Don Lemon, a former CNN host and independent journalist, was arrested on January 30 after covering a January 18 protest in Minnesota. That protest occurred at Cities Church in St. Paul during Sunday services, a Southern Baptist church with a pastor who is also a local field director for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Lemon and fellow Emmy-winning independent journalist Georgia Fort have been federally charged for their press coverage of the protest, which they published on their respective news channels. They each have been charged with two federal crimes by the US Department of Justice under the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
First, they have been accused of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 law that forbids anyone to “injure, intimidate, or interfere” with another person’s ability to enter and exit a reproductive health clinic or place of worship through “force, threats, or physical obstruction.” This law was originally passed to protect patient access to abortion clinics.
Lemon and Fort have also been charged with violating conspiracy against the rights of religious freedom at the place of worship under 18 USC 241 This law is also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and was originally passed to combat the racist vigilantism of the first iteration of the KKK.
January 18: The Cities Church Protest
The protest at Cities Church, called “Operation Pull Up” by its organizers, saw 30 to 40 activists disrupt a church service for 15 minutes with whistles and chants of “ICE out!” The protestors wanted to raise awareness that Pastor David Easterwood of Cities Church is also an active field director for ICE in charge of removal operations, which they felt was inappropriate for a Christian church leader. Easterwood was not in the church at the time of the protest.
At the protest, Lemon interviewed several of the anti-ICE protestors, including the organizer of the protest, civil rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong. Lemon also interviewed a couple of parishioners and Pastor Jonathan Parnell, who was leading services that day. Lemon stated in the interview with Parnell that he was there as an observer, not a protestor, and wanted to get different perspectives on the event.
Conversely, Fort, who is the founder of the Center for Broadcast Journalism, livestreamed the event to Facebook. Her footage was then rebroadcast by CNN, Lemon’s former news network, and went viral on social media. The incident got the attention of—and received online condemnation from—DHS Secretary Kristy Noem, Vice President JD Vance, and even President Donald Trump, who posted that everyone involved in the protest should be “thrown in jail or thrown out of the Country.”
Subsequently, AG Bondi moved forward with a civil rights complaint against the protestors filed by the North American Mission Board (NAMB), an organization of which Parnell is a member. NAMB alleges that the group “obstructed Christian worship” and desecrated the church with their “lawless harassment.”
January 20-22: The First Few Arrests
On Tuesday, January 20, the DOJ filed a criminal complaint against eight people, including Armstrong, Lemon, and Lemon’s producer (Fort was not part of this original complaint). The DOJ then went to Minnesota Magistrate Judge Doug Micko and asked for an arrest warrant. Micko refused to charge Lemon and four others listed in the complaint, citing no probable cause for arrest.
Micko did sign warrants for three people (though with reduced charges): Levy Armstrong, local school board member Shantell Allen, and activist William Kelly, known on social media as DeWoke Farmer. All three were arrested on January 22, and despite offering to turn herself in, she was taken into custody by around 50 federal agents. According to Levy Armstrong’s husband, “They wanted a spectacle.”
The White House X account then posted a photo of Levy Armstrong as she was being detained that was edited by AI to show her crying. When criticized for posting the faked image, White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr replied that the “memes will continue.” Despite pressure from the DOJ to keep the three activists incarcerated, Judge Micko ordered all three released on bond.
Meanwhile, the DOJ filed an emergency petition with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Judge Micko and issue arrest warrants for Lemon and the other four people whose charges Micko dismissed with prejudice. The circuit court’s chief judge Patrick Schiltz denied the DOJ’s petition on January 26.
January 30: Lemon and Fort Are Arrested
The DOJ then secured a grand jury indictment for all eight individuals from their first criminal complaint, including Lemon, plus Georgia Fort. Lemon was arrested in Beverly Hills around midnight on January 30 where he was in town covering the Grammy Awards. He was arrested in the elevator of his hotel.
Lemon stated that about a dozen federal agents came to his hotel to arrest him, even though his attorney had told the authorities that he would turn himself in to face federal civil rights charges over the coverage of the protest. In a social media post and later a press conference, AG Bondi took full credit for the arrest of Lemon.
Fort, meanwhile, was arrested in her Minneapolis home at 6:25 a.m. on January 30. According to Fort, “Around a dozen agents came to my home. They put tape over my doorbell camera. They knocked forcefully on the door, waking my children up, […] and they demanded my arrest.” Fort livestreamed footage of her arrest on Facebook.
Even after Fort was in custody, agents continued to harass her husband and three daughters—Fort’s seventeen-year-old daughter Tetyana recorded footage of herself being pulled over and interrogated while driving her sisters to a friend’s house later that day.
Now: Lemon and Fort Fight Back
According to the grand jury indictment, Lemon and Fort were charged as criminal conspirators to the protest after they refused to immediately leave when told to do so. While the church was open to the public at the time of the protest, churches are still private property and can ask that people leave at any time. Refusal to leave private property is a crime called trespassing, which is a misdemeanor in Minnesota.
Like with Levy Armstrong, the DOJ asked Judge Dulce Foster to keep Lemon and Fort in pretrial detention, which, according to the Bail Reform Act in 18 USC 3142, should only occur when “such person may pose a danger to any other person or the community.” Foster refused and released Lemon and Fort without bond around 2 p.m. MST on February 1.
After Lemon was released, he went on The Jimmy Kimmel Show on Monday, February 2. When the host asked Lemon how he was, Lemon replied, “I don’t know. That’s—that’s a really honest answer. I don’t know. I mean, I’m okay, and I’m not going to let them steal my joy, but this is very serious. I mean, these are federal criminal charges.”
Later in the broadcast, Lemon told Kimmel, “People are afraid, and—look, I have lots of great friends who work in corporate media, but corporate media has been neutered right now. They are afraid, and that’s the reason why I’m so happy with what I do. […] That’s why I do what I do because I think there’s a real need right now. This is an important time. This is not a time for folly. It’s not a time for false equivalence and putting people on television and on news programs, giving them a platform, who come on just to lie. And I think people are sick of that.”
Meanwhile, Fort has continued to cover the ongoing protests in Minneapolis against the presence of ICE in their city. Like Lemon, she has also been sharing her story and has been interviewed about her experience by CNN, MS Now, and a radio station she helped found, Power 104.7.
She told WUFT, a local NPR affiliate, “Everything that I observed [at the January 18 protest] as a journalist I recorded, and I published it. We cannot get to a place where we are criminalizing journalists because it is our very documentation and record-keeping that allows us to have an objective record of how things transpire.”
On The Rachel Maddow Show, Fort told Maddow that she plans to plead not guilty if the government’s case gets to court. “The arrest of myself and Don Lemon is a new level: to threaten taking someone’s freedom away from them for simply doing their job, to try and criminalize journalism. Journalism is not a crime.
Likewise, Lemon’s attorney has stated that he plans to plead not guilty. He doesn’t want to be silenced. He said, “I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now. There is no more important time than right now, and this very moment, for a free and independent media that shines a light on the truth and holds those in power accountable.”
