BREAKING: DON LEMON AMONG REPORTERS JAILED BY REGIME

If documenting inconvenient truth is treated as conspiracy, then labor, climate, and police-accountability reporting all become crimes.

CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and his crew arrested live on air during the George Floyd protests (May 29, 2020).

The Regime arrested four journalists for covering a protest this week.

In a healthy democracy, that sentence should stop you cold. But this is the United States. And we’ve seen this before.

Multiple media outlets have now confirmed that federal authorities have arrested four reporters for doing their jobs — for observing, documenting, and bearing witness. Not under martial law. Not during a declared emergency. But under the ordinary authority of the federal government, on the orders of those currently in power.

Among those arrested was Don Lemon, along with other journalists who were covering a community protest event at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The church is headed by David Eastwood, the director of ICE’s local field office, who has advocated for kidnapping and trafficking children and is a named defendant in an ACLU lawsuit about ICE abuse.

Lemon and other journalists attended the protest as observers — journalists covering the event like they would any other.

Now, four of those reporters have been charged and face serious punishment for documenting those events.

The charges leveled against them are severe: conspiracy to deprive others of their civil rights under the Enforcement Act of 1870, and violations of the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.

This is not a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the law. It is a deliberate decision to treat journalism itself as criminal conduct.

And the legal theory behind it is as dangerous as it is dishonest.

The civil-rights conspiracy statute prosecutors are invoking was born in the aftermath of the Civil War. It was designed to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan — to stop organized, violent campaigns that terrorized Black Americans and stripped them of their most basic rights.

It was never meant to ensnare reporters with notebooks and cameras. Applying it here requires an extraordinary inversion of reality: that witnessing an event is the same as conspiring to carry it out.

The FACE Act is being bent just as grotesquely.

That law exists to prevent people from being physically blocked, threatened, or assaulted when trying to access clinics.

It is about force and coercion — a federal law that criminalizes violence, threats, obstruction, and property damage.

It does not criminalize presence.

It does not criminalize speech.

And it certainly does not criminalize documentation.

To claim otherwise is to assert that journalism itself constitutes unlawful interference.

If that interpretation stands, then any journalist who crosses a doorway while covering dissent can be charged. The law ceases to protect rights and becomes a tool to suppress scrutiny.

This is not an abstract fear. It is happening now.

The reporters were covering a protest of ICE — an agency whose actions have drawn sustained public outrage precisely because of its history of secrecy, retaliation, and abuse. When journalists showed up to document the confrontation between state power and public resistance, the state responded not by answering criticism, but by criminalizing the witnesses.

This is how press freedom collapses in practice.

Authoritarian systems do not announce themselves with declarations. They operate through legal memos and charging decisions. They blur the line between observer and participant. They rely on expansive statutes and conspiracy theories of liability. Over time, journalists learn that showing up carries personal risk — and many decide it isn’t worth it.

We have seen this before. Journalists detained en masse at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Reporters arrested, injured, or targeted during Ferguson. Press assaulted and detained during the George Floyd uprisings. Each time, officials promised it was an exception. Each time, the boundary moved.

I know this machinery intimately.

I was targeted by the state for reporting COVID-19 data that contradicted political narratives. The retaliation did not begin with handcuffs. It began with smears, intimidation, and investigations designed not to discover the truth, but to punish the act of telling it. That is how power disciplines journalism without ever admitting that is what it is doing.

What is happening now is that same logic, escalated.

It should alarm every American that a federal magistrate initially declined to approve an arrest warrant in this case — signaling just how weak the government’s theory was — and that prosecutors responded not by reconsidering, but by escalating through a grand jury. When evidence fails, pressure takes its place.

This is how democracies fracture. Quietly. Procedurally. Legally.

If journalists can be charged with civil-rights conspiracies for documenting events the government finds inconvenient, then labor reporting becomes dangerous. Climate reporting becomes dangerous. Police-accountability reporting becomes dangerous. Any journalism that challenges power can be reframed as participation, obstruction, or conspiracy.

At that point, the First Amendment exists only as decoration.

This is the moment that requires action — now, not later.

Journalists must say this plainly and together: covering events is not a crime.

Editors and publishers must stop hedging and call this what it is: an attack on press freedom.

Readers must support independent journalism financially and publicly, because isolation is how intimidation works.

Elected officials must go on the record demanding these charges be dropped and these abuses stopped.

Because the truth is simple and brutal:

The state did not arrest journalists because laws were broken.

It arrested them because the truth was being witnessed.

If that becomes a crime, silence will not be accidental.

It will be enforced.