Feds Arrest 4 Black People—Including Don Lemon—Over ICE Protest

Federal agents arrested two Black journalists—Don Lemon and independent Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort—and two Black activists on Thursday night. 

“At my direction, early this morning federal agents arrested Don Lemon, Trahern Jeen Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lydell Lundy, in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote. “More details soon.”

Each person arrested was connected to an anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul earlier this month. It is unclear what they will be charged with, and it appears they are being targeted for their First Amendment rights. 

“Don Lemon was taken into custody by federal agents last night in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammy awards,” a statement from Lemon’s lawyer read. “Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done … Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case. This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand. Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.” 

The Justice Department announced that they would “pursue charges” against Lemon just over a week ago. 

“Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility,”  Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said on ‘The Benny Show’ earlier this month. “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.”

Fort was detained in her home in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

“I wanted to alert the public that agents are at my door right now, they’re saying that they were able to go before a grand jury … and that they have a warrant for my arrest,” Fort said in a Facebook live video before being arrested.

“As a member of the press, I filmed the church protest a few weeks ago, and now I’m being arrested for that,” she added. “It’s hard to understand how we have a Constitution, constitutional rights, when we can just be arrested for being a member of the press.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve actually has a long history as an inflation hawk, not the most obvious choice for a president who keeps pushing for lower interest rates.

Trump announced on Truth Social Friday morning that Kevin Warsh, 55, will be his nominee to lead the central bank. “I am pleased to announce that I am nominating Kevin Warsh to be the CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM,” Trump wrote. “I have known Kevin for a long period of time, and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best. On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’ and he will never let you down.”

Warsh is a former Federal Reserve governor who worked as an economist for the White House during the George W. Bush administration. In April 2009, as unemployment skyrocketed during the Great Recession, Warsh was especially concerned about interest rates being lowered too much, seeing inflation as a greater risk.

“I continue to be more worried about upside risks to inflation than downside risks,” Warsh said during a Fed meeting at the time. During those years, he helped manage the financial crisis with then–Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, who was New York Fed president at the time and would later become treasury secretary under President Obama.

In recent months, Warsh has changed his tune and spoken favorably of lowering interest rates, which seems to have caught the eye of President Trump, who otherwise wouldn’t have made the seemingly conventional pick.

Trump has railed against Powell for not lowering interest rates enough, even pushing an unprecedented criminal investigation into the Fed. But amid that controversy, Warsh’s nomination will now go to the Senate Banking Committee, and after a public hearing, the Senate will vote on whether to confirm him.

Some Republican senators, such as Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis, have said they would hold up the president’s Fed nominations while the criminal investigation continues, echoed by leading Democrats.

“No Republican purporting to care about Fed independence should agree to move forward with this nomination until Trump drops his witch hunts of the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Governor Lisa Cook,” said Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the banking committee.

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota are floating the possibility of a mass resignation in protest of the Justice Department’s response to the recent ICE killings of two U.S. citizens.

Prosecutors expressed their frustration to U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, Donald Trump’s appointee to lead the Minneapolis office, irate over the Justice Department’s retroactive smear campaign to justify the deaths of ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good. In an act of defiance, federal prosecutors in the state have reportedly told Rosen that they might resign en masse, leaving the office to crumble under the weight of the unattended workload, officials told The Washington Post Thursday.

It’s not an empty threat: At least one prosecutor in the office’s criminal division has already resigned, reported the Post.

But ICE’s time pillaging Minnesota is almost up.

Border czar Tom Homan, who recently took the reins of ICE and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, told reporters Thursday that he is working on a “drawdown” plan to scale back the number of agents occupying the North Star State.

He noted, however, that he is “not surrendering the president’s mission in immigration enforcement.”

But the way that federal agencies have gone about enacting that agenda has been nothing short of illegal. The chief federal district judge in the state declared in a legal memo Wednesday that ICE had violated 96 court orders since Operation Metro Surge began last month.

“ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz wrote.

In just a few short weeks, Operation Metro Surge has conducted militarized raids across Minnesota, terrorizing residents while carrying out what state officials have described as “unconstitutional stops and arrests, all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.”

The White House just gave a wild explanation for why Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election office on Wednesday.

Having been completely sidelined from the typical responsibilities of the director of national intelligence, Gabbard has spent months leading an investigation into President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election, White House officials told The Wall Street Journal Thursday.

Gabbard has reportedly regularly briefed Trump and his chief of staff Susie Wiles, as well as other well-known election deniers Cleta Mitchell, a far-right activist with the ear of the president, and Kurt Olsen, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign who helped mount the “Stop the Steal” lawsuits.

Gabbard is expected to produce a report on her findings—but we wouldn’t advise election denialists to get their hopes up. Gabbard’s other so-called investigations haven’t gone too well. Last year, her attempt to prove that former President Barack Obama had committed treason fell hilariously flat.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Gabbard was tapped to look into the president’s favorite conspiracy theory, because she’s known to spread far-fetched conspiracy theories herself—specifically ones pushed by Moscow.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is leaping into action to protect American citizens by banning … something that is already illegal.

Speaking at a press briefing at the Capitol Thursday, Jeffries announced that, as a condition of supporting legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security as it continues its deadly immigration enforcement crackdown in Minneapolis, Democrats will demand a ban on deporting American citizens.

“In what country are we living in if it’s controversial to prohibit [the deportation] of American citizens?” Jeffries said. “That shouldn’t even be a discussion.”

It shouldn’t be up for discussion because it is already illegal. Deporting American citizens is not permitted under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which outlines the rules for deporting noncitizens. It also violates a 1958 Supreme Court ruling that found stripping a person of their American citizenship violated the Eighth Amendment protection against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

But the Trump administration is still doing it anyway, sweeping up American citizens as part of its dragnet immigration enforcement efforts.

Senate Democrats also pitched immigration reforms such as requiring federal agents to wear body cameras, banning the use of face masks, and enforcing a new code of conduct. But they’re missing the point.

It seems that Jeffries, along with his Senate colleagues, haven’t quite grasped the fact that the cruelties of Donald Trump’s lawless immigration crackdown are not subject to reform because they are already lawless. Instead, Democrats will continue to find ways to soothe their conscience while filling the coffers of federal agencies that allowed American citizens to be killed in the streets.