Estefany Rodríguez in Limbo

Last week, a reporter in Nashville was detained by ICE. Officials claimed to have paperwork for her arrest, but her lawyers say it was warrantless—and retaliation for her reporting.

Last Wednesday, Estefany Rodríguez, a journalist based in Nashville, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, according to her lawyers, she was not shown a warrant. On Friday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security submitted to the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Nashville Division, a photo of a warrant—what’s known as an administrative, or immigration, warrant, signed by an immigration officer, rather than an arrest warrant signed by a judge. That document, dated March 2, appeared crumpled and contained no A-number (a unique seven- to nine-digit code assigned to noncitizens), and its certificate of service section—which outlines when and where the warrant was served—was left blank. Then, on Saturday, DHS posted on X a photo of yet another immigration warrant, dated March 4. Rodríguez and her lawyers had never seen it before.

The back-and-forth, high-stakes and perplexing, has involved a series of responses to the court—and in none of these has DHS submitted the social media warrant. “Our reply explained that an arrest remains warrantless when the warrant was never executed,” Joel Coxander, a member of Rodríguez’s legal team, told me. “The March 2 warrant was not executed because it was never shown or mentioned to Ms. Rodríguez and the certificate of service on the warrant is blank.” Though the certificate of service on the social media warrant was filled out, “it was issued based in part on the post-arrest interview she did at the ICE office,” as Coxander put it—indicating that she wasn’t presented with the document at the time she was taken into custody.