The U.S. Department of Justice said it is investigating journalist Don Lemon and a group of activists for harassing Christians on Sunday in a Baptist church during an anti-ICE protest in Minnesota.
Protesters, accompanied by Lemon and his camera crew on Jan. 18, entered Cities Church in St. Paul during services. In footage shared by the Center for Baptist Leadership, Lemon calls it a “clandestine mission,” describing how, while the pastor was speaking, “Nekima stood up and said her peace and then the protesters surrounded her.”
Nekima Levy Armstrong, founder of the Racial Justice Network and former president of the NAACP Minneapolis, took credit for organizing the demonstration, accusing David Easterwood, a pastor at the church, of being “the acting field director for the ICE office in St. Paul.” A man with the same name is listed as a pastor on the church’s website.
“It’s time for judgment to begin, and it will begin in the House of God,” Levy Armstrong wrote on Facebook. “Thank you to all of the activists who showed up, plus independent journalists Georgia Fort, Don Lemon, DawokeFarmer2, Brixton Hughes.”
Levy Armstrong also thanked “Monique Cullars Doty, Chauntyll Allen, Satara Strong-Allen for co-organizing this mission from Black Lives Matter Minnesota and Black Lives Matter Twin Cities Metro, along with Racial Justice Network.”
Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general, said “the DOJ Civil Rights Division is investigating the potential violations of the federal FACE Act by these people desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers.”
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, passed in 1994 and originally intended to prohibit intimidation outside abortion clinics, also prohibits intimidating or interfering with any person “seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.”
Dhillon stated that she and Attorney General Pam Bondi “are working around the clock, because no right in our Constitution is more sacred than the freedom to assemble and pray to God.”
Lemon responded to the allegations. “The MAGA administration and the fake news MAGAs are losing their mind over something that’s not even true,” he said. “I have no affiliation to that organization. I didn’t even know we were going to this church until we followed them there. We were there chronicling protests.”
“It’s called journalism,” Lemon said. “First Amendment, all that stuff.”
“Why don’t you talk to the actual person who is in charge of the organization and whose idea it was to have the protests at the church before you start blaming me for stuff,” he said, pointing the DOJ toward the organizers.
