A round the world, dictators and authoritarian leaders have arrested journalists for doing their jobs.
It turns out they arrest journalists in this country too, at least the current administration of an elected wannabe dictator does, despite the guarantee of a free press in the very first amendment to the Constitution.
Given President Trump’s evident racism, it’s no coincidence that the two journalists arrested in Minnesota are Black. Or that they both do their work independently, without the financial backing and legal resources of a major media outlet. Trump has already run his intimidation game on legacy broadcast outlets. These arrests last month make plain that his disregard for the constitutionally protected news media extend all the way to solo practitioners armed only with a voice recorder.
Former CNN host Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, an Emmy award winner, were arrested for covering a protest inside a St. Paul church against Trump’s unhinged immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. Protesters disrupted the church services because one of its pastors is a senior official with ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On Jimmy Kimmel’s show on ABC, Lemon, who produces a YouTube show that bears his name, explained his role inside the church.
“I’m not a protester. I went there to be a journalist. I went there to chronicle and document and record what’s happening. I was following that one group around,” Lemon said.
Video shows him conducting interviews inside the church, holding a small black recorder in his hand.
Fort was there reporting as a video journalist. A vice president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, she produces a television show called “Here’s the Truth,” which has won three regional Emmys. Her local stature as a broadcaster is such that she was one of two journalists allowed inside the courtroom to cover the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted for murdering George Floyd.
A federal magistrate rebuffed the Justice Department’s attempt to charge Lemon and Fort. An appeals court rejected the department’s request to order the magistrate to okay the charges. Federal prosecutors took their case to a grand jury, which returned indictments against the two Black journalists, once again confirming the classic line about prosecutors being able to get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the department was protecting the right to “worship freely and safely,” casting the indictments as a conflict between two rights guaranteed in the 1st Amendment.
That’s hardly the case. Lemon and Fort were indicted under a 1994 law primarily designed to protect women seeking to terminate a pregnancy from anti-abortion protesters at clinics. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act also applies to churches. It’s a stretch as wide as the Grand Canyon, though, to apply the law to the journalistic work the two were doing.
Bondi might want to read a summary of the law on her department’s website, posted there in June 2024, before she and Trump took office.
The FACE Act, as it’s called, “prohibits the use or threat of force and physical obstruction that injures, intimidates, or interferes with a person seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services or to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship. It also prohibits intentional property damage of a facility providing reproductive health services or a place of religious worship.”
The key words in that summary are threat, force, physical obstruction and property damage. No evidence has come to light that either Lemon or Fort committed any such acts, which the federal magistrate and appeals court recognized. Will federal prosecutors be left arguing the journalists’ presence inside the church amounted to a “physical obstruction”? That’s a mighty thin reed.
The FACE Act authorizes the Justice Department to seek financial damages and civil penalties against people who violate the law.
Lemon is being represented by Abbe Lowell, a brand-name Washington lawyer who has represented a number of Democratic elected officials. On the Kimmel show, Lemon said after he learned from Bondi’s public comments that the department intended to arrest him, Lowell offered to have his client turn himself in. But Lemon’s lawyer never heard back from the department.
Instead, Lemon was arrested as he was preparing to cover the Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. He said federal agents grabbed him as he was about to take the elevator to his hotel room. The point, Lemon said, was to intimidate him and instill fear.
Fort was arrested at her Minnesota home in the early morning as her children watched, another situation designed to intimidate and instill fear. She is raising funds for her legal defense. The local NAACP and journalists’ groups have come out in support of her.
Both Lemon and Fort have been released from custody. Whatever federal judge hears the two cases should promptly approve a motion to dismiss these baseless charges.
Try as he might, Trump will not intimidate Black news media and Black journalists practicing their craft on their own. The Black press started during slavery time and has lasted 200 years through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and his illegitimate son, Jimmy Crow, also known as institutional racism. As Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm declared in their inaugural editorial in Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper, “We wish to plead our own cause.”
The Banner has been doing that since 1965 and will keep on doing it. Your Honor, let the two Black journalists go about their work, protected by the Constitution.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
