Trump’s DOJ Arrests Black Woman Who Organized Anti-ICE Church Protest In St. Paul

Over the weekend, protesters in St. Paul, Minn., walked into Cities Church, a Southern Baptist church, during Sunday service and chanted  “ICE out” and “Renee Good” in protest of violent and volatile immigration agents, who have been terrorizing the Twin Cities, and Pastor David Easterwood, who reportedly serves as the director for a local field office for ICE.

MAGA America predictably became outraged—immediately spinning the protest as anti-Christian oppression—and it tried its best make journalist Don Lemon an organizer of the demonstration, when he was clearly only there to cover it.

What’s even more predictable is the Trump administration responding to the MAGA backlash by taking action it wouldn’t take if a mosque had been the staging ground for an anti-Islam protest, or if the demonstration aligned with conservative causes at all.

According to the Associated Press, on Thursday, Jan. 22, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and social justice activist and organizer, and two others who were involved in the disruptive demonstration. Armstrong was interviewed by Lemon just before the protest began.

“You cannot lead a congregation while directing an agency whose actions have cost lives and inflicted fear in our communities,” Armstrong said Tuesday, Jan. 20, in a statement calling for Easterwood to resign from his post as a Cities Church pastor. “When officials protect armed agents, repeatedly refuse meaningful investigation into killings like Renée Good’s, and signal they may pursue peaceful protesters and journalists, that is not justice—it is intimidation.”

Bondi, of course, feels differently about the protest.

“Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” she tweeted, pretending that statement would ever be extended to a Mosque or any church that opposed the Trump regime.

Look, we can argue all day about the rights and wrongs of interrupting a church service—even to protest an ICE oppressor who moonlights as a religious leader—but there’s no argument to be had about why the Department of Justice launched the civil rights investigation that led to the arrests of Armstrong and her co-organizers.

This is, after all, the same MAGA-fied DOJ that refused to launch an investigation into Renee Good’s killing, absurdly claiming her killer, agent Johnathan Ross, acted in self-defense, and joined the rest of the propaganda-reliant administration in claiming Good engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism.” This same DOJ separately opened an investigation into whether Minnesota officials impeded or obstructed federal immigration enforcement through their public statements, and even sent subpoenas to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the office of St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, and officials in at least two counties in an effort to fish for evidence of said obstruction.

This administration has shown time and again that it will latch onto any trending issue that hits its newsfeed, so long as it can score political points off it.

AP reports that according to a source familiar with the DOJ’s actions, federal prosecutors even asked a magistrate judge to charge Lemon with crimes related to the protest, but the judge rejected the request, likely because they understand that even under an authoritarian regime like Trump’s, the First Amendment still applies.

“Once the protest started in the church, we did an act of journalism which was report on it and talk to the people involved, including the pastor, members of the church, and members of the organization,” Lemon said in a video posted on social media. “That’s it. That’s called journalism.”

Exactly.

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