Mario Guevara reports from a local police traffic enforcement area in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on 29 April 2025. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA
‘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
Law 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 waysto 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) in2003. 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.
Ice ‘politically targeted’ farm worker activist Juarez Zeferino, colleagues say
Read more
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 is about racism and misogyny. It follows the Russian all white male jacked up soldiers who are getting their asses handed to them in Ukraine. This clown “Kegseth” is clueless what a modern military is and can be. Remember he was picked because he was a weekend host on Fox opinion net work. Hugs
Hegseth doing pushups with sailors aboard the USS Dewey | Department of Defense
Pete Hegseth loves to have his picture taken doing jumping jacks, jogging with the troops, and hanging with buff special ops commandos. In fact, the Secretary of Defense is all about appearances, making a constant show of being more virile than anyone who’s ever preceded him.
In the name of warfighting and military readiness, Hegseth is self-appointed commanding general of the war on wrinkles.
His obsession has provoked a slew of new rules and regulations about “standards” of grooming and appearance, a deadly serious effort encompassing everything from banning eyelash extensions to offering government-funded laser hair removal procedures. With an emphasis on rules that most impact women and minorities, Hegseth wants to establish his own wokeness, a campaign that stresses looks over actual excellence.
Looks like DOGE missed a spot
The new grooming standards, one Army directive says, are “in support of Army readiness” — military speak for the ability to act swiftly and effectively. Far from some obscure policy, Hegseth believes that disciplined hair care will lead to a disciplined military, restoring the “warrior ethos” he often laments the armed forces have lost.
“We’re looking at overall fitness standards, overall grooming standards, overall basic standards across our formations that we believe have slipped certainly under the previous administration, but over decades,” Hegseth told Congress last month.
“It’s almost like the broken windows theory of policing: when you ignore the small stuff from criminals … it creates a culture where big stuff you’re not held accountable for,” he pontificated at a town hall meeting in February.
Army briefing on “Male Grooming Standard” | Defense Department
Here are three new grooming standards that particularly caught my eye:
Shaving, particularly for soldiers who seek waivers to standard policies due to health complications that daily shaving can cause. This is most common for black and brown folks who have curly hair; so common in fact that the directive makes explicit mention of “pseudofolliculitis Barbae,” or razor bumps, which can become infected.
The directive enumerates three phased treatment plans corresponding to mild, moderate and severe cases. A fourth phase provides the option of laser hair removal to soldiers unresponsive to the previous treatments or with chronic issues.
Eyelash extensions are now banned. No real justification is given but I’m sure it’s a coincidence that this also impacts black and brown people the most. Similarly, nail polish must now be “clear or French or American Manicure only,” a sacrifice to the gods of uniformity which feels more arbitrary than purposeful.
Petty changes to uniforms are being directed, from a ban on duty identifier patches, to shorter boots (“8-12 inches”), to important contingency plans on how to wear one’s sleeves (“the cuffs will remain visible, and the sleeve will rest at, or within 1-inch of, the forearm when the arm is bent at a 90-degree angle”; though “Commanders may prohibit rolling of sleeves and folding of cuffs.”)
It is a hodgepodge of “new” directives that are mostly costly annoyances but overall leave enlisted soldiers I’ve talked to feeling like the Pentagon and “leadership” are just playing a sadistic game of Simon Says.
Clean-shaven soldiers, however, aren’t going to bring the U.S. military closer to an end to the war in Ukraine or create greater security in the Middle East. More creases aren’t going to help tackle the challenges of drones and artificial intelligence, or fight the new Cold War with China.
In fact, Hegseth seems to be taking a page out of the Russian military playbook, which upon suffering over one million casualties in Ukraine, is also trying to stress appearances over serious failures of policy and humaneness.
Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has launched his own campaign to improve troop discipline by clamping down on non-standard haircuts, according to British intelligence, which assessed that this caused him to be “focused on presentation over substance.” In Russia’s case, a laughably undisciplined and corrupt force indeed needs to reform. But emulating Gerasimov is more of an insult to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces.
But this is more about Hegseth, for whom “presentation over substance” seems like his entire worldview. Here he is posing on the Pentagon lawn while signing an order on drone production, a piece of paper that was delivered by drone. The contents of the order didn’t get much attention but the image of the smartly dressed Secretary plucking the paper from the drone instantly became a meme.
Since his first appearance at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in February, when Hegseth mistakenly got ahead of President Trump’s negotiations by declaring Ukraine’s intent to regain its territory as “unrealistic” — prompting criticism from his own party’s Chair of the Armed Services Committee Sen. Roger Wicker, who called it “amateur” — Trump’s secretary has not had a hair out of place.
In every photo I can find, Hegseth’s hair seems painstakingly coiffed, right down to the occasional, ostensible cowlick. He looks like Christian Bale’s depiction of Bruce Wayne but with a MOAB-sized helping of hairgel.
The irony is that, amid all the chaos — of his alleged sexual misconduct, to the mass firing of his staff, to Signalgate and on and on — the man is always perfectly manicured. One has a sense that Hegseth will be more pleased in being named best-dressed of 2025 than anything else.
This newsletter is 100% reader-funded. To receive new posts and support my work, please become a free or paid subscriber.
A U.S. Army veteran who was arrested during an immigration raid at a Southern California marijuana farm last week said Wednesday he was sprayed with tear gas and pepper spray before being dragged from his vehicle and pinned down by federal agents who arrested him.
George Retes, 25, who works as a security guard at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, said he was arriving at work on July 10 when several federal agents surrounded his car and — despite him identifying himself as a U.S. citizen — broke his window, peppered sprayed him and dragged him out.
In this image taken from video provided by United Farm Workers, George Retes speaks about being arrested at an immigration raid at a Southern California marijuana farm during a press conference held over Zoom in Oxnard, Calif., Wednesday, July 16, 2025. (United Farm Workers via AP)
“It took two officers to nail my back and then one on my neck to arrest me even though my hands were already behind my back,” Retes said.
Massive farm raids led to hundreds being detained
The Ventura City native was detained during chaotic raids at two Southern California farms where federal authorities arrested more than 360 people, one of the largest operations since President Donald Trump took office in January. Protesters faced off against federal agents in military-style gear, and one farmworker died after falling from a greenhouse roof.
The raids came more than a month into an extended immigration crackdown by the Trump administration across Southern California that was originally centered in Los Angeles, where local officials say the federal actions are spreading fear in immigrant communities.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom spoke on the raids at a news conference Wednesday, calling Trump a “chaos agent” who has incited violence and spread fear in communities.
“You got someone who dropped 30 feet because they were scared to death and lost their life,” he said, referring to the farmworker who died in the raids. “People are quite literally disappearing with no due process, no rights.”
Retes was taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, where he said he was put in a special cell on suicide watch and checked on each day after he became emotionally distraught over his ordeal and missing his 3-year-old daughter’s birthday party Saturday.
Milk is poured on a protester’s face after federal immigration agents tossed tear gas at protesters during a raid in the agriculture area of Camarillo, Calif., Thursday, July 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Michael Owen Baker)
He said federal agents never told him why he was arrested or allowed him to contact a lawyer or his family during his three-day detention. Authorities never let him shower or change clothes despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, Retes said, adding that his hands burned throughout the first night he spent in custody.
On Sunday, an officer had him sign a paper and walked him out of the detention center. He said he was told he faced no charges.
Retes met with silence when seeking explanation
“They gave me nothing I could wrap my head around,” Retes said, explaining that he was met with silence on his way out when he asked about being “locked up for three days with no reason and no charges.”
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, confirmed Retes’ arrest but didn’t say on what charges.
“George Retes was arrested and has been released,” she said. “He has not been charged. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is reviewing his case, along with dozens of others, for potential federal charges related to the execution of the federal search warrant in Camarillo.”
A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to halt indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests without warrants in seven California counties, including Los Angeles. Immigrant advocates accused federal agents of detaining people because they looked Latino. The Justice Department appealed on Monday and asked for the order to be stayed.
The Pentagon also said Tuesday it was ending the deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops in Los Angeles. That’s roughly half the number the administration sent to the city following protests over the immigration actions. Some of those troops have been accompanying federal agents during their immigration enforcement operations.
Retes said he joined the Army at 18 and served four years, including deploying to Iraq in 2019.
“I joined the service to help better myself,” he said. “I did it because I love this (expletive) country. We are one nation and no matter what, we should be together. All this separation and stuff between everyone is just the way it shouldn’t be.”
Veteran pledges to sue federal authorities for his ordeal
Retes said he plans to sue for wrongful detention.
“The way they’re going about this entire deportation process is completely wrong, chasing people who are just working, especially trying to feed everyone here in the U.S.,” he said. “No one deserves to be treated the way they treat people.”
Retes was detained along with California State University Channel Islands professor Jonathan Caravello, also a U.S. citizen, who was arrested for throwing a tear gas canister at law enforcement, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli posted on X.
The California Faculty Association said Caravello was taken away by agents who did not identify themselves nor inform him of why he was being taken into custody. Like Retes, the association said the professor was then held without being allowed to contact his family or an attorney.
Caravello was attempting to dislodge a tear gas canister that was stuck underneath someone’s wheelchair, witnesses told KABC-TV, the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles.
A federal judge on Monday ordered Caravello to be released on $15,000 bond. He’s scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 1.
“I want everyone to know what happened. This doesn’t just affect one person,” Retes said. “It doesn’t matter if your skin is brown. It doesn’t matter if you’re white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a veteran or you serve this country. They don’t care. They’re just there to fill a quota.” ___ Associated Press writer Jamie Ding contributed from Los Angeles.
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
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
In my recent post about participating in a French journalism festival, I mentioned that the publisher of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo appeared on one of the cartoonists’ panel discussions. Due to the high security around him, his participation wasn’t advertised and had, at least to my count, five armed bodyguards who followed him around constantly. Those murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo were 10 years ago and this man still has to have around the clock protection.
I drew and wrote quite a bit about the issue of free speech during that time and it still infuriates me that some people feel they have the right to threaten (and even kill) cartoonists just because they feel offended. While most of the world were in solidarity after the massacre, the discussion in the U.S. turned to questions about limiting speech…coming even from the so-called liberals in the media.
And now we have another editorial cartoonist receiving death threats because of a cartoon he drew about the Texas floods. Right wing commentators and even several news outlets are describing the cartoon by Adam Zyglis as “mocking” the flood survivors, which of course it is not. It is a legitimate comment about the Republican hypocrisy of attacking government programs except when natural disasters affect them.
Margaret Sullivan has a good piece about how social media, the “right-wing outrage machine” (although I’d argue the left also engages in this), and ignorance of an editorial cartoon’s purpose all figure into these potentially dangerous situations.
(my graphic essay after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre)
(snip-go see it on Substack; just click through. The comic turns quite small with a copy/paste, and enlarging it makes it blurry. -A.)
———————————
Fed TACO by Clay Jones
If Fed Chair Jerome Powell gets a hankering for Tacos today, we know why Read on Substack
Donald Trump hates Jerome Powell, which puts Powell in a non-exclusive club. Donald Trump hates a lot of people. Am I on that list?
Jerome Powell, of course, is the Chair of the Federal Reserve. Last night, TACO met with about a dozen House Republicans and asked their opinions on whether or not he should fire Powell. Trump even showed them a letter he wrote firing Powell. He just hasn’t sent it yet.
Asked today by the press in the Oval Office about this letter and the imminent firing of Powell, Trump said it’s very unlikely.
Did Trump just TACO Jerome Powell? Trump earned the nickname TACO from his tariff threats, where he threatens to place tariffs on nations, then backs off, and threatens again, then backs off. Wall Street has started to ignore Trump’s tariff threats, which created “Trump Always Chickens Out.” It’s the acronym for TACO.
Calling Trump TACO upsets him greatly, but he’s still chickening out with the tariffs.
Speaking of tariffs, in June, our nation had its first surplus in nine years. Wow! The surplus is $27 billion, though the national debt is still over $36 trillion (year to date is over $1 trillion). MAGAts are celebrating this, praising Trump, and calling him a genius for this surplus they think was paid by other nations, forgetting that tariffs are taxes. Trump raised taxes on Americans, and it’s the American taxpayer from where this $27 billion surplus came from.
Republicans, do not ever play a shell game because you will lose. On the other hand, I just created a new game, Republican. Come play with me. (snip-MORE)
Margolis & Cox by Clay Jones
(Note from A.-this one’s long, but I left it whole so we can check our comics sources. The names are interesting, though I’ve seen some of the work, and wondered about it. -A.)
I’m gonna get in trouble again, but it’s good trouble Read on Substack
There’s a duo who create cartoons together, which is my first issue with these guys.
Though there’s no set rule for it, political cartooning is supposed to be a solo craft. I don’t even take ideas from readers. Here, we have a writer feeding ideas to an artist, and they’re terrible ideas. The cartoons are worse than the vitriolic bigotry shit out by Gary Varvel, Steve Kelley, and Mike Lester (if you think I just pissed some cartoonists off, I’m just getting warmed up, baby). At least those dudes can suck on their own. But the MargoCox goons work for Townhall, a very racist right-wing propaganda outlet. Based on that alone, no legitimate news publication should be publishing their cartoons/propaganda, and no syndicate should be distributing them. Unfortunately, Politico publishes them as they’re syndicated by Cagle Cartoons, owned by Daryl Cagle.
In the past, Cagle was also the syndicate for the “anonymous” cartoonist, who was Canadian Cameron Cardow, a racist conspiracy theorist pretending to be an American in fear for his life from liberals, wokeness, and trans people. Politico published his work, too, no matter that it violated every journalism ethics policy in existence. Instead of the racist Cameron, why couldn’t Canada just send us more black squirrels?
I’m pretty sure the first syndicate that will distribute AI-created “cartoons” will be Cagle, and Politico will be waiting to publish them. I’m shocked Cagle isn’t selling lying racist antisemitic conspiracy theorist MAGAt Ben Garrison’s cartoons. He draws Trump with muscles. Take note, MargoCox.
But MargoCox has been producing horrible cartoons, many typical of other conservative cartoons with bigotry and lies, but also boring and bad writing for the most part. They’re a two-man trope machine. Last week, they produced something extremely racist.
If Margo wrote it, then Cox should have refused to draw it. I don’t know these guys, but I’m going to have to assume they’re both equally racist bags of dicks (and after a brand new encounter with them today, I’m not assuming anymore). As for Cagle Cartoons, the syndicate should have said no. Daryl Cagle should have refused to have his name on it.
I took issue with this, so I tweeted and posted this to Facebook (which at this time has 156 comments) on Sunday.
I hate posting the cartoon here, but you have to see it to understand the extent of the racism. It’s like old-timey minstrel shit. I got a reply from Margocox, but it was just a nonsensical GIF.
To me, it comes off as “neener neener, I owned you by being racist. Tee-hee.” If I’m wrong, feel free to inform me what this shit is. I think the guys are proud to be racist. Later, they posted another gif, but this time to my Facebook page.
I did not hear from Daryl Cagle…or did I?
I got a message from a friend late Sunday night who works for Cagle. He said he had to call “bullshit” on my post about Cagle and MargoCox. He said that the cartoon duo worked for Townhall and not Cagle, which I thought I had been clear about. I know how a syndicate works. I own a syndicate.
He said that this specific cartoon hadn’t been sent to Cagle for syndication yet and was not in their database, and that he couldn’t even find it. He demanded to know where I found the cartoon. I told him…
How could I find the cartoon, and he couldn’t?
He explained that it was on Cagle’s website, but NOT on the syndicate website. Yeah, I’m confused. It’s sitting right there, on Cagle’s site with Cagle’s name on it. What up with that? But then he did a whatabout (which should be only a MAGAt technique, but it’s what he did) and said I never go after another syndicate for this kind of stuff, but I do, and I have called out other racist, gaslighting, conspiracy theorist cartoonists in the past. He’s known me for decades, so this can’t be the first time he’s seen me call out cartoonists. In fact, he’s secretly messaged me in the past to feed me dirt on other cartoonists, hoping I would publish it (other cartoonists do this too).
But as for the cartoon NOT being on the syndication site, it is, and presented here with the pricing list.
Cagle is definitely selling this racist cartoon.
I asked my friend, who may not be my friend anymore, if Cagle had sent him to talk to me. It took him a while to reply. Are you familiar with messenger services where you can see that the other person is replying, or trying to…and you see the dots while they’re typing, then they stop, start again, stop, start again, all because the person is trying to formulate how he wants to say something. There was a lot of that.
But he finally got his denial through, saying he hadn’t talked to Cagle about it. I replied, “He’s talking to you right now, isn’t he?” I never got another reply to the conversation he initiated. That was two days ago.
Today, Margolis & Cox came after me, not by defending themselves from accusations of racism, but by attacking my art skills, as if that has anything to do with their racism.
Only right-wing MAGAt trolls attack my drawing ability because it changes the subject and tries to put the onus on me. It’s also stupid criticism when it takes two of them to produce the rancid, bigoted tropes they crap out. I replied, saying that it doesn’t matter how well you draw if the ideas are shit. And their racist ideas are shit.
Of course, I was accused of trying to cancel them, and they’re right. I’m trying to cancel racism. They, with Daryl Cagle’s help, are advancing racism. In addition to racism, you should see all the homophobic crap they’re selling. Homophobic cartoons like this, and this, and this. Also, fellas…don’t talk about my art until you figure out how doors work.
I don’t know which one was coming at me, Margo or Cox, but it demanded that I defend myself from their attacks on my art (roll your eyes) and said there was nothing racist about drawing a black woman as a clown, except these art critics didn’t draw her as a clown. All they did was give her giant lips.
They said I was a “mediocre” cartoonist, jealous of them, and that being “printed” means they don’t “suck.” It’s like talking to very racist and stupid children. I really don’t like to boast about my success, and I don’t think I am that successful, but guys…I’m published more than the two of you put together, and I have more awards at this time than you will ever see, unless the Daily Stormer gives out cartoon awards.
And you can’t brag about being syndicated when your cartoons are sold by the same guy who sells Gary McCoy and the “Anonymous” cartoonist.
This went on for a while with them, and I quickly learned it was pointless to talk to the moron twins because they’re like insecure and immature little boys… little stupid racist boys. If someone were able to make them listen to why their cartoon is racist, they wouldn’t have the intellectual bandwidth combined to comprehend. They’re too stupid to be drawing political cartoons, and much too stupid to be syndicated. But I’ve also learned over the years that Cagle will syndicate anyone if it’ll get him a nickel. He exercises zero civic responsibility.
Syndicates need to be responsible for the stuff they put out. If they can’t, then they shouldn’t sell it. When I asked Cagle a couple of years ago on Twitter to justify syndicating the anonymous cartoonist, his answer was, “I don’t see a problem with it,” which is not an answer.
Now, he’s not replying to this. Why not? Because he can’t justify it. His only reason for carrying this shit is that it might sell. But he needs to explain why he sells racist cartoons. This is beyond a different viewpoint or a counterpoint. He can’t argue it’s not racist, because it is, and the comments from his employee indicate that they know it’s racist. Why was he so upset in the first place? Because I “accused” Cagle of selling a racist cartoon, which I have proven they are doing.
One of Cagle’s cartoonists, Gary McCoy, has had multiple newspapers apologize to their readers for his racist cartoons, with one paper even pulling cartoons altogether over it. This happens with Gary’s work TIME after TIME after TIMEafterTIME, and Cagle continues to sell his racist cartoons. I don’t understand why Cagle continues to carry McCoy despite his racism, because McCoy’s cartoons suck. They can’t be bringing in that much revenue, can they?
What I propose, since Daryl Cagle refuses responsibility for selling racism, is that all of his cartoonists, the ones whose work he syndicates, need to tell him he needs to stop.
A few cartoonists commented on my initial post about MargoCox, outraged over their racism. A few of those are Lalo Alcaraz, Chris Britt, Marc Murphy, John Kovalic, Kevin Necessary, Bob Krieger, Phil Hands, Gary Huck, and Steve Brodner. Other cartoonists need to step up, even those syndicated by Cagle, and denounce racism in political cartooning.
Guys, you are in the business of publishing your opinions…publish your opinion on this. Speak up, or at least speak to Daryl. Tell him to cut out the bullshit. This should go double for the good cartoonists who are in Cagle’s stable. I’m looking at you, some of whom are my friends who I respect greatly, Pat Bagley, Adam Zyglis, Ed Wexler, Michael de Adder, Rick McKee, Bill Day, Jeff Koterba, John Cole, and Alexandra Bowman. For the love of god, for the love of this industry, say something.
I’m asking my colleagues to stand up against racism in our industry, because we know Daryl never will.
A friend of mine, who is a Black woman, said about this, “It’s sad but the good thing as Black women is that we are used to this type of hate to the point where we expect it, and since we have so much experience with it, we are able to rise above it because that’s the only other choice that we have.”
One last note: MargoCox told me that calling them out “will not end well for me.”
The comments will be open for everyone on this blog, because the accused and the ones I’ve called out deserve the opportunity to reply.
The Young GOPer Behind “Alligator Alcatraz” Is the Dark Future of MAGA
James Uthmeier is the real brains behind this notorious migrant detention camp in the Everglades. The more barbarities that emerge, the brighter his star will no doubt shine.
The other day, Stephen Miller went on Fox News and offered a plea that got surprisingly little attention given its highly toxic and unnerving implications. Miller urged politicians in GOP-run states to build their own versions of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the state-run immigration detention facility that officials just opened in the Florida Everglades.
“We want every governor of a red state, and if you are watching tonight: pick up the phone, call DHS, work with us to build facilities in your state,” Miller said, in a reference to the Department of Homeland Security. Critically, Miller added, such states could then work with the federal government by supplying much-needed detention beds, helping President Trump “get the illegals out.”
Keep all that in mind as we introduce you to one James Uthmeier.
Uthmeier, the attorney general of Florida and a longtime ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, is widely described in the state as the brains behind “Alligator Alcatraz.” Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics, sums him up this way: “In Uthmeier, DeSantis found his own Stephen Miller.”
Uthmeier is indeed a homegrown Florida version of Miller: Only 37 years old, he brings great precociousness to the jailing of migrants. Like Miller, he is obscure and little-known relative to the influence he’s amassing. Also like Miller, he is fluent in MAGA’s reliance on the spectacle of inhumanity and barbarism.
“You don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter,” Uthmeier said of “Alligator Alcatraz” in a slick video he recently narrated about the complex, which featured heavy-metal guitar riffs right out of a combat-cosplay video game. “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
Any migrant who dares escape just might get devoured alive by an animal—one animal eating another. Dehumanization is so thrilling!
The real-world “Alligator Alcatraz” is already gaining notoriety for its very real cruelties. After Democratic lawmakers visited over the weekend, they sharply denounced the scenes they’d witnessed of migrants packed into cages under inhumane conditions. Meanwhile, detainees and family members have sounded alarms about worm-infested food and blistering heat. And the Miami Heraldreports that an unnervingly large percentage of the detainees lack criminal convictions.
But Uthmeier is getting feted on Fox News and other right wing media for this new experiment in spite of such notorieties—or perhaps because of them. There’s good reason to think more red state politicians will seek to create their own versions of “Alligator Alcatraz” or get in on this action in other ways—and that more young Republican politicians will see it as a path to MAGA renown and glory.
For one thing, the money is now there. Buried in the big budget bill that Trump recently signed is a little-noticed provision that immigration advocates increasingly fear could fund more complexes like this one. It makes $3.5 billion available to “eligible states” and their agencies for numerous immigration-related purposes, including the “temporary detention of aliens.”
When Miller told GOP politicians to follow Uthmeier by collaborating with federal officials to develop new versions of “Alligator Alcatraz,” he was probably talking about this slush fund. State officials can try to tap into it for building out such facilities. “For Republican states across the country that want to copy the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ model, this bill will give them that money,” immigration analyst Austin Kocher tells me.
What’s more, red state politicians are paying attention. Fox News contacted numerous gubernatorial offices to ask if they intend to take up Miller’s invitation. The responses were positive, with many eagerly touting plans for detention complexes. While it’s unclear if these will resemble “Alligator Alcatraz,” the underlying impulse is clear: Many red states want to expand state-run detention efforts. And again: The money is there.
This is a bad development. “Alligator Alcatraz” should not be the model for the future of migrant detention in much of the United States.
Here’s why. The facility is funded and operated by the state of Florida, but the state can use it to detain undocumented people under a federal program that allows ICE to authorize local law enforcement to carry out immigration crackdowns. That puts “Alligator Alcatraz” in a grey area: Local law enforcement agencies are using it to carry out Trump’s immigration detention agenda even as ICE does not run the facility.
Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center, who specializes in criminal justice, points to a toxic combination built into the idea of more versions of this arrangement. ICE detention is subject to federal oversight. But huge influxes of federal money for migrant detention—as in Trump’s new bill—could create new incentives for states to ramp up their own detention efforts. Yet because “Alligator Alcatraz” is a new experiment, she says, it’s unclear what sort of federal oversight future imitation efforts would receive, even if they get some federal money.
“What will access to counsel look like for detainees?” Eisen asks. “What will access to family members look like? It’s difficult to imagine state-run facilities where conditions and due process are prioritized.”
Illustrating the point, when a reporter recently asked ICE for comment on what’s going on inside “Alligator Alcatraz,” ICE said, well, it isn’t their facility. In other words, the federal government is not responsible for what happens inside those walls—even as Miller and Trump call on other states to build more of them.
Which brings us back to Uthmeier and the future of MAGA.
It’s easy to see Uthmeier and his “Alligator Alcatraz” becoming a model for other young Republicans seeking a route into MAGA celebrity. Consider his career trajectory: It’s fairly conventional establishment-Republican stuff. A native of Destin, a small beach city in the deep red Florida panhandle, he earned a law degree from Georgetown and then worked for the Commerce Department in the first Trump administration—and then for the ultra-establishment D.C. law firm Jones Day.
Uthmeier has also made appearances at the conservative Federalist Ssociety, which is as establishment-conservative as it gets. He joined DeSantis’s first administration as a senior legal adviser, and then got appointed as attorney general when the slot was vacated by the appointment of former AG Ashley Moody to now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Senate seat.
All in all, it’s in some ways a conventional path to GOP success. In fact, Uthmeier actually has a track record of criticizing Trump in the past on things like Covid-19 and abortion. But J.D. Vance survived such heresies, and now, in the party that Trump remade, Uthmeier apparently recognizes that “Alligator Alcatraz” is his big ticket. It’s a reminder that in today’s GOP, the MAGA and older-line Republican establishments are bleeding into one another—and that getting attached to such an idea is a path to national MAGA stardom.
Put another way, in the cut-throat world of the MAGA attention economy, association with things like “Alligator Alcatraz” can carry enormous weight. It’s hard for people who don’t swim in MAGA’s rancid information currents to grasp, but when Trump recently toured the facility with DeSantis, it was a huge MAGA propaganda coup for the Florida governor (yes, he apparently still harbors national ambitions).
Indeed, one person who very much noticed this was apparently Uthmeier himself. According to one Florida operative in touch with Uthmeier’s staff, there’s considerable sensitivity in his inner circle over who is getting credit for “Alligator Alcatraz,” with some worrying that Uthmeier isn’t reaping enough of it.
Uthmeier needn’t worry, however. When Trump toured the facility, he said of Uthmeier: “That guy’s got a future.” In this, the MAGA God King himself gave a big boost to Uthmeier’s 2026 electoral bid to keep his appointed AG role, which will be a platform for even higher ambitions. And if more barbarities emerge from “Alligator Alcatraz,” as they surely will, his MAGA future will only get that much brighter.
Mario Guevara reports from a local police traffic enforcement area in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on 29 April 2025. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA
‘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/ShutterstockLaw enforcement officers patrol as a ‘No Kings Day’ protest takes place in Dekalb county, Georgia, on 14 June 2025.
Photograph: Mike Stewart/AP
Scottie's Playtime 
