Last week, independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested shortly after they covered an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protest at a Minnesota church. Earlier this year, protestors interrupted a religious service at Cities Church in St. Paul, where an ICE official is a pastor. Lemon and Fort have stated they were not there as protestors, but were reporting on the event as journalists. Despite their arguments, they are being charged with “conspiracy against right of religious freedom at place of worship” and injury, intimidation and interference “with exercise of right of religious freedom at place of worship.”
The charges against these journalists are a ridiculous attempt to excuse the blatant silencing of their journalistic freedom, and a distraction to cover up the atrocities committed by immigration enforcement that are not being investigated. The accusations that Lemon and Fort were violating civil rights are an attack on not only the rights of journalists but the rights of Americans to know what is happening in their country.
The government’s actions also mark an attempt to use the First Amendment’s right to freedom of religion to distract from their attack on another First Amendment right: freedom of the press.
Freedom of the press is one of the cornerstone values that our country was built upon. By attacking journalists for delivering news to the people of our country, the Trump administration is turning the news from a basic right to a terrifying scarcity. It should not be difficult to find a reputable source about a tragic event one has witnessed with their own eyes. Censorship is dictatorship. A threat to our First Amendment rights is a threat to the very fabric of our nation.
The arrests of Lemon and Fort are not the Trump administration’s first attempt to censor the press. Earlier this year, the FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, who covers the federal government, seizing her laptops, phone and smart watch. The Trump administration had mixed explanations for their actions. The Washington Post was first told that Natanson was not the main focus of their investigation, but later, FBI Director Kash Patel made a statement on X contradicting this statement, claiming that Natanson had obtained classified military information that could put the country at risk. These inconsistent claims suggest that the actions against Natanson were far more about silencing her and her reporting, which includes coverage of the mass layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal employees over the past year.
In addition, President Donald Trump has developed a reputation for suing media outlets if they are not complimentary of his actions. ABC and CBS were some of the first impacted, but controversially settled for several million dollars and seem to be in the clear for now. Ongoing lawsuits include The Pulitzer Prize Board, The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The BBC, most being taken up on claims of defamation and manipulation of news against Trump and his actions. Suing news outlets for reporting the truth about the president’s actions is not only childish but a deeply unconstitutional intimidation tactic against the free press. This censorship cannot come as a surprise, however, as Trump called the media an “enemy of the American people” in a Tweet in 2017, echoing early whispers of his future authoritarianism.
In October 2025, the White House limited reporters’ access by prohibiting them from accessing a slew of offices in the West Wing, known as “Upper Press,” without an appointment. This access previously allowed journalists to ask questions to administrative officials and quickly obtain information for breaking news. In response, the White House Correspondents’ Association said that it “unequivocally opposes any effort to limit journalists from areas within the communications operations of the White House that have long been open for news gathering.” The administration’s defense of this action cited security concerns over sensitive material, but it appears to be just another excuse to uphold the validity of their suppression of the press.
Also last October, the Trump administration cracked down on press rules for the Pentagon, causing a mass walkout by nearly every news outlet as reporters decided to turn in their press passes instead of agreeing to these new rules. The updated policy prohibits journalists from reporting on anything other than what the department of defense specifically authorizes, entirely dictating what information can and cannot be released to the American public. Reporters emphasized that they would continue to do their jobs from a further distance, getting what information they could from sources who were still willing to speak with them.
In early December, these reporters were replaced by far-right news outlets handpicked by the Trump administration, including bloggers and talk-show hosts inexperienced in this area of reporting. This blatant manipulation should not be tolerated by the media or the American people, but the administration shows no signs of letting up.
As a student newspaper, The Ram is not taking these actions lightly. We understand that a threat to any journalist is a threat to journalism as a whole, and we will not submit to these attacks or back down on our reporting. If nationally known journalists like Lemon and news outlets like The Washington Post can be struck down in this manner, every reporter and publication should be on high alert. If we as journalists and consumers of the free press allow incidents like these to slip under the radar, the government will continue to attack our basic rights until the country is stripped of everything that makes it a democratic republic.