Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, was released on Friday following his arrest in Los Angeles on Thursday night.
Lemon’s arrest came after protesters interrupted a service at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lemon has said that he was reporting as a journalist when he entered the Cities Church on January 18. Protesters said that one of the church’s pastors worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Last night, the DOJ sent a team of federal agents to arrest me in the middle of the night for something that I have been doing for the last 30 years, and that is covering the news,” Lemon told reporters outside the courthouse following his release. “The First Amendment of the Constitution protects that work for me and for countless of other journalists who do what I do.”
“I will not be silenced,” Lemon added. “I look forward to my day in court.”
According to the criminal complaint, Lemon and several other defendants were charged with conspiracy against the right of religious freedom at a house of worship.
The complaint alleged Lemon and the other defendants conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate” the clergy, staff, and congregants of the church. It said Lemon and others physically occupied the main aisle and rows of chairs near the front of the church and blocked people from moving.
The complaint also said Lemon “peppered” the pastor with questions and blocked his movement. It also cited Lemon’s livestream of the event several times, claiming he expressed he was taking care to avoid disclosing the location in advance.
In a statement, Lemon’s attorney Abbe Lowell said he was taken into custody by federal agents in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammy awards.
“Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done,” Lowell said.
Lowell called the criminal charges an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”
“Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court,” he said.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi confirmed Lemon’s arrest in a post on X.
She also said that Georgia Fort, another independent journalist, had been taken into custody, along with two other people. Fort is also named as a defendant in the criminal complaint.
“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,” Bondi wrote.
Fort posted a livestream on Facebook on Friday morning where she said federal agents were at her door.
“They said they were able to go to a grand jury sometime, I guess, in the last 24 hours, and they have a warrant for my arrest,” Fort said in the video. “I’ve talked to my attorney and I’ve been advised to go with them.”
“It’s hard to understand how we gave constitutional rights when you can be arrested for just being a member of the press,” she said at the end of the video. “Alright, I gotta go, they’re knocking.”
The Trump administration sought to charge eight people in relation to the Cities Church incident, citing a law protecting people in a service at a house of worship. Minnesota has been rocked by major protests amid a surge of ICE agents that the Trump administration has sent to the state to ramp up deportations.
A federal magistrate judge had previously rejected charges against five people who appeared at the protest, including Lemon, according to The New York Times.
Lemon left CNN in 2023 after 17 years at the network. He has since worked as an independent content creator, distributing his work on social media and hosting live events.
The day after the Cities Church protest, President Donald Trump shared a screenshot of an X post on his Truth Social calling for Lemon to be imprisoned.
In a statement Friday, Seth Stern, an executive at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the arrests of Lemon and Fort were “naked attacks on freedom of the press.”
“These arrests, under bogus legal theories for obviously constitutionally protected reporting, are clear warning shots aimed at other journalists,” Seth said. “The unmistakable message is that journalists must tread cautiously because the government is looking for any way to target them.”
