Georgia Fort, a journalist and vice president of the Minnesota NABJ chapter, was among those recently arrested in connection with an anti-immigration protest at a Minneapolis church.
On the morning of Jan. 30, Attorney General Pam Bondi took to X to announce the arrests of Fort along with Don Lemon, Trahern Jeen Crews, and Jamael Lydell Lundy in connection with what she called a “coordinated attack” at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month. Unlike Lemon, Fort was able to record and share a video on social media as federal agents arrived at her home to serve her arrest warrant.
“I wanted to alert the public that agents are at my door right now,” Fort said in a video
shared online. “They’re saying that they were able to go before a grand jury sometime, I guess, in the last 24 hours, and that they have a warrant for my arrest.”“I’ve talked to my attorney, and I’m being advised to go with them, I guess, down to Whipple,” she added. “And my children are here. They’re impacted by this. This is all stemming from the fact that I filmed a protest as a member of the media.”
The arrests came two weeks after Fort and Lemon reported from the front lines of an anti-immigration protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, sparked by the revelation that the church pastor, David Easterwood, was also the acting field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota.
In the aftermath, federal agents arrested three protesters and charged them with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 law that bars obstruction of abortion clinics and places of worship. A federal magistrate judge, however, declined to issue arrest warrants for Lemon and the video producer who accompanied him, ruling that prosecutors failed to establish probable cause that either had broken the law.
But in recent days, the Justice Department took the unusual step of filing emergency requests asking Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz—and later the 8th
Circuit Court of Appeals—to overturn the magistrate’s decision. Schiltz rejected the move, admonishing prosecutors and stating that if they disagreed with the ruling, they would need to seek an indictment from a grand jury before arresting Lemon.As she prepared to turn herself in, Fort stated that she believes her arrest violates her constitutional freedom of the press.
“We are supposed to have our constitutional right of the freedom to film, to be a member of the press,” she said. “I don’t feel like I have my First Amendment right as a member of the press because now federal agents are at my door arresting me for filming the church protest a few weeks ago.”
Lemon was taken into custody by federal agents in Los Angeles, where he was set to cover the Grammy Awards. His attorney has since spoken out, calling the arrest an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”
Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump has commented on the arrests, stating that “press freedom is under attack.”
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