We are entering the end of The Latino Newsletter's 67th week, and it's been a week. The news cycle continues at a nonstop pace, and we will be blunt: we are exhausted and drained. Our team is getting ready to enter a critical Phase 2 growth phase, and we will have some exciting updates to share next week about the next season of our podcast.

In the meantime, the bandwidth issues have been real. We thought we would be able to publish a debut piece by two Puerto Rican academics who wrote an opinion piece about language. That will happen next week, as there was some breaking news that we felt needed to be shared regarding the detention of journalist Mario Guevara.

Here is the latest, plus other stories we were following today.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked a federal court on Friday to free journalist Mario Guevara after the Board of Immigration Appeals ordered his return to El Salvador. (More about Guevara’s case is here, from an August piece I wrote for Pressing Issues.)

“Mr. Guevara should not even be in immigration detention, but the government has kept him there for months because of his crucial reporting on law enforcement activity,” the ACLU Speech, Privacy, & Technology Project senior staff attorney Scarlet Kim said in the release. “The fact that he may now be put on a plane to El Salvador, a country he fled out of fear, at any moment, despite a clear path to becoming a permanent resident, is despicable. The court must ensure he is not deported and should order his release from detention immediately.”

Guevara has now spent 97 days in ICE custody.

“I don’t know why ICE wants to continue treating me like a criminal. It pains me to know that I have been denied every privilege and the right to be free when I have never committed any crime,” he wrote in a five-part letter published by the Bitter Southerner later on Friday.

This is how the last part of Guevara’s letter concludes:

This whole situation has me devastated, and not only morally, but also economically, because I am the breadwinner for the home.

Since my arrest, I have lost tens of thousands of dollars and my company, the news channel MGNews, is on the verge of bankruptcy.

But I have to remain strong and confident that the United States still has some caring and decency left and that in the end justice will prevail. 

I hope that it will be soon, because for me, every day is like a week.

Hopefully, soon all my tears and my family’s tears will be wiped away, and we can have fun and smile, triumphant, as we did before, together and in absolute freedom.

Earlier today on our social media profiles, we shared the following statistics with the following text: “Latinos literally clean this country but are not business owners in this industry.” Our team wrote that text because of the disparity between Latino workers and business owners.

We receive numerous pitches from public relations agencies and individuals. The vast majority come from agencies that have no idea what we publish. But every so often, one of those emails shares a fact or statistic that reflects our complexity as a community. This was one of those cases. Thank you to Guillermo Meneses for sending over a pitch that got our attention.

If you like the idea of a reporter’s notebook type of post, let us know and send any ideas our way. We have a new email: [email protected]

ICE Deploys Tear Gas at Protest: From CBS Chicago, “Federal agents deployed tear gas and pepper balls as they clashed with protesters outside the Broadview ICE facility Friday morning.”

Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. He is also its current part-time publisher and executive director. Email him here.

Consider donating to The Latino Newsletter. Any contribution, no matter how small, helps keep this newsletter free and accessible to all. ¡Gracias mil!