Pranksters fill Trump Tower gift shop with merch featuring pictures of Epstein with the president
The Good Liars, a political comedy duo of Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, posted photos of postcards with an old photograph of Donald Trump and Epstein they say were among the souvenirs at the president's Manhattan skyscraper.
The Independent reached out to the Trump Tower store, but a representative declined to confirm the incident. The Independent has also reached out to The Good Liars for comment.
A similar prank was recently carried out in London when activists put the same old photo of Trump and Epstein on a bus shelter near the U.S. embassy ahead of the president's state visit to the United Kingdom in September, according to an Instagram post from the group Everyone Hates Elon.
The mischievous acts come as the Trump administration is embroiled in controversy surrounding files in the criminal investigation of Epstein, who died in jail while awaiting trial on federal charges related to the sexual abuse of dozens of minor girls.
Trump had socialized with Epstein, a wealthy financier, decades ago when he was a New York real estate mogul. In a 2002 interview with New York magazine, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years at that point and called him a 'terrific guy.'
Trump has said their friendship ended before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to Florida state charges of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Conspiracies have long swirled, particularly from right-wing figures, about the so-called Epstein files, including rumors of a suspected client list of powerful people who may have partaken in the late financier's crimes.
When the Justice Department and FBI released a memo earlier this month saying there was never any client list and that 'no further disclosure' of the files 'would be appropriate or warranted,' the Trump administration faced backlash, notably including from the president's base.
Things came to a head Thursday night with two major developments in the Epstein files saga.
First, the WSJ released a bombshell report claiming Trump had given Epstein a bawdy birthday card, including a drawing of a naked woman and the message, 'Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,' in 2003.
Trump and the White House have vehemently denied the reporting, calling the birthday card 'fake.'
The president took it a step further, announcing in a Truth Social post Thursday night he would sue the WSJ, its parent company NewsCorp and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who is chairman emeritus of NewsCorp.
Trump followed that up with another Truth Social post announcing his request for Attorney General Pam Bondi to release all 'pertinent Grand Jury testimony' related to the Epstein case, 'subject to Court approval.'
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The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Why many Black Americans are boycotting big-box retail stores: ‘using my money to resist'
Rebecca Renard-Wilson has stopped shopping at Target and all things Amazon including Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh. These days, the mother of two shops for the things she needs at farmer's markets, small mom-and-pop stores or she goes directly to the websites of products she wants to purchase. 'I have options of where I put my money,' Renard-Wilson, 49, said. 'Yes, Target's convenient. Yes, Amazon Fresh is on my drive to my kids' school. The options that I have discovered have opened up new relationships. I feel more connected to my community because I'm not shopping at those big-box places. I'm able to now use my money not only to resist places that don't align with my values, but I'm able to now support places that do align with my values. To me, that's a win-win.' Renard-Wilson is among a growing group of African Americans who are ditching corporate big-box retail stores who rolled back their DEI programs and instead are shopping at small, minority- and women-owned businesses they believe value their dollars more. In February, more than 250,000 people signed a pledge to boycott Target after Rev Jamal Bryant, pastor of New Birth Baptist church outside of Georgia, called for a 40-day Target Fast that started at the beginning of the Lenten season. The boycott has become a movement across social media and within community neighborhoods nationwide with the shared goal of rejecting systems that do not value the African American community, and it has already impacted Target. In the first quarter of the year, the company reported a $500m loss in year-over-year sales, citing reaction to the boycott and lower foot traffic. Shortly after taking office in January, Donald Trump eliminated DEI programs across offices in the federal government. Retailers, including Target, Walmart and Amazon, followed the president's lead in eliminating their DEI programs and initiatives. In 2020, following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, millions marched in the streets in protest of police violence – and tech giants, retailers, Fortune 500 companies and industries pledged their commitment to diversity practices. Target specifically committed to invest $2 bn in Black-owned businesses. It increased the amount it spent with Black-owned suppliers by over 50% and doubled the number of Black-owned brands on its shelves. Customers found Black-owned hair products such as TGIN (Thank God Its Natural), Camille Rose and Pattern (by actor Tracee Ellis Ross), beauty brands Black Opal and TLB (The Lip Bar), and lifestyle merchandise like Be Rooted and Tabitha Brown's products including mugs, stationary, tote bags, home decor and kitchen essentials. Some considered it to be a 'racial reckoning'. By 2024, the reckoning had soured as racial justice fatigue and a deviance to progress set-in with the reelection of Trump. 'We are standing in righteous indignation against racism and sexism in this nation,' Bryant told his congregation. Target, he said, 'made a commitment after the death of George Floyd that you would invest $2 bn into the Black community before December 2025'. When Target dropped its DEI programs and initiatives in January, Bryant said the company was 'reneging on the financial commitment you made to our people'. Bryant partnered with the US Black Chamber of Commerce to provide a digital directory of more than 150,000 Black-owned businesses across the US and asked that the more than 250,000 people who registered to buy directly from the Black-owned businesses' online platforms and not Target. And during the Easter weekend Bryant said that five mega churches turned their spaces into retail malls so congregants could support Black-owned businesses. It wasn't an easy decision to boycott Target, Renard-Wilson said. She has friends who have products on Target shelves and liked supporting their businesses. When she learned about the boycott on social media, she was conflicted. 'Some people were saying if you boycott Target, then you are basically crippling those Black, queer, or Latino creatives who have had to put so much capital, so much time, and so much resources just to get their stuff on the Target shelves,' Renard-Wilson said. 'I was like, 'Damn, now this is complicated.'' The retailers' decisions to eliminate their DEI initiatives, Renard-Wilson said, demonstrated that they 'don't really care about' minority communities. There was a time, she says, when she shopped at Target and Amazon Fresh pretty regularly, because they were convenient. Sometimes she visited Amazon Fresh two or three times a week, because it was on the way to her kids' schools. Renard-Wilson, who lives with her husband and two young children in Los Angeles, gets a lot of the goods that she used to purchase at Target or Amazon from Costco now, which doubled-down on its commitment to DEI. 'We didn't really mess with Costco that much because it was a headache to get to and the parking was always crazy,' said Renard-Wilson. 'But when Target was like, 'Forget DEI', and Costco was like, 'We value diversity,' I was like, 'I'm going to spend my money in a place that's aligned with my values.'' And when Renard-Wilson can't find what she needs at Costco, she'll go to small local mom-and-pop stores or buy directly online from the source. She found a deodorant she likes produced by a Black woman-owned company. Renard-Wilson is also part of a Facebook group where people share where to get certain items. The financial cost of not shopping at Target or Amazon has been minimal, Renard-Wilson said. In fact, when she compared one of her pre-boycott credit card bills with her credit card bill during the boycott, she had spent $2,000 less by not shopping at the big-box retailers. She points out the one time her husband, a teacher, paid more than double for workshop supplies that he could have gotten much cheaper at Amazon. Other than that, Renard-Wilson says most products have only been a few bucks more along with the cost of shipping sometimes. 'Thankfully, prayerfully, we're in a financial position to be able to pay a little bit more,' says Renard-Wilson, who acknowledges that her family is currently in a privileged financial position to be able to explore options outside of big-box corporate retail stores. But there are families in smaller rural areas who do not have the retail options of big cities, technology access or the financial means to fully participate in the retail boycott. Karmen Jones' 82-year-old grandmother lives in rural Mississippi. The closest grocery store to her grandmother is a Walmart, Jones says, which is 30 to 40 minutes away from her grandmother's home. There is no Instacart or Uber Eats in her area that's close to the Delta, and her elderly grandmother is not going to go online to purchase items, Jones said. There's also the transportation issue. Jones often has to take her grandmother grocery shopping when she visits. 'It's a privilege to be able to protest,' Jones, 26, said. 'My grandmother does not have the privilege to say no to a Walmart if that's the nearest grocery store that she has.' Jones' family's roots run deep in Mississippi. Her family had to be protected from the Ku Klux Klan, she says, because her great-grandmother owned a successful Black business. Jones recently visited the plantation where her family lived and worked in Mississippi, and witnessed the large wealth gap between Blacks and whites in the rural area. Given her family's history, she doesn't want people to judge her grandmother if she is unable to participate in the boycott. 'I believe the elders deserve to have a break at times. They deserve to have support and to have care. That is where she [my grandmother] is in her chapter in her life. She's in a place where she deserves care,' said Jones, a communications consultant, whose family travels between Washington DC, where she first heard about the retail boycott, and Mississippi for work. She also notes that there's a difference in the robust grocery market in the DMV (Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia) versus the food deserts in Mississippi. 'In the DMV, we quickly noticed that you don't really have to go to Walmart or Target. You can go to Harris Teeter or Trader Joes,' Jones said. In Mississippi, Jones says she's shopped at Kroger or Costco since the boycott. If she goes to a particularly rural area, she has to stop at a corner store or market for goods. But more importantly, she's noticed the big financial cost to boycotting. Most of her beauty or hair products used to be purchased from Amazon, Jones says, but now she buys items from Ulta, which has remained committed to its DEI initiatives put forth in 2020 and 2021. 'There is a price to pay for protesting,' Jones said. Though Jones has had to pay more for products, she says she will not be going back to big retailers anytime soon, even if they reinstated their DEI initiatives. Target, especially, was a disappointment, Jones said. 'Target marketed itself prior to Trump's last election as being pro-DEI and being pro-Black creatives. Our faces were all around the store and even in the aisles,' she said. Bryant told CNN's Erin Burnett in May that the Target boycott will continue until things shift. He's taking a page out of the history books, pointing to the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that lasted 381 days. That protest, which occurred 70 years ago, serves as a model. Most recently Bryant called for a boycott of Dollar General stores and McDonalds. Renard-Wilson says she doesn't plan to return to the big-box retail stores, even if there is a shift to embrace DEI again. 'I do not have any desire to continue supporting capitalistic systems that put profit over people,' Renard-Wilson says. 'I'm going to use my money and try to invest in people who care about me and my community.' This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
BreakingNews.ie
41 minutes ago
- BreakingNews.ie
What you need to know about Trump, Epstein and the MAGA controversy
The 2019 suicide of disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a New York jail cell generated conspiracy theories, fuelled by US president Donald Trump's conservative MAGA movement, that he was killed by one of his famous connections. Here are some facts about Epstein and the current controversy: Advertisement Who is Jeffrey Epstein? The Brooklyn-born Epstein, a former high school math teacher who later founded consulting and financial management firms, cultivated the rich and famous. He was known for socializing with politicians and royalty, including Mr Trump, Democratic president Bill Clinton, Microsoft MSFT.O co-founder Bill Gates and Britain's Prince Andrew. Some friends and clients flew on his private plane and visited his Caribbean islands. Mr Trump knew Epstein socially in the 1990s and early 2000s. During the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, the financier's longtime pilot, Lawrence Visoski, testified that Mr Trump flew on Epstein's private plane multiple times. Mr Trump has denied being on the plane. What was Epstein charged with? In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to a Florida state felony prostitution charge, after federal prosecutors agreed not to charge him with sex trafficking of minors. He served 13 months in jail and was required to register as a sex offender. That punishment is now widely regarded as too lenient. Advertisement In July 2019, the US Justice Department charged Epstein with sex trafficking minors, including sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of girls, in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005. He pleaded not guilty. Epstein died on August 10th, 2019, at age 66 by hanging himself in a Manhattan jail cell, an autopsy concluded. He was never tried on the 2019 charges. What is the current controversy over Epstein? Though the New York City chief medical examiner determined that Epstein's death was a suicide by hanging, Epstein's ties to wealthy and powerful people prompted speculation that one or more of them wanted him silenced. In several interviews, Mr Trump left open the possibility that Epstein may not have died by suicide. During the 2024 presidential campaign, when asked on Fox News if he would declassify the Epstein files, Mr Trump said: "Yeah, yeah I would." Advertisement In February, Fox News asked attorney general Pam Bondi whether the Justice Department would be releasing Epstein's client list, and she said: "It's sitting on my desk right now to review." The 2019 suicide of disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a New York jail cell generated conspiracy theories. Photo:Some of Mr Trump's most loyal followers became furious after his administration reversed course on its promise. A Justice Department memo released on July 7th concluded that Epstein killed himself and said there was "no incriminating client list" or evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent people. The demands by Trump supporters for more Epstein-related documents have caused a rare fracture within the president's base. Supporters, inspired by conservative talk show hosts and podcasters, have said the federal government is concealing records to protect wealthy and influential people with ties to Epstein. Advertisement Trying to contain the fallout, Mr Trump defended Ms Bondi and accused his supporters in a Truth Social post of falling for a hoax, calling them "weaklings" who were helping Democrats. With backlash from his base not abating, Mr Trump on July 17th requested that Ms Bondi ask a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts related to Epstein's 2019 indictment. The government on Friday filed a motion in Manhattan federal court to unseal the transcripts. What happens next? Ultimately, a judge will decide whether to release the transcripts. Transcripts of grand jury proceedings are generally kept secret under federal criminal procedure rules, with limited exceptions. If a judge agrees to release the transcripts, it is likely that some material would be redacted, or blacked out because of privacy or security concerns.
The Guardian
41 minutes ago
- The Guardian
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.'
