NEW YORK — A landmark settlement has been reached in a federal lawsuit challenging the unlawful targeting and questioning of five journalists about their reporting near the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
As reported by the ACLU, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of San Diego and Covington & Burling LLP, the settlement resolves Guan v. Wolf, a case filed in November 2019 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York against U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The lawsuit alleged that Border Patrol agents violated the journalists’ First Amendment rights.
The plaintiffs — Bing Guan, Go Nakumara, Mark Abramson, Kitra Cahana and Ariana Dreshler — are U.S. photojournalists and American citizens who traveled to Mexico between November 2018 and January 2019 to document migrants traveling from Central America north in caravans. Plaintiff Bing Guan stated, “The future of our democracy depends on the freedom of the press, now more than ever,” according to the ACLU.
After publishing their work, each journalist was stopped at the border and interrogated by federal officials who questioned their reporting and sought information about their sources. As stated in the ACLU article, shortly after these interrogations in March 2019, a “government database information leaked to NBC San Diego in March 2019 revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had engaged in wide-ranging intelligence collection targeting activists, lawyers, and journalists — including these five journalists.”
Guan continued, saying, “It’s clear the government’s actions were meant to instill fear in journalists like me, to cow us into standing down from reporting what is happening on the ground. After being targeted for doing just that, I am grateful for what our lawsuit has achieved in defending the rights of journalists to report free from government officials’ scrutiny,” as mentioned by the ACLU.
Plaintiff Kitra Cahana added, “Government officials should never put journalists on secret lists, interfere with our ability to work and travel, or pressure us for information at border crossings. My biggest fear is that other journalists may have avoided important stories out of fear of being targeted themselves.”
The district court denied the government’s motion to dismiss in March 2021, holding that “the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged that border officials violated their First Amendment rights.” The case was settled in January 2026, according to the ACLU. The case was also officially settled in January 2026.
In a statement, Esha Bhandari, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said, “The First Amendment applies at the border to protect freedom of the press,” and added, “We are thankful to have secured redress for these journalists, to allow them to do their jobs reporting on the news free from unjustified government scrutiny.”
The settlement highlights ongoing tensions between national security enforcement at U.S. borders and constitutional protections for press freedom, raising broader concerns among civil liberties advocates about government surveillance and the chilling effect such actions may have on journalists covering immigration and border policy.
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