Here’s how the judiciary needs to respond to Don Lemon’s arrest

Jan. 31, 2026, 6:00 AM EST

ByAustin Sarat

Former BLN anchor Don Lemon was arrested and charged on Thursday with violating a federal law after being present during an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Since his departure from BLN in 2023, Lemon has worked independently, doing reporting and commentary on his own YouTube channel and on Substack.

Lemon and others are accused of disrupting a service at Cities Church that was being conducted by an ICE official who serves as a pastor there. Attorney General Pam Bondi described what happened as a “coordinated attack” on the church.

As she explained“Our nation was settled and founded by people fleeing religious persecution. Religious freedom is the bedrock of this country. We will protect our pastors. We will protect our churches. We will protect Americans of faith.”

In this case, the Trump administration is weaponizing its commitment to protecting religious liberty to go after Lemon and the others. The administration can dress it up any way they like. But Lemon is being targeted because he has been a long-time and vociferous critic of President Trump.

Rather than being part of the protest, Lemon was livestreaming the protests on social media. Targeting him is a signal to other journalists that they, too, may find themselves in hot water for covering and amplifying what the administration is doing in Minneapolis and other places.

Judges need to see through the ruse and stand up for press freedom at a time when the administration’s hostility to the press is reaching new heights. As Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, put it“Lemon’s arrest under a bogus legal theory is a clear warning shot aimed at other journalists. The unmistakable message is that journalists must tread cautiously because the government is looking for any way to target them.”

Lemon is not the only journalist who has run afoul of the administration while covering protests against ICE. In 2025, 32 journalists were detained or arrestedtwenty-eight of them were at immigration-related protests.

As the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker notes“Protests have long been where the fault lines of press freedom are most visible, and 2025 was no different.” The journalists who “were pulled from news scenes, placed in cuffs and held in custody from minutes to days — long enough for deadlines to pass and breaking news to go cold…”

In Lemon’s case, a federal magistrate judge, Douglas Micko, on Jan. 22 refused to issue arrest warrants that the government sought. Trump’s Department of Justice had tried to convince him that the warrants were necessary to allow it to respond to a “national security emergency.”

As the district court’s chief judge, Patrick Schiltz explained in a letter to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, there was “no evidence” that Mr. Lemon or his producer had engaged “in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.” The Eighth Circuit was persuaded and declined to overrule Micko’s decision.

But note, these judicial decisions did not prevent the Trump administration from arresting Lemon. Moreover, they focused more on the deficiencies in the government’s case than on providing a ringing endorsement of press freedom.

Indeed, with few exceptions, legal protections of the press are not robust.

Most cases in which courts have stood up for a free press focus either on government efforts to stop newspapers from publishing material already in their possession or  punish them for material they have published.

For example, in 1964, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public figures could not win libel suits against newspapers for things they published unless they could prove “actual malice,” meaning it was published “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Seven years later, the Court allowed The New York Times and the Washington Post to publish the so-called Pentagon Papers, which detailed a troubling pattern of government secrecy and deception during the Vietnam War. In that case, Justice Hugo Black wrote a stirring defense of press freedom.

“In the First Amendment,“ he observed, “The founding fathers gave the Free Press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy… the government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press could revert would remain forever free to censure the government.”

But all that meant for Black and the majority of his colleagues was that the First Amendment forbids “prior restraint.” The decision offered no protection for reporters, nor their sources.

They remain unprotected except through state shield laws. In 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia made clear that the Constitution did not allow a reporter to keep the identity of an informant who leaked classified information secret. It denied that the law provided a reporter/source privilege.

The court said it could not “Seriously [entertain] the notion that the First Amendment protects a news mans agreement to conceal the criminal conduct of his source, or evidence thereof, on the theory that it is better to write about a crime than to do something about it.”

Law professors Ronnell Jones and Sonja West are right to say that “Journalists themselves have few constitutional rights when it comes to matters such as access to government sources and documents or protection from being hounded by those in power for the news gathering and reporting.” That means that they are “vulnerable to the whims of society and government officials.”

Don Lemon learned that lesson when federal authorities showed up at his door.

To keep the press free in the face of authoritarian threats, the courts must do more to protect journalists. They need to interpret the First Amendment to allow reporters to keep sources confidential, and to prohibit governmental actions that needlessly prevent journalists  from carrying out their responsibilities.

They need to bolster Justice Black’s belief in the virtues of a free press by limiting the occasions on which reporters can be subject to criminal prosecution for their work.

What Thomas Jefferson said in 1787 seems especially apt today. “The basis of our government,” he wrote“being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Only by protecting people like Don Lemon can we preserve the kind of press Jefferson envisioned and Justice Black praised.