The Trump administration has been seeking to prosecute protesters who disrupted a Minnesota church service led by a pastor who is also an ICE official. Churches are not public places, so a protest there is not protected by the First Amendment—though it will be harder to argue that it is a federal crime.
But they’re not just arresting the protesters. Now they’re arresting journalists who covered the protest.
The New York Times reports:
The former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested late Thursday night on charges that he violated federal law during a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minn., his lawyer said, in a case rejected last week by a magistrate judge.
Mr. Lemon has said he was simply reporting as a journalist when he entered the Cities Church on Jan. 18 to observe a demonstration against the immigration crackdown in the area.
The protesters interrupted a service at the church, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official serves as a pastor, and chanted “ICE out.” Afterward, the Trump administration sought to charge eight people over the episode, including Mr. Lemon, citing a law that protects people seeking to participate in a service in a house of worship.
But the magistrate judge who reviewed the evidence approved charges against only three of the people, rejecting the evidence against Mr. Lemon and the others as insufficient. The Justice Department then petitioned a federal appeals court to force the judge to issue the additional warrants, only to be denied. …
On Friday morning, a prominent independent reporter in the Twin Cities, Georgia Fort, who had also filmed the protest at the church, said in a live-streamed video on Facebook that she was being arrested by federal agents.
The damning part is the repeated failure to get judges to sign off on this arrest, including putting extraordinary pressure on judges to do so. Early reports do not indicate if they finally got one to sign off on a warrant. And it’s not hard to see why; this is an unambiguous violation of the First Amendment.
But this is consistent with the administration’s policy in the occupation of Minnesota. The shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti resulted directly from ICE and Border Patrol agents confronting, threatening, and forcibly detaining citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights to record law enforcement activities in public.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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