Atlanta journalist fights deportation from Ice jail despite dropped charges: ‘I’m seeing what absolute power can do’

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/20/mario-guevara-journalist-ice-georgia-trump

a man talking to a phone cameraMario Guevara reports from a local police traffic enforcement area in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on 29 April 2025. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

People hold signs that say “no kings” and “people over billionaires”‘No Kings Day’ protests have swept the US as over 100,000 rally in New York City against the Trump administration’s policies on 14 June 2025.

Photograph: Carlos Chiossone/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

Police officers patrol outsideLaw enforcement officers patrol as a ‘No Kings Day’ protest takes place in Dekalb county, Georgia, on 14 June 2025.

Photograph: Mike Stewart/AP

A Salvadorian reporter with an audience of millions, Mario Guevara was arrested while livestreaming a protest against Trump in June – and is still struggling for freedom

Prosecutors dropped the last remaining charges against Atlanta-area journalist Mario Guevara last week after he was arrested while livestreaming a protest in June. But the influential Salvadorian reporter remains penned up in a south Georgia detention center, fending off a deportation case, jail house extortionists and despair, people familiar with his situation told the Guardian.

Donald Trump’s administration has been extreme in unprecedented ways to undocumented immigrants. But Guevara’s treatment is a special case. Shuttled between five jail cells in Georgia since his arrest while covering the “No Kings Day” protests, the 20-plus-years veteran journalist’s sin was to document the undocumented and the way Trump’s agents have been hunting them down.

Today, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, he’s the only reporter in the United States sleeping in a prison cell for doing his job.

‘No Kings Day’ protests have swept the US as over 100,000 rally in New York City against the Trump administration’s policies on 14 June 2025. Photograph: Carlos Chiossone/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

“For the first time in my life, I’m seeing what absolute power can do,” said Guevara’s attorney, Giovanni Díaz. “Power that doesn’t care about optics. Power that doesn’t care about the damage to human lives to achieve a result I’ve only heard about as some abstract thing that we heard about in the past, usually talking about other governments in the way that they persecute individuals. This is powerful.”


Around Atlanta, Guevara has been the person that immigrants call when they see an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid going down in their neighborhood.

Guevara had been working for La Prensa Gráfica, one of El Salvador’s main newspapers, when he was attacked at a protest rally held by the leftwing group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 2003. The former paramilitary organization viewed reporters from his paper as aligned with the rightwing government, and threatened his life. He fled to the United States in 2004, seeking asylum with his wife and daughter, entering legally on a tourist visa.

He has been reporting for Spanish-language media in the United States ever since, riding a wave of Latino immigration to the Atlanta suburbs to career success and community accolades. He began reporting on immigration crackdowns under the Obama administration, one of the few reporters to note a tripling of noncriminal immigration arrests in the Atlanta area, as noted in a 2019 New York Times video profile of his work.. He meticulously documented cases and interviewed the families of arrestees. People around Atlanta began to recognize him on the street as the journalist chasing la migra.

His work continued through the Trump administration, drawing an audience of millions that followed him from Mundo Hispánico to the startup news operation he founded last year: MGNews or Noticias MG.

“It’s a unique niche that was met by Mario’s innovation and entrepreneurialism, if you will,” said Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials and GALEO Latino Community Development Fund. “He developed a really strong relationship with the community. He developed significant trust with much of that community. And because of that, his eyeballs started increasing.”

An immigration court judge denied Guevara’s asylum claim in 2012 and issued a deportation order. Guevara’s lawyers appealed, and the court granted administrative closure of the case. He wasn’t being deported. But he wasn’t given legal residency either. Instead, the government issued him a work permit, his lawyer said. With a shrug, he went back to work.

Guevara is arguably the most-watched journalist covering Ice operations in the United States, a story that the English-language media had largely been missing, Gonzalez said. And local police were well aware of his work. He has been negotiating with them for access to immigration enforcement scenes for more than a decade.

“Mario Guevara is well known – sometimes liked sometimes not – but definitely well known by law enforcement agencies, particularly in DeKalb county and Gwinnett county, and also with federal agents, and particularly immigration agents,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez, among others, believes this put a target on his back in the current administration.

“It seems like law enforcement coordinated and colluded with the federal agents,” Gonzalez said. Gonzalez points to the misdemeanor traffic charges laid by the Gwinnett county sheriff’s office shortly after Guevara’s arrest in DeKalb county by the Doraville police department as evidence.

“The facts and the timeline indicate that pretty clearly to anybody that’s been following this,” he claimed. “In this regard it’s particularly troubling, given that he is a journalist and his situation. He had no reason to have been targeted for his arrest.”

The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to a request for comment about their relationship with local law enforcement. The Gwinnett county sheriff’s office said in a response to a lawmaker’s inquiry that it cooperates with Ice when deemed “mutually beneficial” but has not responded to requests for additional comment.

Doraville’s police chief, Chuck Atkinson, has not replied to an email seeking answers and fled from questions about the case at a city hearing. But Doraville’s mayor, Joseph Geierman, denied a connection between Ice and Doraville’s arrest of Guevara.


On 14 June, the day of his arrest, in Atlanta’s DeKalb county, Guevara darted around a Doraville police truck. A group of riot cops nearby took note. One shouted “last warning, sir! Get out of the road!”

Guevara was helmeted and wearing a black vest over his red shirt with the word “PRESS” in white letters. James Talley, an officer with the Doraville police department, was wearing an olive drab Swat jumpsuit with a helmet and gas mask.

A masked demonstrator set off a smoke bomb near the cops. Guevara ran into the street with a stabilized camera in hand to capture the police reaction and the crowd scampering out of the way, as was shown on a police body camera video.

Police had issued a dispersal order and were kettling protesters out of Chamblee-Tucker Road. They chased the suspected bomb thrower into the crowd, to no avail. But Guevara was in front of them on a grassy slope.

Police from DeKalb county managing the raucous protest had been taking verbal abuse from demonstrators for a while – a sharp contrast from other protests around Atlanta held that day. The protest was winding down. Body camera video from the event suggests Talley was in an arresting mood.

“Keep your eye on the guy in the red shirt,” Talley said to another Swat officer from Doraville. “If he gets to the road, lock his ass up.”

Talley pulled another police officer aside. “If he gets in the road, he’s gone,” Talley said. “He’s been warned multiple times.”

The other officer drew a finger across his chest. “The press?” Yep, Talley replied.

The three of them waited about 50ft away as a DeKalb county police officer approached Guevara on the hill, ordering him to get on the sidewalk. Guevara backed away from the officer, his attention focused on the recording, took two steps into the street, and the Doraville police pounced.

Guevara pleaded for the police to be reasonable.

“I’m with the media, officer!” Guevara said. “Let me finish!”

People shouted at the officers “That’s the press!” as they walked him handcuffed to a vehicle. “Why are you all taking him! He didn’t do nothing.”

More than one million people were watching Guevara’s livestream when he was arrested.


Trump has stepped up his rhetorical attacks on journalists since his inauguration. Last week, he described a reporter asking about warnings and emergency response in the Texas flooding disaster as “an evil person”, an epithet he has turned to with increasing frequency.

The Guevara case is a sign of increasing hostility toward a free press, said Katherine Jacobsen, a program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. She traced a through line from the Associated Press being barred from government briefings after it refused to accept the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”, then lawsuits and investigations reopened against media companies, then attacks on journalists covering protests in Los Angeles, then Australian writer Alistair Kitchen’s deportation seemingly in relation to his reporting on student protests.

“Next thing you know, we have Mario Guevara, a long time Spanish-language reporter in the Atlanta metro area, who is in Ice detention,” she said. “It’s growing increasingly concerning by the day.”

Guevara’s audience views it as more than an attack on press freedom, though. They view it as an attack on themselves.

“He’s a test case to push the envelope for legal immigrants that have committed no crime, to trump up charges against them,” GALEO’s Gonzalez said. “And the second piece is how to target journalists.”

 


Guevara’s arrest set off an immigration nightmare akin to the kind he has spent the last decade documenting.

His arrest on a Saturday led to a weekend in DeKalb county’s decaying jail and a bond hearing that Monday. A magistrate court judge granted Guevara a no-dollar bond, but by then Ice had become aware of the arrest and placed Guevara on a hold. The jail released him into Ice custody, and held him briefly in a metro Atlanta facility.

The next day, Gwinnett county charged Guevara with three misdemeanor traffic offenses, claiming that they were related to Guevara livestreaming a law enforcement operation a month earlier. The charges would be sufficient to keep him in jail and provide Ice an argument for his deportation at a federal bond hearing. The Gwinnett county sheriff’s office said Guevara’s livestreaming “compromised” investigations.

Guevara’s attorneys tried to work quickly, Diaz said. “The detained dockets are so backed up, and the immigration detention centers are so overwhelmed that what used to take us two or three days to get a bond hearing now is taking about a week,” he said.

Attorneys working for immigration enforcement argued in court that Guevara’s reporting constituted a “threat” to immigration operations.

Jacobsen with CPJ was listening to the hearing when the government made that argument.

“We felt a sense of alarm,” she said. “Alarm bells were raised by the government’s argument, as well as the judge not necessarily pushing back against the government’s argument that live streaming poses a danger to threaten law enforcement actions.”

Law enforcement officers patrol as a ‘No Kings Day’ protest takes place in Dekalb county, Georgia, on 14 June 2025. Photograph: Mike Stewart/AP

The immigration judge granted Guevara a $7,500 bond for the immigration case. But Guevara’s family was not allowed to pay it because government attorneys appealed the bond order to the board of immigration appeals. But it took seven days for the court to issue a stay to the government’s appeal. Meanwhile, Ice began playing musical jail cells with Guevara.

Over the course of the next three weeks, Ice shuttled Guevara between three different counties around Atlanta and eventually to the massive private prison Ice uses in Folkston, Georgia, 240 miles south-east of Atlanta on the Florida line.

“We weren’t surprised that they appealed, because the government’s reserving and in most cases appealing everything, even stuff where they shouldn’t appeal because they’re wasting everybody’s time,” Diaz said. “But we didn’t really know the breadth of what they were trying to do to him.”

Earlier this week, Todd Lyons, Ice’s acting director, issued a memo changing its policy on bond hearings, arguing that detainees are not entitled to those hearings before their deportation case is heard in court. Immigration advocates expect to challenge the move in court.

But Guevara is not facing a criminal charge. The Gwinnett county solicitor’s office dropped the traffic charges last week, noting that two of them could not be prosecuted because they occurred on private property – the apartment complex – and the third lacked sufficient evidence for a conviction.

For now, Ice has mostly kept Guevara in medical wards in jails even though he is healthy, Diaz said. “From the beginning, they’ve been keeping Mario under a special segregation because they’re claiming he’s a public figure. They want to make sure nothing happened to him.”


Doraville is a municipality of about 10,800 in DeKalb county with a separate police force, and had been asked to assist managing the protest in the immigrant-heavy Embry Hills neighborhood nearby. Protests have become a regular occurrence in DeKalb county since the Trump administration’s immigration raids began.

Doraville’s cops have displayed a more cooperative relationship with immigration law enforcement than many other metro Atlanta departments, and observers have raised questions about whether its police department arrested Guevara to facilitate an Ice detainer.

Geierman, the mayor, denied those accusations.

“The Doraville police department was not operating under the direction of, or in coordination with, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the June 14th protest,” he said in a statement. “To the department’s knowledge, no Ice personnel were present at the event. Doraville officers were on site to support the DeKalb county sheriff’s office as part of a coordinated public safety effort.”

Observers have also questioned Guevara’s charges from Gwinnett county – ignoring traffic signs, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving – that stemmed from an incident that occurred in May, a month before his arrest.

“Mario Guevara compromised operational integrity and jeopardized the safety of victims of the case, investigators, and Gwinnett county residents,” the department said in a statement.

But Gwinnett’s belated prosecution left his attorneys gobsmacked.

“In the narrative that they put out, they say he was livestreaming a police operation, and he was interfering,” Diaz said. “But when they went to a judge to get warrants, the only warrants the magistrate was able to sign for them was for traffic violations. I mean, that’s kind of telling.”

“I think the whole thing is suspicious,” he added. “From the beginning, just everything seemed they were really making efforts to make it difficult for him to go free.”

Marvin Lim, a Filipino American state representative whose district contains the apartment complex in Gwinnett in Guevara’s citation, has asked the sheriff’s office a detailed set of questions about the department’s relationship with federal immigration enforcement. He has not received an adequate response, he said in an open letter to the sheriff.

An array of six advocacy organizations challenged Gwinnett’s sheriff, Keybo Taylor, in a letter Tuesday over Guevara’s arrest and the sheriff’s posture toward immigration enforcement, demanding details about the relationship. GALEO, among them, also issued a separate letter Wednesday calling on Taylor to be transparent about the Guevara arrest.

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Guevara “was arrested while doing the vital work that journalists in a democracy do”, GALEO’s letter states. “Not only do the circumstances surrounding his incarceration and subsequent immigration detainment stir serious civil rights concerns, but they also build upon an expanding sense of fear and confusion in Georgia’s most diverse county.”

“I am being persecuted,” Guevara wrote in a 7 July letter seeking humanitarian intercession from, of all people, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s rightwing president.

“I am about to complete a month in jail, and I need to get out in order to continue with my life, return to my work, and support my family,” Guevara wrote. “I have lived in the United States for nearly 22 years. I had never been arrested before. In these past three weeks, I have been held in five different jails, and I believe the government is trying to tarnish my record in order to deport me as if I were a criminal.”

Guevara’s American-born son turned 21 this year, permitting him to sponsor Guevara’s green card and eventual citizenship. His application is pending, Diaz said. It may not matter.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen a stay filed for someone who has no convictions, has almost no criminal history in 20 years, and only had pending traffic violations,” Diaz said.

“It’s clear that everybody’s working really hard to keep him detained.”

 This article was amended on 21 July 2025. An earlier version misspelled the surname of Jerry Gonzalez.

 

 

$ informative shorter clips from The Majority Report

Some more clips from The Majority Report. Normally the fun half is subscription only, but there are workarounds.

The first one is the entire fun half on 7-14-2025

This one is the fun half of 7-1502025

This one is the fun half from 7-16-2025

 

This is a fun half from an Emma Thursday 07-17-2025

This last one is from the Nazi authoritarian cult of tRump maga who I posted a meme of getting fired and asking for money because his boss felt his was not a good fit for the company.  FAFO

Culture war obsessed Ryan Walters wants a purity test for teachers to ensure they are hard right maga Christian nationalists

Making minor young girls have babies for the state benefit

Twits n Tw&ts on Trans Toilets

Very informative and heart felt.  Aron Ra is well known for his thought approach to atheism and science, delivering it in a way that a normal person can understand.  The things he says at the end and the pictures he shows makes clear that as he says this is not about protecting anyone but about enforcing bigotry.  Hugs

ICE Raids Are Getting WAY More Dangerous

I would like people to compare the “tough guy” speech given by the ICE person about removing child molesters and kidnappers, rescuing children from forced labor, the worst criminals, murders, making mom and pop safe with the four crimes they mentioned that of the dozens and dozens arrested were accused of.  One guy was charged with fentanyl distribution, one was charged with trespass, a third was charged with driving without a license and refusing to show identification.  Wow mom and pop are so much safer now that the worst of the worst are in detention with no due process.   Let’s be clear, they are going after legal immigrants, they are going after those following the rules, they are showing up at places where these people are working and looking for work because the goal is to remove all the brown people.  It is that simple, it is a white supremacy thing driven by racist like Stephen Miller who hates Spanish speaking people and those with brown skin.  They held a US citizen veteran for three days with no due process and no explanation.  Take a guess of his skin color?  Brown?  Great guess and correct.  These gang thugs are not trying to make the US safer for anyone, they are determined to make it whiter.   At the 5:21 mark ICE thugs abruptly stop their car in the middle of the street and with guns and tasers ready while masked and in no uniform they rush a woman who is a well known activist who has been openly filming them for weeks.  This is an attempt to cause fear and stop people from viewing and reporting their actions. This is such a 1930s Hitler’s Germany moment in the US.  And Vaush talks about how the nation if flooded with guns and these masked people with no uniforms rushing at people could be shot by people in reasonable fear for their lives as Roger also has been saying.    Hugs

More clips from The Majority Report on different subjects I feel are important to share.

Some The Majority Report clips on ICE and the democrats

From The 19th: LGBTQ+ youth have lost a lifeline. What now?

Note from A: Something about which to write or call your US Rep and push:

Representatives and advocates are fighting for more LGBTQ+ mental health services. Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids reintroduced a bill last month dedicated to LGBTQ+ mental health resources. “By increasing access to mental health support for our children and teens, we can save lives,” Davids said in a press release. And last weekend, hundreds of people protested in front of Trump Tower in an effort to save the hotline.

———————————————————–

Jul 17, 2025 Sam Donndelinger, Uncloseted

If you or a loved one are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 74174.

This story was originally published in Uncloseted Media, an LGBTQ-focused investigative news outlet.

When Arden was 16, they called a suicide crisis hotline “thinking their life was over.”

They were in an abusive relationship, regularly self-harming, and felt that nothing was helping. “It was terrifying,” they told Uncloseted Media.

“If it weren’t for the hotline, I would have killed myself.”

Since that day, Arden, now 24 years old and living in Brooklyn, has used various crisis helplines. When the 988 national suicide prevention hotline launched a “Press 3” option in 2022 for LGBTQ+ youth, they immediately started using the resource.

Arden, who identifies as nonbinary, says the LGBTQ+ hotline workers “respected their identity” and were understanding that they are not a woman. “It was really affirming for a very troubling time in my life.”

Since then, Arden has “Pressed 3” more times than they can remember, seeking help for everything from dealing with the loss of their friend, who died by suicide, to “stupid cliquey gay people stuff.”

“I remember when my friend had killed himself and I was dealing with a lot. I called them and they talked to me for over an hour because I was really upset,” they say. “When I called the hotline, it was a last resort. I was really at my wits’ end.”

Arden — whose last call to the lifeline was two weeks ago — is one of 1.3 million callers and chatters the LGBTQ+ youth hotline has served since it launched, according to federal data. The legislation that greenlit the national program, signed by Trump in 2020 during his first term, explicitly recognized that LGBTQ+ youth are more than “4 times more likely to contemplate suicide than their peers, with 1 in 5 LGBTQ+ youth and more than 1 in 3 transgender youth reporting attempting suicide.”

A close up of a hand holding a phone.
Kaoly Gutierrez/Uncloseted Media

This new option to “Press 3” allowed queer youth in crisis the ability to directly connect with counselors from a set of specialized LGBTQ+ crisis centers. These counselors are trained in cultural competency and often bring lived experience, providing identity‑affirming, empathetic support for challenges like coming out, discrimination or mental health crises.

Despite the hotline’s success, the Trump administration announced last month that they would be shutting it down on July 17, claiming that the service had run out of congressionally directed funding. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said in an email to Uncloseted Media that “continued funding of the Press 3 option threatened to put the entire 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in danger of massive reductions in service.”

There are no plans, however, to shut down the other hotline options, including the Veterans Crisis Line, the Spanish Language Line and the Native and Strong Lifeline. And while Congress spent $33 million on the LGBTQ+ service last year, the cost of continuing it represents merely 0.006 percent of the $510 billion that suicide and self-harm costs the U.S. yearly.

“This is absolutely a mistake,” a suicide prevention call center director told Uncloseted Media. “We are concerned that this will result in increased suicide rates for LGBTQ+ youth.”

Why we need option 3

The director’s concern is supported by a 2022 research brief that found that queer college students with access to LGBTQ-specific services were 44% less likely to attempt suicide than those without it. Research also shows that a hotline specific to LGBTQ+ services increases the likelihood of queer youth calling.

“It’s true for any direct service,” Harmony Rhoades, associate research professor of sociology at Washington University, told Uncloseted Media. “People who are in substance use recovery want to work with people who’ve gone through recovery themselves because they understand what that experience is. Culturally, there is not a lot of understanding of the specific experiences of someone who is LGBTQ+ and without specific training, a crisis counselor isn’t going to be able to know the language that’s going to feel affirming.”

A person stands holding a phone by a pond.
Kaoly Gutierrez/Uncloseted Media

“Connecting with someone who gets it was really helpful. … Because at home, I was so isolated and I didn’t really interact with other queer people,” says Genna Brown, who used the Trevor Project’s chat function at 10 years old.

“I was an extremely self-loathing, suicidal kid who was under the impression that God hated me and I was gonna burn in hell for eternity,” Brown, now 15 and living in High Point, North Carolina, told Uncloseted Media.

“I only used the chat feature because I was scared my parents would hear me. We shared a wall,” she says. “I was spiraling really bad. I’d just realized I was crushing on girls, and I thought I was going to burn in hell for all eternity because that is what we are taught.”

Raised in a Southern Baptist church, Brown never felt safe at home, where her father would regularly spit slurs like “faggots” and “queers.” At church, every sermon was about Sodom and Gomorrah or about how “real love” only existed between a man and a woman.

“I grew up knowing the number one thing not to be was one of the ‘dirty queers,’” she says. “I kept thinking, I can kill myself now and go to hell, or live longer and still go to hell. I used to have panic attacks at 9, 10 years old, just thinking about burning in hell perpetually.”

Brown remembers Caitlin, the chat counselor who helped her, being the first ever to tell her that queer love was valid.

“She told me she’d been with her girlfriend for seven years. I didn’t even believe queer people could be happy. … It broke my brain in the best possible way,” says Brown, who is now out and proud to her parents, who have come around, and to most of her friends on social media.

A person sits at the bottom of outside stairs, with another person standing at the top of them.

Genna and her Mom, Melanie. Kaoly Gutierrez/Uncloseted Media

Arden had a similar experience. The queer line is better than the regular line,” they say. “I feel like it’s less like going through a checklist on the queer line.”

As a survivor of sexual assault, Arden says knowing that the counselors on the other line were trained in LGBTQ-specific trauma made it easier to reach out for help. “My voice doesn’t pass per se but they still respected my identity,” they say.

LGBTQ-specific resources for youth are critical, with 41 percent seriously considering suicide in 2024. In addition, queer youth are disproportionately affected by a litany of mental health issues and trauma, including physical and sexual assaultanxietydepressioneating disordersbullying and addiction.

“It’s not like we’re cherry-picking some random group,” says Rhoades. “If we are going to fund [suicide prevention], there is no reason we should do it inefficiently by not effectively targeting the people who need it most. So yes, they need specific suicide prevention services.”

While the hotline focuses on LGBTQ+ youth, they don’t turn away adults who need help. Joshua Dial, 36, says that when he called 988, he was often connected to the LGBTQ+ youth hotline after mentioning that he’s gay.

“I always walked away feeling better after I called,” he says. “There have been times when I spoke to the regular 988 crisis people, and they helped too. But they didn’t understand quite as much.”

Dial, a Lutheran who lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, says he wasn’t always comfortable being open about his sexual orientation to his religious community and that the only way to meet other gay people was on hook-up and dating apps, which he notes are “not for emotional support.”

“I wouldn’t be talking to my pastor about getting on Grindr. I can’t go to my pastor and tell them what I did last weekend,” he says.

Dial, who was raised to believe that homosexuality is a sin, has experienced depression since the age of 16 and has also struggled with bipolar disorder, addiction and PTSD. “My addiction was getting worse, and the only constant was that the line was always available,” he says. “I didn’t have any other options, but I knew that if I called the hotline, I would get help.”

Dial says the emotional support he received through these phone calls kept him from self-harm and suicide. “There are times when I called that number and was this close to taking a handful of pills, this close to slitting my wrist, this close to buying a gun to shoot myself. And I talked to those people, and they not only understood, but they gave me the empowerment of knowing that someone had my back.”

How cutting option 3 affects the whole system

While the cuts are only meant to affect the hotline’s support for LGBTQ+ youth, crisis center employees say they’ll impact the entire 988 network.

“This being rifted does very much mean less capacity for 988 as a whole,” says the suicide prevention call center director. “Everyone will be affected.”

“When the LGBTQ+ hotline opened up, it really lowered the volume on the mainstream counselors,” a 988 hotline counselor in Washington state told Uncloseted Media. “It seemed really helpful, and I didn’t get a lot of LGBTQ+ chats after that point.”

The counselor at the Washington state center says they are about to lay off 42 counselors from their LGBTQ+ hotline. They say these roles won’t be replaced on the main 988 line due to a hiring freeze. Because of this, counselors expect the number of calls they receive to double, which could dramatically increase wait times. The Washington state center did not respond to a request for comment.

Even without the cuts, wait times are an issue. A 17-year-old caller from Virginia says that even the 10 minutes they had to wait for their call to be answered were painful. “I was worried that nobody would want to talk to me. I was just feeling hopeless,” they say. “There’s this one resource that I’m supposed to be able to have access to 24/7, but it just isn’t as accessible as it should be. For some people, those 10 minutes are crucial.”

In a 2009 study of 82 patients referred to a psychiatric university hospital after a suicide attempt, nearly half reported that the period between their first thought of suicide and their actual attempt had lasted 10 minutes or less, underscoring how shorter wait times can be a matter of life and death.

“If we are not able to catch someone during the time that suicidal thoughts have appeared and intervene as quickly as possible, they could start figuring out how they’re going to kill themselves and make it happen,” says the suicide prevention call center director. “And a lot of folks have access to means that can result in instant death like firearms.”

What can be done?

With the “Press 3” option gone, Rhoades worries that the current spate of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and hateful rhetoric toward the community will affect how counselors without queer-specific training will provide care.

“We’re living in an unprecedented time where anti-LGBTQ+ hatred is being normalized,” she says. “It absolutely affects how young people are treated. And it filters down to crisis counselors.”

As Congress and the Trump administration prepare to shut down “Press 3” on July 17 in an effort to save money, many believe that it will have the reverse effect.

“They just want these people to die. … That’s the message I got,” says a hotline operator in Washington state, adding that the administration is “not looking at the bigger picture.”

Representatives and advocates are fighting for more LGBTQ+ mental health services. Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids reintroduced a bill last month dedicated to LGBTQ+ mental health resources. “By increasing access to mental health support for our children and teens, we can save lives,” Davids said in a press release. And last weekend, hundreds of people protested in front of Trump Tower in an effort to save the hotline.

Arden says they wouldn’t be here today without the line’s support. “I’ve been struggling for a long time in my life [with] self-harm and I’ve been clean almost two years now,” they say. “I would definitely not be clean if it weren’t for the hotline and I would probably hurt myself again.”