With Don Lemon’s Shocking Arrest, Trump Expands His Total War on Free Speech
The rabidly anti-First Amendment administration plans to keep escalating its fascist assault on journalists, activists, and ordinary Americans too.
Late Thursday, Donald Trump’s administration arrested Don Lemon, a former CNN host turned independent journalist who recently reported on an anti-ICE protest inside a St. Paul church. Federal agents arrested another independent journalist, Georgia Fort, for documenting the protest as well.
The administration has also arrested a state Senate candidate and aide to the Hennepin County Attorney, as well as a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota. Press freedom advocates and free-speech attorneys widely denounced Team Trump’s actions as, among other things, “a dark and dangerous day for the First Amendment and democracy.”
Lemon and Fort were on the scene when activists disrupted a church service to inform people that one of the pastors had been serving as a local acting ICE field director, amid the agency’s brutal and bloody occupation of the Twin Cities. Judges in Minnesota had previously rejected the administration’s efforts to indict Lemon and his producer, with the state’s chief federal judge writing that there was “no evidence” that Lemon had “engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.”
A top White House official, James Blair, tweeted on Friday: “A federal grand jury indicted Don Lemon. He was not just magically arrested.” The indictment has not yet been made public. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the arrests were made at her direction, soon after posting a video saying “you have the right to worship freely and safely,” and “if you violate that sacred right, we are coming after you.”