This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter at nashvillebanner.com/newsletters.
Journalist Estefany Rodríguez has spoken publicly for the first time after she spent more than two weeks in federal immigration detention. On Monday, she sat down next to her boss, Nashville Noticias News Director Veronica Salcedo, for an intimate 50-minute interview that has since been viewed thousands of times. She started by giving Salcedo a hug and thanking the people who have shared her story, showed support or donated to her GoFundMe.
“Those who follow my work, whether in the news or even on my personal profile, know that lately everything has been related to immigration news,” Rodríguez said. “It’s the daily bread. That’s what we were out on the street covering as a whole team, in a way also exposing ourselves, because we are all immigrants — and that needs to be made clear — immigrants, in my case, with a pending immigration process.”
On the morning of March 4, immigration agents detained Rodríguez in front of a Crunch Fitness on Murfreesboro Pike in South Nashville. Rodríguez had come to the United States legally in 2021, fleeing threats against her life stemming from her reporting in Colombia. She filed for asylum before her visa expired, later married Alejandro Medina III, a United States citizen, and had been pursuing residency through their marriage.
Her account offers a rare look inside a detention system that has swept up hundreds of thousands of people since the Trump administration dramatically expanded immigration enforcement, told by a journalist who had spent months reporting on those same detentions from the outside. Here are the takeaways from her interview, conducted in Spanish and translated by the Nashville Banner.