As both a journalist and Christian, Kevin Bourne offers a view on the Don Lemon and Georgia Fort arrests after the Minnesota anti-ICE church protest.
Many Americans, including members of the Black community and those concerned about the apparent deterioration of democratic values, are alarmed over the sudden arrests of journalists Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, Trahern Jeen Crews, and Jamael Lydell Lundy.
For those who haven’t been following the news, the arrests stem from a January 18th incident in which anti-ICE protesters entered a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, interrupting a worship service in progress. Protesters targeted the church where one of the pastors is reported to be the acting field director of the St. Paul ICE field office.
The journalists entered the church to cover the protests, sparking a debate about the fine line between religious rights and the rights of the press. Lemon was recently arrested while covering the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, while Fort took to social media to release a video about her impending arrest as agents stood waiting at her front door while her children were at home.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi took to social media to take responsibility for the arrests.
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.
She later added in a separate video:
“Make no mistake. Under President Trump’s leadership and this administration, you have the right to worship freely and safely. And if I haven’t been clear already, if you violate that sacred right, we are coming after you.”
January 23, 2026 (Credir: Myotus – CC BY 4.0)
Cities Church lead pastor Jonathan Parnell praised the move in a statement released on Friday stating, “We are grateful that the Department of Justice acted swiftly to protect Cities Church so that we can continue to faithfully live out the church’s mission to worship Jesus and make him known. Freedom of worship ‘without fear of violence and intimidation’ is a crucial right and ‘agitators who invaded the church’ should be held accountable.”
Abbe Lowell, lawyer for Don Lemon, also released a statement about the arrest.
“Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done. The First Amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable.”
As both a devout Christian and a journalist, this incident hits home for me. Also, being Black and a former conservative political staffer and policy nerd, this hits home even more as I’m able to understand multiple sides of this debate.
Religious vs. Journalistic Rights
As a Christian, I firmly believe in religious rights. Ideally. I’ll elaborate later. But people have the right to assemble and worship safely without intimidation. Do protesters have a right to be angry at the incidents which have taken place since ICE arrived in Minnesota? Absolutely. But there’s a time and place to voice your anger and in the middle of a worship service, which is a sacred moment, is not the right time or place. Also, the right to protest doesn’t include inside a place or worship. That’s the law.
Now, as a journalist, I also firmly believe that journalists have a right to do their jobs. It’s not our job as journalists to create the news, but to follow the news, wherever that may take us, so citizens are informed of what’s going on. This plays an important role in upholding democracy. It doesn’t necessarily mean you, as a journalist, agree with what’s taking place. Journalists are simply there to document.
So this raises some questions. Were Lemon, Fort, Crews, and Lundy inciting violence or intimidating parishioners? If so, they violated the parishioners’ religious rights. If they were simply following a story, that’s their job and right, and arresting them places America in the company of the same authoritarian regimes the West spent years opposing. Now, by law a journalist needs permission in order to cover an event inside a place of worship. If they don’t receive permission, they can be arrested, and this is what happened. But I think this law is flawed. Do I think the press should be able to enter a place of worship whenever they want? No. But in the case of anti-ICE protest on the Minnesota church, it’s newsworthy enough that citizens have a right to see and know what’s going on. Also, when we examine these arrests alongside the Trump Administration’s attempts to control and weaponize the Federal Communications Commission, this control of the press or media isn’t an isolated incident. It’s even more suspect when the government has taken swifter action against journalists than the agents who killed American citizens, which set off this whole thing in the first place.
(Credit: Lorie Shaull – CC BY 4.0)
Division of church and state
But this leads to a deeper discussion about the division of church and state, and whether members of the clergy (or churches) should engage in public affairs. Should church leaders like Jonathan Parnell do double duty working with ICE if those reports are true? And, if so, can we be upset when this double duty brings public discourse into our churches? After all, what does the work of the ministry and Jesus Christ have to do with immigration? When did immigration become a Christian issue?
We can’t forget that the division of church and state was as much about protecting the church from government interference as it was to protect the state from the church. Still there’s a growing sentiment among Evangelicals that the division of church and state does not line up with Biblical teaching; that the Bible calls for Christians to be involved in the affairs of government. If that’s the case and Christian leaders want to be involved in the affairs of government, and blur the lines between church and state, can we blame the people for seeing our places of worship as a public space and not a sacred one? If you believe that church and state shouldn’t be divided, it has to go both ways.
One of the errors made by many in the early church, even among Jesus’ own disciplines, was that they confused Jesus’ movement for a political one. They thought he was going to overthrow the Roman government after years of occupation. But many, even some of the people who were closest to him, ended up being disappointed because his agenda was to offer love, healing, and forgiveness and not political change. One may ask if these modern day zealots are making the same mistake.
Kevin Bourne is SHIFTER’s editor-in-chief and columnist at SHIFTER
Related content:
BLACK MOVIE HALL OF FAME TO BE INAUGURATED IN KANSAS CITY IN 2026
