Why did ICE Lock Up this Pro-Trump Reporter? (Part One)
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In June, journalist Mario Guevara was arrested while covering an anti-ICE protest in Georgia, transferred to ICE detention, and locked up by the federal government for more than 100 days. And that wasn’t even the worst of it.
But Mario is not the kind of ICE-criticizing reporter you might be picturing. He was a Trump-supporting, Republican-identifying, law-and-order-sympathizing immigration hawk, who knew ICE well and had covered them favorably for years. Why did the Trump administration still go after him?
This is the first in a special two-part series about Mario Guevara.
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Guests:
- Mario Guevara, MG News
- Emily Wu Pearson, WABE
- Giovanni Diaz, ESQ.
- Scarlet Kim, ACLU
This episode has been updated to reflect the fact that Mario Guevara had a Social Security card before his immigration case was administratively closed, not after. His subsequent green card petition was also unrelated.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I want to play something the president said the other week because you might have missed it. |
| 0:10.1 | This was shortly after an ICE agent had fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Good at point-blank range in her car in Minneapolis. |
| 0:19.0 | At first, the Trump administration had said Good was a domestic |
| 0:22.4 | terrorist who was trying to run over the agent and kill him. But now, at this press conference, |
| 0:28.5 | the president had a different tune because he'd learned something about Renee Good's family. |
| 0:33.5 | I'm not going to edit this clip for clarity, by the way, so just bear with it. |
| 0:37.3 | I felt horribly when I was told that the young woman who was, had the tragedy, it's a tragedy, it's a horrible thing. |
| 0:46.5 | Everybody would say, ICE would say the same thing. |
| 0:49.5 | But when I learned her parents and her father in particular, |
| 0:55.0 | was like, I hope he still is, but I don't know, |
| 0:58.0 | was a tremendous Trump fan. |
| 1:01.0 | He was all for Trump, loved Trump. |
| 1:04.0 | And, you know, it's terrible. |
| 1:07.0 | I always told that by a lot of people. |
| 1:10.0 | They said, oh, he loves you. He was a, I hope he still |
| 1:14.5 | feels that way. I don't know. It's a hard, hard situation. But her father was a tremendous, |
| 1:18.9 | and parents were tremendous Trump fans. I'd so sad. It just happens. It's terrible. |
| 1:27.7 | The only thing that might drive Donald Trump more than payback is praise. |
| 1:32.2 | All it takes for Renee Good to go from a domestic terrorist to the victim of a horrible tragedy in his eyes |
| 1:38.1 | is learning that her dad was a Trump supporter. |
| 1:42.2 | It's sick, but real. Trump craves adoration. The story we have for you |
| 1:47.8 | today, it's remarkable because it's about someone the Trump administration targeted, a reporter |
... |
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