As the Justice Department promises to pursue charges against protesters who disrupted a church service in Minnesota over the weekend, Nicki Minaj is calling for out journalist Don Lemon to be arrested for reporting on the event.

“Don ‘c**k suckin’ Lemon is disgusting,” Minaj wrote in a Monday X post. “I want that thug in jail!!!!! He would never do that to any other religion. Lock him up!!!!!”

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The post from the recently minted MAGA darling comes amid widespread conservative backlash to Lemon’s reporting on Sunday’s demonstration at Cities Church in St. Paul — including from Donald Trump, who on Monday reposted a call for Lemon to face prison time for allegedly violating federal law.

In a statement, the St. Paul Police Department said that around 10:40 am on Sunday, between 30 and 40 anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activists entered Cities Church during worship services, ABC News reports. According to multiple outlets and video of the demonstration posted to social media, activists were protesting one of the church’s pastors, David Easterwood, who was not present but is reportedly the acting director of the city’s ICE field office.

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Video posted to Lemon’s official YouTube channel shows the controversial former CNN anchor apparently embedded with the anti-ICE activists before and during the demonstration. One clip shows Lemon interviewing Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the organizers of the protest, who explains that the “clandestine operation” was meant to “disrupt business as usual.” Protesters, Armstrong tells Lemon later in the clip, were “demanding justice for Renee Good,” the 37-year-old mother who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis earlier this month. Other clips show Lemon interviewing Cities Church pastor Jonathan Parnell — misidentified in the title of Lemon’s video as Easterwood — and members of the congregation.

In a Sunday X post, U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would investigate participants in the protest for potential violations of the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which protects people’s rights to physically access both reproductive healthcare clinics and places of worship.

During a Monday interview on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast, Dhillon also seemed to suggest that Lemon might face charges as well.

“Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility,” she told Johnson. “He went into the facility, and then he began — quote, unquote — ‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t.”

As the New York Post noted Monday, in his livestream of the protest, Lemon told viewers that demonstrators were “planning an operation we’re going to follow them on.”

“I can’t tell you exactly what they’re doing, but it’s called Operation Pull-Up,” he said.

But as Lemon pointed out in an interview with TMZ Monday, “It doesn’t matter if I had an idea or didn’t have an idea of what was going on in the church. I’m a journalist. I was there to report and to show and to chronicle what’s going on, and to memorialize it, and that’s exactly what I did.”

In an email to NBC News, Lemon said it is “notable” that he has “been cast as the face of a protest I was covering as a journalist,” and claimed that he was not the only reporter at the demonstration.

“What’s even more telling is the barrage of violent threats, along with homophobic and racist slurs, directed at me online by MAGA supporters and amplified by parts of the right-wing press,” he said, adding that he stands by his reporting.

As for Minaj’s post, Lemon described it in a YouTube Short as “unhinged” and “homophobic.” In his interview with TMZ, Lemon said the rapper “is clearly out of her depth. She doesn’t understand politics. She doesn’t understand journalism. And I’m not surprised that she is weighing in on something that is beyond her capacity.”

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