Nashville journalist Estefany Rodríguez won a small victory Monday in what could be a protracted effort to gain her freedom. In a virtual hearing, a Dallas/Fort Worth-based immigration judge granted Rodríguez, who works for Nashville Noticias, a $10,000 bond. However, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers reserved the right to appeal, and Rodríguez will likely remain detained until their answer — it’s due Tuesday night — and possibly longer. If ICE appeals, said Rodríguez’s immigration attorney Joel Coxander, she will remain in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center until the Board of Immigration Appeals reviews the case. If they don’t, she can be released on bond. “Bond is not the end of our work,” Coxander said. “We continue to press forward in her habeas case, arguing that her arrest and ongoing detention were outside the law.” Rodríguez arrived legally in the U.S. in 2021 on a visa to escape threats over her previous reporting in her native Colombia. Before her visa expired, she filed an asylum claim. She eventually married Alejandro Medina III, a U.S. citizen born in Texas, and petitioned U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for residency status through their marriage. She was detained on March 4 in front of Crunch Fitness on Murfreesboro Pike. Medina has started a GoFundMe for his wife’s legal battle. Ahead of a show-cause hearing scheduled for 1 p.m. Tuesday in Nashville, Rodríguez’s legal team submitted a 33-page filing that Coxander described as “our strongest argument yet.” In the filing, Rodríguez’s lawyers asked for her immediate release and an injunction preventing her re-detention — and barring that, the opportunity to conduct discovery in the form of depositions and an evidentiary hearing. Her team is aiming to prove that ICE violated her First and Fourth Amendment rights by allegedly arresting her without a warrant in retaliation for her critical coverage of ICE. Rodríguez’s attorneys revealed that she was transported to Louisiana on March 12. Before that, Rodríguez was held in Etowah County Jail in Alabama. During that period, her jailers did not allow her to call her attorneys, who were only allowed to contact her last Saturday, 10 days after her arrest. In a sworn declaration, Medina wrote that he put money in his wife’s jail account. However, the calling PIN her jailers gave her never worked, and they never fixed it, although she asked. She was able to speak briefly with her husband when another person in custody offered their account. Rodríguez was supposed to arrive in Louisiana earlier. According to the filing, after one day in Etowah, she was taken to an airport for transport to the processing center in Basile, Louisiana. Before boarding, an ICE officer began to inspect scalps. The officers asked if she had lice, then returned her to Etowah after Rodríguez said she didn’t, but she had a young child. A woman who helped her comb out her hair said she didn’t find lice. Still, the jail put Rodríguez in isolation for five days. At the end of those five days, the filing reads, she was brought to a shower room and told to strip naked. An officer poured a disinfecting liquid — possibly used to clean floors — over her body. Rodríguez said her eyes burned. The woman who’d helped her was watching and began to cry. Medina wrote that after being cleaned, his wife was told that they had missed the transport. As a result, she remained in Etowah until March 12. In the Monday filing, Rodríguez disputed each claim made by ICE in its Thursday, March 12 brief. “The respondents have failed to show cause,” the filing states. “They have declined to submit even a single declaration from a single person. They have failed to explain irregularities obvious on the face of their documentation. Their discussion of the substantive claims mainly amounts to asserting they have done nothing wrong. “The Court should find the Respondents have failed to show cause, it should declare they have violated Rodríguez’s statutory and constitutional rights, it should order them to release her immediately, and it should enjoin them from re-detaining her absent a material change in circumstances.” National context Speaking after Rodríguez was granted bond, Katherine Jacobsen of the Committee to Protect Journalists highlighted some similarities between Rodríguez’s case and the detention — and eventual deportation — of Atlanta-based journalist Mario Guevara. Guevara, like Rodríguez, had a work permit and a pending green card application. A digital reporter with 500,000 Facebook followers and conservative leanings, he was arrested by the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office while covering a June 2025 “No Kings” protest and eventually transferred to ICE custody. Guevara is now back in his native El Salvador. “To us, it was a case that seemed to be an attempt from the Department of Homeland Security to use all of its various instruments to go after Guevara and intimidate other local reporters who might be covering ICE activities,” Jacobsen said. “So that’s what we as an organization have on our minds when we are watching Rodríguez’s case unfold.” “We, of course, hope that the outcome will be different,” she said. “But I think it’s important to look with a sober mind as to what [DHS] and using ICE has been doing to curtail freedom of speech, and the signal they’re trying to send with cases like Rodríguez’s.” Guevara, like Rodríguez, was granted bond. In the initial bond hearing, ICE argued that Guevara’s social media live streaming of immigration raids posed a danger to public safety. Although a judge had granted Guevara bond, ICE appealed, and the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled against him. He was transferred to ICE custody and eventually deported. It’s not an exact comparison, Jacobsen said, as Guevara’s case was more complex. Still, she continued, “[Rodríguez] is an emblematic case of what’s going on in the bigger picture.” She said that U.S. citizens who say they don’t care about Rodríguez’s detention because this case doesn’t affect them should consider how their tax dollars are being spent. Jacobsen added that the U.S. has historically been a safe haven for journalists forced from their home countries by oppression and violence. She said that Rodríguez’s arrest, after she fled death threats due to her reporting in Barranquilla, sends the message to other international journalists that that perception is no longer true. Judge Eli Richardson will preside over the show-cause hearing set for Tuesday in Nashville. Richardson is seen as a no-nonsense, professorial judge — whatever ruling he makes, he will explain in detail. Community advocates are cautiously optimistic, since Richardson has already ordered ICE to show cause, a crucial step in successful wrongful detention cases. “Ultimately, Rodríguez was performing a very important function in her community,” Jacobsen said. “And now, we have a worse understanding of what’s happening — because not only has she been silenced via ICE, but other journalists who are covering this same thing are more hesitant to go out and cover this.” “And the public is less well-informed.”