On Friday, January 30, 2026, four Black journalists were arrested and charged for their reporting on ICE protests in Minnesota. These arrests were not spontaneous – judges initially rejected the warrants. Don Lemon was halfway across the country in LA while covering the Grammys. The charges included conspiracy against the right of religious freedom and interfering with the exercise of religious freedom at a place of worship.
Why are Black journalists being arrested?
ICE misconduct in Minnesota and elsewhere have been covered extensively by journalists. But these four Black journos were the targets in this latest test case on chilling first Amendment protection. In a similar policy choice, a Black pastor’s stoic and resolved arrest photo was doctored to darken her skin and depict her crying in despair. Not for the first time, something outrageous and novel is tested on Black targets, the canaries in the coal mine. The relevance of this is significant: Americans are socially conditioned to accept injustice, illegality, irrational government action, and even atrocity toward Black and brown people. Yes, of course it will move beyond Black journalists if this course of action is deemed worthy. But there is a huge ideological understanding that mutes the response, limits the outrage, and plants a seed of doubt in the public imaginary.
What is not being said?
The playbook is international
These tactics were already honed outside the US., in expansions of executive or authoritarian power. Applying them here is an exercise in bootstrapping, not creativity.
What is the nitty-gritty legal argument?
In this (wholly domestic) case the federal government’s infringement on the public’s First Amendment right (and the journalists’ First Amendment protection) leverages an alternative population’s right to the same class of protections (i.e., parishioners’ right to worship), in order to erase, delimit, or compromise the broad nature of the First Amendment right – apparently seeking to rank its operation by the class of rightsholder.
The legal argument that the public’s First Amendment’s protections for freedom of the press must balance against parishioners’ individual First Amendment right to worship was developed robustly in the context of the Palestinian occupation. The fundamental rights of Palestinians (whom, under occupation, have rights but not rights superior to citizens) – to movement, to speech, to worship – were devalued in the context of Israeli (citizenship) rights to worship, even at Palestinian-controlled locations - meaning Palestinian control in their own land and under existing international treaty was an untenable barrier to Israeli rights to worship.
Sharon Weill writes about this aspect of state policy vis-à-vis international human rights, how domestic courts have served as apologists, smoothing over violations of law and policy and licensing infringement of the rights of undesirable people in order to protect expansive access to rights for the privileged. That argument should not be applicable in this context (and they have struggled to get judges to accept it already) but the bigger picture relies on changing the law by breaking it, another authoritarian approach to limiting rights.
What is the playbook anyway?
Expansion of executive power – which some of this crowd have been working on since Nixon. Rebalance the power dynamic to favor the people the Constitution originally protected – propertied white men, who will protect others as they see fit. Do what we want and create legality for it in the courts. A half-win is progress.
Aren’t we done talking about race? Isn’t this another exercise of authoritarian power?
Race was socially constructed, to facilitate expansive executive authority & enable authoritarianism. It is actively leveraged today, even as many seek to deny its relevance. The opportunities to expand power arising from the normalization of systemic racism have sped implementation of Project 2025. Stay tuned…More to follow on this.