The spotlight on the Trump administration’s draconian immigration crackdown moved at least briefly today away from the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as the White House rejoiced in the arrest of gay journalist Don Lemon.

“When life gives you lemons,” the administration posted on social media early this morning, along with an emoji of chains. Lemon was arrested under an 1871 law originally designed to combat the Ku Klux Klan and a 1994 law meant to keep protestors from. Blocking access to churches.

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Feds arrest gay journalist Don Lemon for covering anti-ICE protest in church

Lemon is one of several individuals the Trump administration has sought to arrest after a demonstration at a St. Paul, Minnesota church last week. Protesters were there to shame the church’s pastor who is also an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer. 

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Lemon maintains he was at the protest in his capacity as a journalist.

Lemon’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, called the arrest “a stunning and troubling effort to silence and punish a journalist for doing his job.”

A second Black journalist, Georgia Fort, was also arrested Thursday under similar charges.

Warrants for the arrests of both journalists were denied twice by a federal magistrate and a federal appeals court. On Friday morning, James Blair, a deputy White House chief of staff, said that a federal grand jury had indicted the journalists, The New York Times reported. He didn’t reveal where or how those indictments took place following the earlier denials in federal courts.

Journalists and free press organizations are sounding the alarm over their colleagues taken into custody.

“Journalism is not a crime,” the National Press Club and PEN America said in statements on Friday morning.

They were joined by the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Free Press Action Advocacy, and Reporters Without Borders in denouncing the arrests.

“The Trump administration cannot send federal agents after reporters simply because they don’t like the stories being reported — especially after already failing multiple times to obtain a warrant from the courts for Lemon’s arrest. Lemon and Fort should be released immediately,” said Reporters Without Borders Executive Director Clayton Weimers, who called the actions yet “another attack” on press freedom by the Trump White House.

Lemon’s longtime former boss, CNN, weighed in, as well.

“The FBl’s arrest of our former CNN colleague Don Lemon raises profoundly concerning questions about press freedom and the First Amendment,” the news network said in a statement.

“The First Amendment in the United States protects journalists who bear witness to news and events as they unfold, ensuring they can report freely in the public interest, and the DOJ’s attempts to violate those rights is unacceptable.”

As worrying as the assault on press freedom from White House was also the glee the Trump administration took in finally getting Lemon into handcuffs, and the racist and homophobic rhetoric that accompanied it.

In addition to the official White House chains reference to the arrest of a Black man, the wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Katie Miller, reposted a previous interview with new MAGA star Nicki Minaj in response to Lemon’s arrest. Minaj calls him a “c**ksucker”.

Lemon’s arrest follows a litany of attacks on the First Amendment by Trump in his second term: the expulsion of Pentagon reporters for refusing to sign a “loyalty oath”, the pursuit of Congress members who advised troops to refuse illegal orders, the FBI search of a Washington Post reporter’s home, the takeover of TikTok orchestrated by Trump for the benefit of his crony Larry Ellison, and Ellison’s son’s installation of pro-Trump “journalist” Bari Weiss to head up CBS News, among others.

In a roundup of all those assaults on the fundamental freedoms that make American democracy work, journalist Jefferson Weeps points to the words of Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he would “not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Said the second president and author of the Declaration of Independence: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

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