03/07/2026
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BREAKING🚨 ICE just ARRESTED an immigration journalist WITHOUT A WARRANT. She has a valid work permit, she came to the US legally, and she's married to a US Citizen.
Estafany Maria Rodriguez Flores is a journalist in Nashville who reports on ICE abuses, and the fear immigrant families live with every day for the Spanish‑language outlet Nashville Noticias.
On Wednesday morning, she was sitting in a car with her husband, in a vehicle clearly marked with her news outlet’s logo, when ICE agents surrounded them and dragged her away.
Estafany did everything “the right way.” She entered the U.S. LEGALLY in March 2021 on a tourist visa, applied for asylum, married a U.S. citizen, and now has a valid work permit while she and her husband work through the long process of getting her green card approved. She had an official appointment scheduled with ICE on March 17, a date set and reset by the government itself after winter storms delayed earlier meetings. She showed up, followed the rules, kept every letter, every notice, every appointment.
But instead of facing her at that scheduled meeting, ICE agents intercepted her in traffic and hauled her to a detention center. According to court filings, they showed her a “notice to appear” in immigration court — but no arrest warrant existed. Her lawyers confirm ICE admitted there was no active arrest warrant when they took her into custody. This is power, not law.
And this is not the first time. In 2018, another Spanish‑language reporter in Tennessee, Manuel Duran of Memphis Noticias, was arrested while covering an immigration protest. Local charges were dropped — but ICE grabbed him anyway and locked him up in immigration detention for 465 days, well over a year, in a case that drew national outrage and international headlines. That is the precedent. That is the warning.
Now it’s happening again. A young mother, a wife, a working journalist — not hiding, not “in the shadows,” but on TV, on social media, in a car with her station’s logo — has been disappeared into a detention center by the very agency she critiques. Around the country, other immigrant‑rights reporters have also found themselves targeted or detained by ICE after documenting raids and enforcement actions, raising growing fears that immigration detention is being used as a weapon to silence critical journalism.
If ICE can sn**ch a journalist who followed every rule — entered legally, married a U.S. citizen, obtained a valid work permit, and complied with every notice — what does that say to the millions of others who are just trying to live, work, and tell the truth? What does it say about press freedom in the United States under an administration that has already shown it is willing to punish reporters who expose its cruelty?
✍️ PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION Demanding her Release:
https://act.link/gi-sHDnV5
