Army veteran and US citizen arrested in California immigration raid warns it could happen to anyone
George Retes, 25, who works as a security guard at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, said he was arriving to work on July 10 when several federal agents surrounded his car and despite identifying himself as a U.S. citizen, broke his window, peppered sprayed him and dragged him out.
'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.
Retes was taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles where he said he was put in a special cell and checked on each day after he became emotionally distraught because he was missing his 3-year-old daughter's birthday party Saturday.
He said that the federal agents never told him why he was arrested or allowed him a chance to contact a lawyer or his family during his three-day detention.
Retes said he joined the army at 18 and was deployed 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.'
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BreakingNews.ie
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What you need to know about Trump, Epstein and the MAGA controversy
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The Guardian
5 minutes ago
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Atlanta journalist fights deportation from Ice jail despite dropped charges: ‘I'm seeing what absolute power can do'
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. 'For the first 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 Gonzales, 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, Gonzales 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,' Gonzales said. Gonzales, 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,' Gonzales said. Gonzales 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 Gonzales said. 'And the second piece is how to target journalists.' Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion 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.' 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. 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.'
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Huge fortress home where couple harbored 21 children was set up like a hotel
From the outside, the imposing castle-like design and gated exterior made the $4.1 million mansion appear like a fortress. Residents admired it as they walked their dogs through the high-end California neighborhood of Arcadia - and assumed the family inside just enjoyed their privacy. That's until they noticed heavily-pregnant women walking around the grounds. For behind the walls lurked a dark secret, with mothers claiming the couple who lived there were running a chilling surrogacy scheme. The owners, couple Guojun Xuan, 65, and Silvia Zhang, 38, made headlines after they were found to have harbored a staggering 21 surrogate babies in the house - 17 of which were under the age of three. A neighbor, who asked not to be named, told the Daily Mail he suspected the couple were operating some sort of 'maternity house' for years - and would see cars driving in and out at all times of night. He recalled: 'Some of them [the pregnant women] were Caucasian. They were exercising and walking around because maybe their backs hurt, or they want to go into labor. 'I heard rumors that this was set up like a hotel. There are nine bedrooms. The talk around the neighborhood is they even had a front desk manager, and it was like coming to a birthing hospital.' Michael Bui, another neighbor, told Daily Mail, he would never see people go in and out and never heard crying. Women who handed over babies to the couple said they believed they were helping to build a loving family and were oblivious to other surrogates recruited across the country, from Pennsylvania to Texas. The alleged ruse continued for years - for reasons that California detectives and the FBI are yet to fully uncover - until the couple brought a two-month-old to the hospital with a traumatic head injury in May. The hospital visit led to a search warrant on the lavish mansion, which turned up the horror discovery of not only the massive brood, but also indoor surveillance cameras depicting nannies 'physically and verbally' abusing the children, Arcadia Police said. When Daily Mail visited the towering property this week, there was no sign of Xuan, Zhang, or anything showing dozens of children spent their childhoods there besides a dilapidated trampoline. Xuan and Zhang were arrested after their May hospital visit and charged with child endangerment, while the Arcadia Police Department also issued an arrest warrant for one of the nannies, named as Chunmei Li, 56. Neighbors told Daily Mail this week that residents on their Arcadia street keep to themselves, enjoying the sunny California weather in the peace of their mansions. They said they were shocked to hear dozens of children lived in the home for years, as they had never seen any toys or strollers outside nor any children playing in the street. Mark Tabal, who lives about a block and a half from the home, said he passes by the castle house several times a day to walk his dog, but had not met the couple. He said: 'I've never seen any of the kids out here. It's a fairly quiet house and I've never seen the owners. Every once in a while, I see a gardener watering the bushes outside. 'It's pretty suspicious to hear the news and knowing this is the house but not hearing anything.' Neighbor Art Romero told CBS News that the huge nine-bedroom, 11-bath home was set up like a hotel, with a large lobby and a desk at the front appearing like a hotel clerk. It is unclear what the couple do for work or how they acquired their considerable wealth, with public records showing they are connected to a number of investment firms. Surrogate mothers who gave their children to the couple have expressed horror at the allegations, saying they believed Zhang and Xuan were clients of a surrogacy company. The FBI is now investigating whether they misled mothers across the country. After the shock allegations made headlines this week, an image emerged showing Zhang smiling at the birth of one of the children, hugging surrogate mother Kayla Elliot, 27, from Texas. In an interview with Center for Bio Ethics and Culture on TikTok, Elliot revealed that when Zhang met her at the hospital, she was handed $2,000, and her mother, boyfriend, son and daughter $200 each. She said that Zhang appeared unemotional about the birth and that she 'wasn't holding the baby.' She said: 'The baby was wrapped in a bassinet... you would think that somebody that wanted a baby so bad would be holding on that baby and loving that baby and just in awe with that baby.' Another surrogate mother in Pennsylvania, who asked to remain anonymous, revealed to KTLA that she is currently still pregnant with a baby intended for the couple. The 15 children found in the home were aged between two-months and 13-years-old, and six others had been given away. All 21 were taken into the custody of Department of Children and Family Services. Bui said on the street outside the home this week that the staggering allegations have left their quiet neighborhood searching for answers. He asked: 'Did they send them to school? 'I don't know why no one found out about the people who carried the children. Twenty-one children! What do you want to do with all of those children?' Surrogate Elliot, 27, is now fighting to regain custody of a baby girl she gave to the couple. She said that she was told that the baby was going to a loving family who only had one child, and believed Xuan and Zhang were clients of a surrogate firm that investigators now allege they owned. She told ABC7: 'It's horrific, it's disturbing, it's damaging emotionally. 'These agencies, we're supposed to trust them and follow their guidance and come to find out this whole thing was a scam, and the parents own the agency - that was not disclosed at all beforehand. Zhang has denied the allegations, and told KTLA that officials are 'misguided and wrong... We look forward to vindicating any such claims at the appropriate time when and if any actions are brought.' Despite Zhang's alleged claim that she just wanted a large family, one expert fears the mega-family may have been connected to trafficking. Kallie Fell, executive director of the nonprofit Center of Bioethics and Culture, told ABC7 that while the couple may not have broken the law by having so many surrogate children, the situation made her fear they were part of a human trafficking ring. Fell, who is working with Elliot, said that the surrogacy industry is unregulated, and often, 'anything goes.' She said: 'These clinics, these agencies are not regulated by any governing body. 'That to me smells of trafficking... What are the intentions of having that many children at home through these assisted reproductive technologies?'
