Arresting the witness: Don Lemon, the DOJ, and the chilling of press freedom

Arresting the witness: Don Lemon, the DOJ, and the chilling of press freedom

by George Cassidy Payne

1104 words

When federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon and independent reporter Georgia Fort in connection with a protest inside a Minneapolis-area church, many commentators framed the incident as a straightforward defense of sacred space. Worship was disrupted. Congregants were frightened. Law enforcement restored order.

That framing captures part of the truth, but it obscures the deeper constitutional and moral stakes at play. These arrests are not simply about a protest in a house of worship. They raise a more dangerous question: whether journalists can witness and document contentious public events, especially those where power, conscience, and institutional authority collide, without facing criminal charges for the act of observation itself.

The case stems from a January demonstration at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Protesters interrupted a service after learning that one of the church’s pastors also serves as an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For demonstrators, that dual role represented a profound moral contradiction: how can a religious leader entrusted with pastoral care also participate in an agency responsible for detention, deportation, and family separation?

Lemon was present to report. He did not organize the protest, lead chants, or incite the crowd. He documented the scene, spoke with parishioners and protesters, and relayed events to the public. Georgia Fort, a Minnesota-based independent journalist, livestreamed the protest and later livestreamed her own arrest outside her home. Both were detained and charged.

Federal prosecutors allege that Lemon, Fort, and others conspired to interfere with religious worship, invoking the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law that also applies to religious spaces. Lemon and Fort were released after initial court appearances. A judge imposed limited restrictions but did not require pretrial supervision. No violence occurred.

That fact matters, but it does not end the ethical inquiry.

Fear in contemporary America is not abstract. Houses of worship have been sites of mass shootings. Congregants across faith traditions live with the reality that disruption can precede catastrophe. No one can fully know the intentions of a group entering a sanctuary during a volatile political moment. Even actions intended as nonviolent moral protest can be experienced as frightening.

Holding this truth is essential. Civil disobedience does not exist in a vacuum, and claims of nonviolence do not erase the fear others may feel. Moral confrontation can be principled and still deeply unsettling. Ethical seriousness requires acknowledging that tension rather than dismissing it.

But fear alone cannot become the standard by which constitutional rights are curtailed, especially the rights of journalists. The central question is not whether congregants felt afraid. It is whether that fear justifies arresting reporters who were not organizing, directing, or participating in the protest.

After his arrest, Lemon emphasized that he was being punished for doing what he has done for decades: covering the news. That claim is not rhetorical posturing; it is a matter of record. Lemon spent more than 20 years as a professional journalist, including 17 at CNN. He reported from war zones and disaster sites, covered elections and courtrooms, moderated presidential forums, and interviewed heads of state. He received multiple journalism awards and was entrusted with one of the most visible news platforms in the country.

Whatever one thinks of his commentary or politics, Lemon’s credentials are not ambiguous. He is not a bystander with a phone. He is a trained, experienced journalist whose career unfolded squarely within the institutions of American media.

Almost immediately, a familiar dismissal followed: Don Lemon is not a “real journalist.” The argument is both unserious and revealing. Who decides what journalism is, and whose legitimacy is always conditional?

The delegitimization of Lemon cannot be separated from race. Black journalists in the United States have long been subjected to heightened scrutiny, provisional credibility, and retroactive disqualification, especially when their reporting unsettles powerful institutions. Their professionalism is treated as fragile, revocable, contingent on compliance.

Cable news figures routinely blur reporting, commentary, and advocacy without having their status questioned. Independent journalists livestream protests at personal risk with little institutional protection. Yet it is often journalists of color whose legitimacy is challenged after their witnessing becomes inconvenient.

If journalism is defined by branding rather than function, it becomes a tool of exclusion. If it is defined by function—observing, documenting, informing—Lemon and Fort clearly qualify. For that, the state sent federal agents to their doors.

This pattern is not new, and it is not uniquely American. Around the world, governments that feel threatened by scrutiny move quickly to discipline those who document it. In Russia, journalists who report on state violence or dissent are arrested, exiled, or killed. In Saudi Arabia, journalism itself can be treated as subversion, as the murder of Jamal Khashoggi made unmistakably clear. In North Korea, independent reporting is impossible because witnessing is criminalized by definition.

Similar dynamics emerge in wartime. Since the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, journalists—particularly Palestinian journalists working under extraordinary conditions—have been killed while reporting. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the war in Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in the organization’s history, with more journalists killed in a single year than in any other conflict it has documented. Some of those reporters were embedded. Many were not. What unites them is not ideology or militancy, but proximity to events the world needs to understand. When journalists are killed in large numbers and accountability is elusive, public knowledge narrows at precisely the moment transparency matters most.

This is not a choice between religious freedom and press freedom. Both matter. But when the state treats observation as conspiracy, the balance collapses in favor of power. Protection becomes insulation. Accountability becomes disruption.

Journalism is not a threat to faith. It is a threat to unaccountable authority, especially when that authority cloaks itself in moral, national, or divine legitimacy. A functioning democracy depends on contested spaces, on the ability to observe power where it gathers, even when that power claims holiness.

Don Lemon and Georgia Fort did not interrupt worship. They interrupted silence.

The question now is not only whether they will prevail in court. It is whether witnessing itself will remain a protected act in American public life, or whether fear, once invoked, will become a legal solvent capable of dissolving press freedom wherever power feels exposed.

If journalists can be arrested for documenting protest inside a church, the precedent will not remain confined to sacred spaces. It will travel—to campuses, courtrooms, town halls, and streets—wherever institutions demand insulation from scrutiny.

A democracy that punishes witnessing does not preserve order.
It preserves power, by erasing those who dare to look.

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George Cassidy Payne, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Rochester-based writer whose work sits at the intersection of politics, ethics, and lived experience. A poet, philosopher, and 988 crisis counselor, he covers issues of democracy, justice, and community resilience.