A Reporter in Nashville, Detained by ICE

Estefany Rodríguez, a journalist for a Spanish-language outlet, was covering immigration raids. The next day, agents arrested her without a warrant.

On Tuesday, Estefany Rodríguez, a journalist at a Spanish-language outlet called Nashville Noticias, was in the suburbs southeast of Nashville, covering a series of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Rodríguez, who is from Colombia, reported from the parking lot of a residential complex where three ICE agents detained a man believed to be of Venezuelan origin; ICE also arrested at least three others nearby. On Wednesday, she headed to a gym in South Nashville with her husband, Alejandro Medina III, who is a United States citizen. They’d taken a car marked with the Nashville Noticias logo. When they were outside, they suddenly found themselves surrounded: according to a statement from Nashville Noticias, “several men got out and demanded that our colleague be taken into custody.” They had no warrant. And yet Rodríguez was taken to a detention center in Louisiana, where she remains now.

An emergency petition for her release, filed in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, notes that Rodríguez arrived in the US in March of 2021 on a tourist visa and, while the visa was still valid, filed for political asylum. Back in Colombia, where she covered stories relating to “cartels and organized crime,” she received death threats, Joel Coxander, one of her lawyers, told me. Later, she married Medina, and they filed for permission to adjust her status to that of a lawful permanent resident. She has a valid work permit; in addition to Nashville Noticias, she has previously contributed to Univision 42 Nashville. Ahead of her arrest, she, Medina, and Coxander had been actively engaged with the ICE field office in Nashville—a back-and-forth involving repeated delays because of an ice storm, an unexpected office closure, and an agent unable to find Rodríguez in the computer system. They’d come in to talk, and been given a date to return: March 17. “For a warrantless case like this, ICE has to have both an immigration violation and reason to believe there is a flight risk for this person,” Coxander said. In the petition, Rodríguez’s lawyers argued that the Department of Homeland Security lacked legal basis for her arrest—after all, she’d intended to make her appointment.