ICE Detains Another Journalist
Attorneys and allies push to free Nashville’s Estefany María Rodríguez Florez
On the morning of March 4, Nashville Noticias reporter Estefany María Rodríguez Florez dropped off her daughter at a school bus stop and drove to a gym in South Nashville. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had been tracking her. When Rodríguez Florez and her husband pulled into the parking lot, several unmarked vehicles surrounded their car, which displayed her news outlet’s logo. One of the agents already had a photo of that car on his phone.
Rodríguez Florez has covered ICE arrests in the Nashville area as one of her primary beats since November. The day before her arrest, she was documenting immigration enforcement activity in Middle Tennessee. ICE took her into custody without a valid warrant, according to her attorneys, and she has been in ICE detention ever since.
Pressing Issues spoke early Tuesday morning with Joel Coxander, an immigration attorney at MIRA Legal, who along with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), is representing Rodríguez Florez.
“She shouldn’t have been arrested is obviously what we’re arguing,” Coxander told me. “There’s a First Amendment issue here, where she’s covering these important issues, and we want her to be able to keep reporting on issues like that.”
Who is Estefany María Rodríguez Florez?
Rodríguez Florez was born in Colombia and built her career as a TV journalist there, also managing radio programming for a regional network. Her reporting on corruption and organized crime — and the ways they overlap — made her a target back home. She received death threats that became, in Coxander’s words, “very immediate.” She filed police reports and had a security detail. Eventually, she left Colombia with her young daughter.
She entered the United States on a tourist visa in March 2021, applied for asylum in July of that year, and received a work permit in 2022. She soon settled in Nashville, where she joined Nashville Noticias, a Spanish-language news site.
marzo 10, 2026
In a statement released on March 4, Nashville Noticias said that her work focused on “covering social, family, health, police, and immigration issues.” By November 2025, the work she did covering ICE expanded, Coxander noted.
Following the rules?
In 2024, Rodríguez Florez met Alejandro Medina, a local musician and U.S. citizen. They got married in January 2026, and she applied for a green card.
Rodríguez Florez has no criminal record and, as the New York Times noted “In the past, immigrants applying for green cards through their American spouses were not subject to detention, even if they had overstayed their visas.”
According to a detailed timeline published last week by The Nashville Banner, ICE sent Rodríguez Florez a G-56 letter on Jan. 8 — asking her to come into the Nashville ICE field office for “processing and additional information.” According to Coxander, those types of letters are “invitations” not legal mandates.
Mikeie Honda Reiland
A series of miscommunications and bureaucratic contradictions followed, which Coxander said ICE is using against his client. A winter storm closed the ICE office on the original appointment date. When Rodríguez Florez’s legal team went to confirm the rescheduled appointment, ICE couldn’t find her in the system and told her to come back on March 17. But ICE arrested her first.
None of this is standard protocol.
“Her attorney and her husband had literally gone to ICE, which shows that she’s trying to follow all the rules,” Coxander said. “Despite all that, why would they then still choose to detain her and claim she’s a flight risk?”
A chilling effect
In addition to the concerns stemming from her initial arrest, the government’s ongoing detention of Rodríguez Florez poses broader constitutional questions. In an amended March 8 legal petition, Rodríguez Florez’s attorneys argue that her arrest and detention violate the First Amendment because they constitute retaliation for her past reporting and prevent her from reporting now. Her detention chills other journalists who report on or criticize ICE.
Rodríguez Florez’s attorneys argue that the intended purpose of her arrest is “to silence viewpoints with which the Trump Administration disagrees.”In response to the case, a coalition of 41 press-freedom and civil-society organizations is demanding her immediate release.
The coalition — which includes Amnesty International USA, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Free Press, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, PEN America, Reporters Without Borders, and the Society of Professional Journalists, among others — condemns her detention as “part of a broader erosion of democratic norms and human rights in the United States in which immigration authorities are increasingly being used to chill free expression and First Amendment rights.”
This is not the first time a journalist covering ICE has faced this kind of pressure. Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist, was detained for months and then deported after being arrested while covering a protest in Atlanta, as Nora Benavidez of Free Press wrote about for Pressing Issues in September.
Nora Benavidez
“Estefany Rodríguez was in a marked news van when she was taken by ICE, having fearlessly covered immigration for local Nashville audiences for months,” Benavidez said on Tuesday. “It is no surprise that ICE arrested her. This follows the government’s effort to silence independent reporting and public awareness on critical issues of the day.”
Censorship campaign
As of Tuesday morning, Rodríguez Florez is being held in Alabama, awaiting transfer to a detention center in Louisiana, although her exact location is unclear. Under the federal district court’s current schedule, ICE must show cause for detaining her by March 12. A hearing before Judge Eli Richardson is set for March 17 — the same date Rodríguez Florez had been told to report to the ICE field office voluntarily.
“We’d like to see her released and we’d like her to be able to proceed with the rest of her life and her case and getting her green card in what is a pretty straightforward marriage case,” Coxander said.
But as Benavidez of Free Press notes, the stakes in this case are high for every journalist and anyone speaking out against government wrongdoing.
“The U.S. government is relentless in its attacks on dissent,” she says. “It deported journalist Mario Guevara for filming a protest; it leveled bogus criminal conspiracy charges against Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering a church protest; it detained students indefinitely for speaking out on behalf of Palestinian rights. This censorship campaign flies in the face of our core, founding principles to protect free speech and the Fourth Estate.”
About the author
Julio Ricardo Varela is the senior producer and strategist at Free Press. He is also a working journalist, columnist and nonprofit-media leader. He is a massive Red Sox, Knicks and Arsenal fan (what a combo). Follow him on Bluesky.
Teamwork
Compiled by Pressing Issues editors
Over at Tech Policy Press, Free Press’ Jenna Ruddock wrote about the tech industry’s trip last week to the White House to announce a “nonbinding, unenforceable pledge to offset the costs of their increasingly power-hungry data centers.”
This was little more than a PR stunt, one that will do little to quell the growing opposition to costly and destructive data center construction. “Ultimately, the pledge masks the reality of what’s possible if the ongoing data center construction frenzy is allowed to continue at its current pace, something neither the Trump administration nor key industry players are willing to negotiate,” Ruddock writes. “As communities across the United States are fighting to slow and even stop that relentless pace, the same companies that trooped to the White House this week with a promise to do better are fighting back at every step.”
Our allies at MediaJustice just published a new report this week on “how tech oligarchs are capturing America’s media system, who’s driving it, and why it matters for our communities.” On Thursday, March 12 they’re holding a virtual launch event (register here) with Free Press’ Joseph Torres, FAIR’s Janine Jackson and Alicia Bell of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund.
The kicker
“The most amazing thing when I met her was these conversations. I just wanted to hear everything she had to say. She would tell me about her life in Colombia — her childhood, her mom. I told her about my dreams, my aspirations, you know, all these things I wanted to do.” —Alejandro Medina, Estefany María Rodríguez Florez’s husband, in The Nashville Banner
