One day after she was covering immigration arrests in Nashville, journalist Estefany Rodriguez Florez was surrounded by federal agents while she was in a car stamped with her network’s name.
Rodriguez Florez, who was born in Colombia and is married to a U.S. citizen, was swiftly arrested without a warrant, according to court filings.
Her arrest has alarmed civil rights advocates and press freedom groups who have demanded her immediate release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, where she remains while a fast-moving legal battle for her release is ongoing.
Rodriguez Florez entered the United States legally on a tourist visa in 2021. She filed for political asylum and married a U.S. citizen; the couple has filed for permission to adjust her status to lawful permanent resident, and she has a valid work permit as she awaits a green card, according to attorneys.
“We don’t yet know if Estefany Rodríguez’s detention was in retaliation for her reporting but we certainly wouldn’t be surprised,” according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “ICE abductions of noncitizen journalists take the reporters best equipped to cover immigration enforcement off the beat.”
Her detention joins a “shameful and alarming pattern of the Trump administration’s use of immigration authorities to clamp down on freedom of the press,” according to Katherine Jacobsen, the U.S., Canada, and Caribbean Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Rodriguez sought asylum in the United States to escape death threats she received for reporting in her home county.
“The United States has traditionally been a safe haven for journalists fleeing retaliation in connection with their work,” Jacobsen said. “With Rodriguez’s case, federal authorities have shown a cruel disregard for this tradition.”
Dictatorships abroad target a free press to “terrorize” journalists and impede the public’s right to know the truth, according to Free Press senior counsel Nora Benavidez.
“The Trump administration consistently targets our most vocal and vulnerable voices to do just that,” she said.
The arrest of Rodriguez Florez also follows the deportation and arrest of Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara, who held a work visa and green card when he was detained by federal agents in Atlanta last year. He was deported in October.
Rodriguez Florez “is the latest to be caught up in this government-led campaign of censorship and control,” according to Benavidez.
On Tuesday, Rodriguez Florez was covering immigration raids for Spanish-language outlet Nashville Noticias in the suburbs southeast of Nashville.
The next morning, on her way to the gym with her husband, officers surrounded her car, which was marked with the Nashville Noticias logo.
“Several men got out and demanded that our colleague be taken into custody,” according to a statement from the outlet.
According to a petition for her release, Rodriguez Florez routinely showed up for required ICE check-in appointments and was due to appear at a local office the day it was closed for a snowstorm earlier this year.
When she returned, she was provided a note from an agent who could not find her name in the system, and rescheduled her next appointment to March 17, according to court filings.
She was then arrested March 4.
According to a response from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tennessee, she was “arrested pursuant to a valid arrest warrant” and “lawfully detained.”
Government lawyers have accused her of having “clearly misrepresented facts” of her case, noting that her application for asylum “does not negate the fact that she is an undocumented alien and should be detained pending a bond hearing.”
She remains inside Etowah County Jail, according to prosecutors.
But government documents referenced in her petition for release show that she was never served with a warrant, which her lawyer described as “crumpled up and discarded, not placed in a file as would be any relevant document.”
The document, which the government provided in its filings in the case, does not include any information about the date it was allegedly served, and is instead “oddly crumpled and photographed, rather than flat and scanned,” according to her attorneys.
In a statement, a spokesperson for ICE said she was arrested as part of a “targeted enforcement operation.”
“She failed to depart the country and is in violation of the conditions of her visa and currently has no lawful immigration status. She will remain in ICE custody pending her immigration proceedings,” an ICE spokesperson said.
“Estefany is an incredible woman, deeply dedicated to both her work and her family,” her husband wrote on GoFundMe as the family raises money for her legal support.
”She works tirelessly to inform and serve the community with passion,” he wrote. “Beyond her work as a journalist, she is always looking for ways to help others, whether it's supporting families in need, donating food, or sharing gifts with those who need them.”
Nashville Noticias “expresses its respect for the laws of the United States and hopes that this situation will be resolved favorably for our colleague so that she can be released soon, as she needs to reunite with her young daughter and husband to continue her legal process within the framework permitted by law,” according to a statement from the outlet.
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