Don Lemon, Trahem Jeen Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lydell Lundy

Last night, veteran journalist Don Lemon was arrested by federal law enforcement at his hotel in Los Angeles. The pretext: that his reportage at a Minnesota church on January 18th to provide an account of an anti-ICE demonstration violated the rights of those seeking to participate in worship services. A charge two federal courts have previously rejected as spurious. Across the country, journalist Georgia Fort posted an account of her arrest on the same trumped up charges.

MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com

Independent journalist Georgia Fort was also arrested by federal agents earlier for reporting on the church protest in Minneapolis. She was live streaming when agents arrived to take her into custody.

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:10:25 GMT

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Let us set aside, for the moment, that the arrests were predicated on their entering a church pastored by an ICE field agent days after the killing of Renée Good and a week before the murder of Alex Pretti. By ICE. We must also suspend, for an instant, incredulity that a regime that has raided churches to kidnap immigrants has suddenly changed its mind of the sanctity of such spaces.

What we must not lose sight of is that journalists are being harassed and hunted by an authoritarian crackdown that conflates truth telling and sedition. It is not a surprise—this is Step 6 of the autocrat’s playbook: attack the truth. Like the defunding of public media, the suspension and/or firings of Kimmel, Colbert and Karen Attiah, or the ongoing enshittification of TikTok, the Republican regime helmed by Trump but enabled by Congress and the Supreme Court is hard at work eradicating American freedom.

The arrest of Don Lemon, who has been in the news business for 30 years, signals that we have left behind a First Amendment that has real meaning. Georgia Fort, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, has stepped into the void created by a corporate media obsessed with false equivalence. Their detention, and that of Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy, joins the raid of a Washington Post reporter’s home, and the now-acceptable practice of this administration barring the press from presidential events and the Pentagon. We hear these stories come over the transom and shake our heads, then we return to regularly scheduled programming that has been consolidated to filter out truth and flood propaganda.

Attacking the truth is a well-tested tool of those who want to control a people and its power. Because when reality is shaped by a set of algorithms and arrests, we adapt to lessen our expectations and toggle down our outrage. As with our tacit acceptance of the military occupation of multiple U.S. cities, we are likely to file this arrest under the heading of “how horrible” or “my goodness gracious.” Some will do their best to keep it in our current events, but like the character in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, we will soon require daily notes to remind ourselves of the ongoing erosion of what we knew of America.

Over the past two nights, I’ve spoken to audiences about how we are squarely in a competitive authoritarian country. Invariably, the question is what can we do. The answer will always feel inadequate to the scale of harm, but it is true nonetheless: the small things add up.

To combat this regime, I urge us to follow the 10 Steps to Freedom and Power. First, by SHARING the truth (not misinformation). ORGANIZE and MOBILIZE to mitigate harm, whether that is donating to local journalists or flooding social media with demands for the release of these journalists. Minneapolis is proof of concept—this draconian over-reach is precisely because a thousand acts of resistance have forced the eviction of Greg Bovino and the blessed temporary quiet of Kristi Noem.

And yes, we must ENGAGE those who hold elected office at every level of government responsible for speaking out and offering concrete plans for how they will protect us, our children and our communities. It works. This week, Senate Democrats held their ground and gained a concession that would have been unthinkable in the final days of 2025, when an off-duty ICE agent killed Keith Porter. No, the modest reform of a modern reimagining of fugitive slave patrols in the form of ICE or Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is insufficient for restoring justice, but increments matter.

Resistance matters.

Losing our nation will happen over time and all at once. We, though, will decide what is to be—by realizing that we must show evil and good who we are and that we’re not going anywhere.