What Compliance With Fascism Looks Like

It isn't Marines marching down Main Street. It's local cops behaving like the rules don't matter and getting away with it.

Mario Guevara didn’t get arrested because he was undocumented. He got arrested because a local Doraville cop had an excuse to screw with a news reporter at a protest, and he took it.

Nor is Guevara sitting in an Immigration and Customs Enforce detention cell simply because he’s undocumented — and that only in a very technical sense, since he has complied with the law from the moment of his arrival to today, has a work permit and filed a green card application. He’s stewing in a Folkston ICE box because the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office decided to hit him with petty, weakly-substantiated traffic violations a month after their encounter with him, just to give ICE a hand. The Gwinnett sheriff used those charges as a rationale to seize Guevara’s cell phone … and won’t tell people what they did with the data on that phone.

If you live in Gwinnett County, you should probably go to the county commission meeting tonight and ask your commissioners to withdraw funding from the sheriff’s office until he explains himself properly. More on that later.

The images of National Guard troops violating posse comitatus in the streets of Los Angeles compel outrage, as do ICE agents tricked out like paramilitaries in armored vehicles raiding California farms. But the more insidious and dangerous influence of the Trump Administration’s policies are on the behavior of local police and local governments.

Trump issued two executive orders earlier this year meant to induce local compliance with his national policies. The first said, in effect, that the federal government would tear up consent orders with local agencies and protect local police officers from legal accountability for misconduct. The second order threatened to arrest government officials at the state and local level who were not complying with federal immigration enforcement or were engaged in “DEI” practices in hiring. Aside from being plainly unconstitutional, the order is so vaguely worded that it could apply to any local government a malicious federal prosecutor might like.

Together, these two orders give leave for local police officers to follow their baser impulses, daring local elected officials to rein them in and risk the attention of the Trump regime.

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I thought at first that ICE had directly influenced James Talley, the Doraville police officer who made the Guevara arrest. The presence of an officer in fatigues I could not identify in bodyworn camera video lent weight to that supposition.

But I pulled Talley’s bodyworn camera video, not just for the couple of minutes of the arrest but for his whole outing that day, looking to see if he had some conversation with someone as a plan to target Guevara. It’s clear from the video that he and two other Doraville officers basically hovered behind Guevara waiting for him to make a mistake so that they could pounce. He was targeted. But I no longer believe Talley targeted Guevara because of ICE. Instead, the truth appears to be more basic.

Talley seems to dislike journalists. He had an opportunity to arrest one and took it.

The Guevara arrest is about at the half-way mark. The gas-mask wearing other cop in the video is also a Doraville police officer. “Keep your eye on the guy in the red shirt,” Talley said to him. “If he gets to the road, lock his ass up.”

Talley pulled another police officer aside right after that. “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. About 30 seconds later, Guevara is in black zip-tie cuffs.

Talley and another officer were chatting shortly after arresting Guevara. Talley asked that DeKalb Police officer if a drone hovering above them was one of theirs. The officer said it belonged to a news reporter.

“You got a bee-bee gun?” the officer asks Talley. “I wish,” he replied. “We could take one of the protesters’ moves and throw a rock.”

Guevara stewed in the back of a warm patrol truck for a few minutes before the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office brought a van around to cart arrestees to jail.

Talley took a moment to rush over to another person recording on his cell phone while standing on a sidewalk nearby, arresting him when he didn’t get out of Talley’s reach fast enough his liking.

A few minutes later, Talley greeted another Doraville officer warmly, and after some banter asked him a question. “What about press? Are we leaving press alone?” Yeah, the other officer replied. “Oh, okay,” Talley said. Then he walked over to the jail bus, bundled Guevara into it, and quietly filled out the arrest paperwork.

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Doraville, at least on paper, is a politically progressive city of about 10,800 residents. Elections are nonpartisan, but a majority of its six person council are Democrats, as is its mayor, Joseph Geierman. Doraville voters went two-to-one for Harris over Trump in November. Doraville elected the first openly trans city councilperson in state history in 2017. Fewer than one in five Doraville residents is non-Hispanic and white.

Voter turnout for municipal elections is abysmal. About 4,300 residents are registered to vote. Fewer than 800 bother to cast a ballot for mayor and city council races. A cadre of cranky old conservatives whose presence in town predates white flight and the immigrant surge, who will call into a city council meeting to complain about “welcoming city” diversity initiatives are overrepresented among these voters.

Doraville’s political leadership is, nonetheless, liberal. Doraville’s police, on the other hand, have a legacy of being … well, illiberal. The current police chief, Chuck Atkinson, is a lifelong Doraville resident, promoted through the ranks. It’s former police chief John King is now insurance commissioner and a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He’s also a Trump supporter and former Army general who famously requisitioned an armored personnel carrier for the city SWAT team.

I don’t have beef with either of them, per se. I’ve known King for years and voted for him in 2022. (I’m not crazy about his politics, but I think he’s honest and he returns my calls. Usually.) I spent a month documenting the madness of a local political pest, Tom Owens, about a decade ago and ended up with a brush of national attention for it. But Doraville’s city budget is about $22.5 million and about $10 million of that goes to E-911, municipal court and policing. Doraville Police, which might have 50 cops on staff, manages to field a SWAT team and generates about $25,000 per police officer in traffic fines. Doraville is a police department with a city government attached to it.

It would be easy to dismiss Guevara’s arrest as a one-off, a matter of bad luck, but for two things. First, Doraville’s police department has been running FLOCK camera searches on behalf of ICE, using the city’s license plate readers for immigration enforcement. Flock Safety, a national firm with a presence in 42 states, is based in Smyrna. The firm doesn’t have a contract with ICE, and if it did, I strongly suspect it would lose contracts in half the states its operating in. Asking local departments to run the search for them gets around this. And it requires compliance.

Flock gives local agencies with its technology an option to enable a data portal to show how that agency has used its network. Dunwoody has its portal up and running. Doraville does not use this transparency tool, despite the negative attention raised by the reports. Atkinson hand-waved the police department’s use of the cameras on behalf of ICE as a consequence of a joint operation with the DEA, where ICE said one of their suspects was undocumented.

The second issue is that Doraville’s leadership has chosen to say as little as possible about all of this, hoping the news will blow by them.

About four in ten Doraville residents are Latino, and about three of that four are noncitizens, the Washington Post reported in 2021. Doraville become a center for immigrants from across the world. The city trades on the food scene that’s developed with immigrant settlement and presents itself as a proud of its multicultural nature.

There is no such thing as a formal sanctuary city in Georgia. State law bans the practice, requires local municipalities to cooperate legally with federal immigration policies, and HB 1105—a state law passed this year—requires local law enforcement to apply to enter into 287(g) contracts that deputize local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law.

But Doraville appears to be going above and beyond. Public safety in Doraville depends in no small part on immigrants — including and especially undocumented immigrants — cooperating with the police on investigations. A cozy relationship with ICE threatens that cooperation. Criminals will exploit the silence of immigrants.

Rather than get in front of that problem, the city is remaining silent.

As this story posts, I am on my way to a press conference with the Committee to Protect Journalists at the Georgia capitol. Guevara is currently the only journalist in America imprisoned for doing his job. The arrest of Mario Guevara is an international incident. It is also a signpost on the road to fascism.

I don’t like using the word fascism. I think it’s usually overwrought rhetoric, hyperbole in an age of hyperbole. But when the government is arresting and holding journalists without charge — and all the charges against Guevara have been dropped — then the word is apt.

And Doraville facilitated this state of affairs.

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Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor displaced a long-serving Republican sheriff, Butch Conway, in 2020, after Conroy’s hardline position on immigration enforcement left him out of touch with the electorate. Taylor is an elected Democrat in a county that has become increasingly progressive and increasingly multiracial with a substantial immigrant population. But local Democrats have been asking about the charges against Guevara, and grown increasingly pissed off at the sheriff’s opaque response.

State Representative Marvin Lim, a Filipino-American immigrant 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. “This response is especially disheartening because a suite of the unanswered questions I asked are very relevant to Mr. Guevara,” Lim wrote. He noted that the sheriff’s office said that it cooperates with ICE when they feel it is “mutually beneficial” to do so.

“My questions in reply regarded what policies exist to adjudge what ‘mutually beneficial’ cooperation means – a critical question that goes far beyond law enforcement discretion in the field – and whether GCSO cooperates with ICE on enforcement of laws regarding any individual’s ‘lawful presence’ only as required by HB 1105 and no further,” Lim wrote. “Had Sheriff Taylor answered my reasonable questions, these assumptions could at least be confirmed or corrected. Sheriff Taylor has, unfortunately, forced my hand, to reveal his lack of transparency regarding GCSO’s immigration-related policies – something that can no longer reasonably be seen as unintentional, but a deliberate decision on his part.”

Guevara has millions of followers on social media. His reporting relies on phone calls and emails and text messages from his contacts telling him that there’s police activity in a neighborhood, so that he can roll out to it quickly and document it. He is the ultimate community journalist.

For this reason, the seizure of his smart phone by the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office should raise the highest of alarms.

The pretext for the warrant taking his phone is, frankly, bullshit.

“During multiple law enforcement operations conducted by our Trafficking and Child Exploitation (TRACE) Unit—which enforces county ordinances and state laws related to prostitution, pimping, street-level narcotics, human trafficking, child exploitation, Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) investigations, and other organized crimes—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 when you dig under the surface of this ominous statement, you find that the underlying investigation was of a run of the mill prostitution sting at an apartment complex south of Lilburn, resulting in misdemeanor charges.

My thanks to Sam Barnes, a freelance reporter in Atlanta and Atlanta Community Press Collective alumni, for sharing documents obtained through Open Records Act requests.

I have asked the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office what they searched for on Guevara’s phone, whether they accessed his text messages or other communications, whether they took a pen register of the incoming and outgoing calls, and crucially whether they shared this data with federal agencies and what their data retention policy is for this information.

They demanded I file my inquiry as an Open Records Act request, even though they are not required to answer interrogatories by the Act. Which is to say, they’re telling me to get effed. Just like they’ve been doing with an elected official, Marvin Lim.

A half-dozen advocacy organizations have called for Taylor to start holding town hall meetings to explain himself. As nearly as I can tell — because his communications office doesn’t actually communicate — he hasn’t responded.

I don’t think Taylor is going to say anything unless he is forced to the table. As an independently-elected official, there’s no getting rid of him except to vote him out of office, or at least threaten his re-election chances. But Taylor doesn’t control his budget. The Gwinnett County Commission does. The commission can withdraw funds from his office until it is satisfied that the sheriff is acting transparently.

If that action is on the table, perhaps Taylor will be more forthcoming. The commission meets tonight — July 22 — at 7 at the Gwinnett Justice and Administration Building in Lawrenceville.

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Mario Guevara poses a problem for the Trump Administration and ICE because he is not someone whose reporting can be dismissed as partisan noise. He’s a religious conservative and George Bush fan who would probably have been voting Republican if he were a citizen, at least before all of this.

Guevara has both reported honestly about what he sees and has been around long enough to understand just how effed up things are right now by historical standards.

“They know who he is,” said Jerry Gonzalez of GALEO. “He has developed relationships with them, and he relied on that as sort of an ability to be able to do the things that he was doing in the past, because of his open communication with the law enforcement agencies, explaining what he’s doing. So that way he could get the type of footage that he would get.”

ICE isn't prioritizing violent criminals, or even nonviolent criminals. They're chasing down whoever they can catch, because they're under an intense (and illegal) quota that can't be met any other way. The people who are easiest to catch are the ones who are complying with the law, showing up for court, wearing an ankle monitor, or have children enrolled in school where they can find the parents.

Honest reporting about this can and will change people’s mind about immigration. The polling bears this out. Support for hardline immigration enforcement has cratered, and reporting like Guevara’s is why.

“He’s a test case to push the envelope for legal immigrants that have no committed no crime, to trump up charges against them,” Gonzalez said. “And the second piece is how to target journalists.”

Gonzalez described the arrest as “the fascist move.”

“This case, I think, is pushing on both of those fronts to see how much they can get away with in both arresting immigrants and trumping up charges. Also doing that to journalists that they don’t like. It’s particularly dangerous.”

ICE has generally kept Guevara in medical wards in jails even though he is healthy, Guevara’s lawyer Giovanni Diaz told me. “From the beginning, they’ve been sort of keeping Mario under a special segregation because they’re claiming he’s a he’s a public figure. They want to make sure nothing happened to him.”

But doing so also prevents Guevara from interacting with many other prisoners and continuing to document how immigration enforcement works while imprisoned himself. Immigration officers have kept him from the processing center in downtown Atlanta, “the same area that they route just about everybody right before they triage them,” Diaz said. “For whatever reason, they don’t want to him to go there. I don’t know what that means. It maybe, you know, they don’t want him to see something.”

“You have a community that’s terrified,” Diaz said to me. “They’re not just going after undocumented immigrants. That’s already been confirmed. When they see people with unmarked cars acting suspicious and they look like law enforcement, they’re going to assume they’re ICE, so they contact him, and he goes out. But what does he do when he gets there? He does the same stuff that he always does. He contacts them. He says, hey, are you ICE? I’m a member of the press. And they say yes or no.”

People keep asking me what they can do to stop this mess from spreading. I think it boils down to a willingness to confront fascism directly, even if doing so comes at a cost. The administration has been trying to roll over communities as quickly as it can, to overwhelm us with a deluge of immoral and illegal and unconstitutional acts.

But the federal government has functional limits on how much it can do at once. This is especially true as it cuts staff and loses legal and operational expertise.

Trump’s movement requires local consent to operate. It is why Trump makes bellicose threats to imprison local elected officials and to withdraw federal funds from local governments. It must make agents of state and local police, and local courts, and local school administrators and local businesses and local hospitals.

Successful politicians tend to be risk averse. They prefer small predictable gains to large endeavors with a substantial risk of failure, even if the payoff is mathematically superior. It’s understandable: voters punish failure more than they reward success.

Standing up to Trump means becoming the tallest nail sticking out of the board. It means risking mean Truth Social posts, and the state government breathing down your neck, and perhaps a spurious indictment from the Department of Justice that will require mobilizing an army of support to fight. It is a distraction from the anodyne job of local government; paving roads and cleaning sewers and issuing zoning orders and code violations.

Perhaps Keybo Taylor is calculating that some showy acts of cooperation with ICE might buy him some grace when federal investigators are asked to look at the conditions of the Gwinnett County jail.

Perhaps Doraville doesn’t want to become the front line in the war for democracy.

But the alternative is conceding civil government to the Doraville cops and to whatever insane demand the administration next asks a local official.

What can you do? Make sure your elected officials are putting up the fight you would expect of them. Tell the people who represent you that resistance will be rewarded politically and acquiescence will be punished politically. Ask difficult questions about compliance. Demand that they fight illegal and immoral orders. And be prepared to replace people who do not meet the moment with a profile in courage.