated against Duran for stories he produced for his online Spanish-language outlet Memphis Noticias. The legal filing cites a July 2017 Facebook post about allegations of cooperation between local police and immigration enforcement at a traffic stop.
"Following that publication, a Memphis police officer sent (Duran) a text message asking him to take down the story and meet with a senior official in the department," the legal filing said.
Memphis police have long said that they don't cooperate with immigration enforcement.
But its reporting from journalists like Duran that are exposing lies—and those are the voices under attack by the most dishonest administration, and its enablers, that we’ve ever seen. "The actions pursued by government officials in this case threaten core First Amendment freedoms that are essential to our democracy,” the legal filing in Duran’s support states. “The right to criticize and expose the actions of government officials, and the right of members of the press to write and publish about them."