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bayard rustin
Immigrants Aren't Invaders; Often, They Are Fleeing US or European Invasions
The West has a long history of destabilizing countries the world over and then attacking the people who flee those wars.
Jan 31, 2026
After a year of gutting the United States government, deploying armed jackboots to American cities, and bombing at least seven countries, the Trump administration kicked off 2026 by invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. In the wake of that assault, President Donald Trump doubled down on his abandonment of the isolationist positions he once supposedly held, threatening military action against Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Mexico. He then vowed that the US would come to “own” Greenland either “the easy way” or “the hard way.”
In truth, American imperialism defines much of this country’s history, but the latest escalation comes at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have also been deployed around the nation to grab immigrants off the streets and whisk them to detention centers. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to preach the jingoistic gospel of stopping the arrival of new refugees and migrants, while blasting European governments over migration—even as he vows to launch military campaigns that will undoubtedly result in further mass displacements and fleeing people crossing borders in search of safety.
Destabilizing countries the world over and then attacking the people who flee those wars is, of course, nothing new. From the September 11 attacks in 2001 until September 2020, this country’s war on terror, according to one study, displaced an estimated 37 million people in eight countries. And that figure doesn’t even include several million displaced during smaller conflicts the US participated in from Chad to Tunisia, Mali to Saudi Arabia. Nor does it include the number of people displaced by Israel’s five wars since 2008 in and around the Gaza Strip; its land theft in the occupied West Bank; or its frequent airstrikes in Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran, all made possible thanks to Washington’s financial and military support.
When it comes to Washington demonizing the people displaced by its weapons, just ask the Palestinians. Millions of them live strewn across the map of the Middle East and beyond thanks to Israel’s ongoing military occupation and the American tax dollars that have enabled it.
“Eight Lives, Gone Just Like That”
In March 2015, I sat in the back of a taxi bound for Saida, a Lebanese coastal city a little less than an hour south of Beirut. The taxi hummed down the highway, the sea blurring through the windows to our right, and then swerved inland. Saida is more than 30 miles north of the country’s boundary with Israel and some 50 miles west of the border with Syria, but even that deep inside Lebanon, a de facto border appeared in the front windshield. The driver made a series of turns, braked, and inched toward a military checkpoint outside Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp.
Lebanese soldiers appeared on either side of the vehicle. Their job was to decide who could—and could not—enter the camp. After reading over our documents and ensuring that we had the proper military permission to enter the camp, the soldiers motioned the driver to move forward. We eased in amid a sprawl of ramshackle homes, many built atop one another. It was a dusty, humid day, but people clogged the streets. Children punted a soccer ball back and forth in the road. Motorbikes trembled over potholes. Men stood around in knots, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee, and some walked by with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.
Along with an American photographer and a Lebanese reporter, I had gone to Ain al-Hilweh, the largest of Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian camps, to speak to people who had been doubly displaced by the war in neighboring Syria. As that civil war tore through the country—a war that drew interventions from the US, Great Britain, France, Israel, Russia, Iran, and several other places—Palestinian refugees from Syria found themselves fleeing to Lebanon. The population of Ain al-Hilweh alone had swelled by tens of thousands.
"For my whole life, I’ve seen Palestinians move from tragedy to tragedy, and from nakba to nakba.”
Of the Palestinians we met that day, the only ones who had ever set foot in their ancestral homeland were those who had been born before—and lived through—the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation. What we’d soon learn, however, was that a term like double displacement failed to capture the extent to which borders had governed every aspect of their lives in permanent and repeated exile.
In a corner store with barren shelves, we found Afaf Dashe sitting in a small chair near the counter. At 70 years old, she had survived the Nakba—Arabic for catastrophe, the term Palestinians use to describe the ethnic cleansing of their country since 1948—as a three-year-old girl when her family fled to Syria. She had grown up in a suburb of Damascus, married, and raised children. When civil war started to rip through Syria in 2011, she and her family gritted it out through four years of barrel bombs, airstrikes, and shelling before they finally escaped.
While Ain al-Hilweh offered some respite, it offered neither true safety nor stability. In Lebanon, decades of state repression, lethal Israeli interventions, and failed Palestinian rebellions had left such refugees particularly vulnerable. Rather than setting down new roots in that dismal camp, Afaf explained, three of her daughters, along with five of her grandchildren, had decided to risk taking the long, often deadly journey to Europe. After crossing from Syria to Lebanon, they parted with Afaf and continued on by sea to Libya. They then paid smugglers to board a boat bound for Italy. As Afaf reached that point in her story, tears gathered in her eyes and she paused, for a long moment staring into the distance, seemingly at nothing, before turning back to us. The boat carrying her family, she said, had capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. “Eight lives, gone just like that. For my whole life, I’ve seen Palestinians move from tragedy to tragedy, and from nakba to nakba.”
More than once in her life, it occurred to me, wars had pushed her, her children, and her grandchildren across borders and, in a distinctly embattled world, borders decided where she and her loved ones could possibly move, where they could live, and where they could die. I thought about the US passport in my pocket, the relative ease with which I had crossed borders throughout my adult life, and the American tax dollars that helped doom Afaf to a life of permanent exile. She would be the first person I met who had lost loved ones simply looking to cross a border to find safety, but by no means the last.
Violent Borders
For tens of millions of people, borders are not merely places where the risk of violence is present. Borders are, by definition, violent. Borders are not merely crossed. Borders must be survived and endured. Borders are not only walls and razor wire. Borders are guards and police, surveillance cameras and drones, batons and bullets. For those tens of millions of people, borders don’t stop where one country ends and the next begins; they stalk and haunt across endless miles and years. Borders are both crime scenes and crimes, with nationalism the motive.
For people forced to flee, the violence doesn’t stop once they escape countries being bombed or economically strangled. The journey itself offers its own slate of dangers. The International Migration Organization has recorded more than 33,200 instances of refugees and migrants dying or going missing in the Mediterranean Sea alone since 2014. Between 1994 and 2024, rights groups estimate that more than 80,000 people died in the deserts or rivers on and around the US-Mexico border.
Perhaps more than anything else, the idea of strong borders has fueled the fascist-style surge that now grips the United States and significant parts of Europe.
Throughout the last decade, I’ve traveled along the European refugee trail, stopping off in countries across the Balkans and Central and Western Europe, while also reporting from American communities along the heavily militarized US-Mexico border. Wherever I’ve gone, the displaced have horror stories to tell—of people drowned at sea, of migrants shot along borders, and others who simply disappeared along “the refugee trail.” At a shelter in Belgrade, Serbia, Afghans who had fled the fallout of the US war in their country and walked the endless land route from Turkey spoke of the Bulgarian border police who had detained, threatened, or beaten them along the way. On the Serbian border with Hungary, Moroccans and Algerians told me of policemen who beat their feet with batons to deter them from ever trying to cross the border again. In Greece, young men from Sudan and Somalia—their countries no strangers to US intervention—described the tear gas and rubber bullets they faced on the country’s northern border with Macedonia. In Turkey, Syrians told me about the dogs that Bulgarian border police sicced on them. In Arizona, people recalled walking for so long in the Mexican desert that the soles of their shoes tore apart.
Perhaps more than anything else, the idea of strong borders has fueled the fascist-style surge that now grips the United States and significant parts of Europe. From the time Donald Trump first entered the Oval Office in January 2017, far-right and ultranationalist parties around Europe have also gained ground in ways that would once have been unimaginable—and where the far-right has yet to take power, center-left and liberal parties have often swung hard to the right on their immigration and border enforcement policies.
In one breath, even Democratic Party officials in the United States, still singing praises of liberal democracy, are also promising to crack down on immigration and strengthen border enforcement in a desperate bid to appear tougher in the age of Donald Trump. In the United Kingdom, the center-left Labour Party ousted the Conservatives in 2024, only to put into practice anti-immigrant policies that align with those even further to the right, like Nigel Farage and his UK Independence Party. In Greece, even after the violent neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party was banned, following years of anti-immigrant violence, the nominally center-right New Democracy Party adopted and repackaged its rhetoric in slightly modified form, while placing a former fascist in charge of its migration ministry. From the United States to Europe, immigration is ever less often discussed as a humanitarian issue and ever more often described in terms of an “invasion,” functionally recasting desperate civilians as armed soldiers.
Politically, the invasion story is more easily digestible than the grim actual stories of displaced people. Unsurprisingly, it has found ever larger audiences. And consider that a grim irony, since so many of the people crossing into the US and Europe, even before they faced deadly journeys at sea and militarized borders, were driven from their countries at least in part due to American and European involvement in mass violence and policies designed to foster economic collapse in their homelands.
Such invasion stories about immigrants are, of course, anything but new, after centuries in which a nationalistic desire for hard borders has undergirded so many claims that war and violence are necessary. In 1908, a decade before she herself was deported from the United States, the Lithuanian-American anarchist Emma Goldman pointed to the violence at the heart of such nationalism during a speech in San Francisco. “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate,” she told her audience. “Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.”
Hope in the Pushback
In the decade since I started covering migration and borders, I have also witnessed what resistance to the anti-immigrant far-right might look like. In Greece, activists and volunteers, anarchists, socialists, and everyday people worked together to do what they could to offer an alternative to the grim realities displaced people were experiencing. On Greek islands like Lesbos, humanitarians gathered by the shore to help the displaced disembark from boats. Others headed out to sea to rescue people from sinking vessels. In Athens, anarchists and other leftists occupied abandoned buildings, refashioning them into squats that displaced immigrants could inhabit without the overcrowding and decrepit living conditions of the official camps. In Germany, everyday people opened their homes to newly arrived refugees. In Austin, Texas, the congregants of a church told me about how they had taken in asylum-seekers facing deportation.
And today, Americans in cities from Chicago to Los Angeles have rallied to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Ever since an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis in January, ever more protesters have taken to the streets in growing numbers to voice their opposition to state-sanctioned murder and the Trump administration’s drive to carry out mass deportations fueled more by cruelty than any concern for the country’s safety. As the president deepens federal deployments and threatens to use the military against what he calls the “invasion from within,” those demonstrators undoubtedly understand that their own fates are wrapped up with those of immigrants and refugees. Squats, humanitarian aid, and mass protests may not stop the cruel wheels of the anti-immigrant political machine, but they do offer glimmers of hope at a time when hope is in short supply.
You can buy into the claim that the most powerful countries on the planet are the victims of invasions or remember that actual invasions and the military campaigns that create lethal cycles of mass displacement are happening in all too many places on this planet.
In the early months of 2026, that hope may be needed more than ever, in part because all too many Americans and Europeans continue to empower politicians who recycle the tired argument that, if there were fewer immigrants, life in their countries would be more prosperous and peaceful. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump bluntly assured Americans that immigrants were invaders who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” During the first year of his second term, his administration snatched international students off the streets, separated families, and shipped immigrants off to foreign prisons. Meanwhile, he continued to repeatedly tell Americans that they were being “invaded,” a story that comes with a painful body count, while courting what inevitably loiters behind nationalism and nativism: fear.
In her novel White Teeth, Zadie Smith put all of that in perspective this way: “But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance.”
Last year, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimated that more than 122 million people across the world had been displaced as a result of war, violence, or persecution, a number that marked a decade-long high and was also the 10th consecutive year that the total number of people displaced across the globe had increased. Worse yet, war and military campaigns are still driving people from their homes globally.
Sooner than later, such wars and other disasters will result in yet more people seeking safety in Europe and the United States. When that happens, there is little doubt that far-right leaders, hoping to offload the blame for their own failures, will once again stand in front of us and claim that state violence is necessary to protect our country from an “invasion.” Then, you’ll have to make a choice: You can buy into the claim that the most powerful countries on the planet are the victims of invasions or remember that actual invasions and the military campaigns that create lethal cycles of mass displacement are happening in all too many places on this planet. That choice will determine just how much hope there is for a world where desperate people escaping disasters they had no hand in creating don’t have to consider crossing a manmade line a matter of negotiating their very survival.
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Labor Unions Play Key Role in Combating ICE in Minnesota
Heavy-handed and lawless tactics by federal agents are "attack on oppressed sections of the working class," says Kieran Knutson, president of CWA Local 7250 in Minneapolis.
Jan 31, 2026
nited States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol began “Operation Metro Surge” targeting the Twin Cities nearly two months ago. Since then, they have taken the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti while terrorizing Minnesota’s immigrant communities.
The massive deployment of immigration officers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul has been met with an incredible response from the community. Neighbors have come together to develop complex rapid response networks to track ICE and notify vulnerable people, keep immigrant families fed and protected with strong mutual aid networks, and make their opposition to what amounts to a full-scale federal invasion clearly visible.
This past Friday, unions, faith leaders, and community organizations organized a day of mass protest and economic disruption, punctuated by a rally and demonstration in well below sub-zero temperatures attended by tens of thousands.
What’s next for organized resistance in the Twin Cities? To get a picture of the situation on the ground, Inequality.org checked in with experienced labor organizer and activist Kieran Knutson, the president of Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis.
Chris Mills Rodrigo: What has your experience been like on the ground in Minneapolis over the last two months?
Kieran Knutson: It’s unlike anything I’ve ever lived through before. There are 3,000 ICE agents in the Twin Cities metro area, just by comparison the Minneapolis Police Department is between 800 and 900 cops.
You see them frequently and they’re constantly active, whether that be abduction raids, missions where they have the name of someone they’re trying to grab specifically, or just straight up racial profiling while ripping people out of gas stations or as they’re picking up their kids from daycare.
And confrontations with ICE have been intense. They’re deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, flash grenades. Brutalizing people. It’s hard to describe, it really just strikes me as a fascist paramilitary force, a force of occupation.
CMR: How has that presence affected the community you live in?
KK: One the one hand, huge numbers of Latino workers in particular are just locking down. People stopped going out altogether. Imagine being stuck inside, not being able to go to the bar, go see friends, run errands, none of that stuff. I think there’s this level of terrorism that even if you don’t ever run into ICE you do fear it.
On the positive side, in the neighborhood that my wife and I live in, for example, there are 700 people in the rapid response network. And my understanding is that there are eight or so similar neighborhood networks across the Twin Cities — that means there’s thousands of people participating in this movement. Tons of people here are outraged, the whole society hates ICE here and that’s heartening.
CMR: What has labor’s role been in community response?
KK: The first thing to say is that the immigrant portions of the working class are an incredibly important part of the working class in the Twin Cities and have really strengthened it to be much more pro-union and more militant. Some unions are heavily immigrant, so what’s been going on can’t help but affect them. Our local is less so, but we do have this spirit of an injury to one is an injury to all that we’ve cultivated over the years.
We see this as an extremely important fight, and labor unions have been involved in the scaling up of rapid response networks and planning actions like the big day of action last Friday.
CMR: Can you tell me more about how labor was involved in organizing that?
KK: The idea for it came out of the labor movement. There have been talks for some time about how unions have to be more serious about being able to do strikes, and political strikes in particular. There’s this problem in U.S. labor law where almost every collective bargaining agreement has a strike clause. And while this action was not able to avoid that, what it did do was create a situation where tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of workers were absent from work, almost like a mass sick out.
The unions built the coalition which includes a lot of faith groups and community organizations, ones that represent the Somali community, the Latino community, Native American groups.
Also, since the George Floyd uprising, there have been some significant labor struggles in the Twin Cities area — teachers here went on strike, nurses have done strikes. I think that’s given people more confidence. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of the experience, and the networks, that came out of the uprising in the response to ICE today.
We really wanted to push to make this action a mass one, so we included no school and no shopping so that it could become a society-wide effort. There was a huge amount of support from small businesses, I think 700 ended up closing.
CMR: What was the intended message of the action?
KK: Some union organizers pointed out that early on in his term, when Trump was listing cities that he was going to send ICE to, San Francisco was on the list. Trump backed off though, saying that tech executives had called him to explain that deployment wasn’t necessary. So some of the thinking was, there are all these CEOs and billionaires with corporate headquarters here in Minnesota that have been silent about this reign of terror in our communities, we should start squeezing them into speaking up.
And it kind of worked — on Sunday a letter came out from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce with over 60 big CEOs signing on. That showed the business class is willing to say something to the Trump regime about the chaos it’s causing.
CMR: The day after this incredible show of solidarity, ICE officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a union member. What’s the next escalation for labor?
KK: On Monday, the first day back at work after the action, coworkers that I talked to all felt very excited about Friday. They saw the national coverage, how big the march was despite -20º weather, how celebrities got behind it. And then, to them, Saturday felt like retaliation.
Some people are calling for staying on strike, or a real strike. Our membership hasn’t had a chance to discuss next steps yet, but speaking with other labor activists what makes sense to me is to organize a substantial assembly of rapid response groups, unions, activists, and community organizations to hash out what’s next.
CMR: What makes ICE and the occupation of the Twin Cities a labor issue?
KK: It’s an attack on oppressed sections of the working class, some of the poorest paid sections of the working class, and sections of the working class that have the least rights.
I think the administration is also aimed at the Twin Cities because of the George Floyd uprising, a sense of disciplining the population that had been a big part of that. I think that unions which want to be fighters for the working class have to be a part of this fight. This army that’s being constructed could just as easily be unleashed against workers who are organizing or on strike, or on social movements.
This is a dangerous, dangerous force that has to be defeated. To leave this force intact would mean a constant danger for all of us.
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From Maine to Minnesota and Beyond, Tens of Thousands March to Demand 'ICE Out!'
"We want to show solidarity," said one employee at a worker-owned bakery in Los Angeles. "We've seen historically that strikes work. I hope the violence stops. I want ICE out of our communities."
Jan 30, 2026
Popular outrage over President Donald Trump's deadly campaign targeting immigrants and their defenders sparked a National Shutdown day of protests across the United States on Friday, as people from coast to coast took to the streets demanding an end to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's "reign of terror."
"No school, no work, and no shopping," the National Shutdown said on its website. "The entire country is shocked and outraged at the brutal killings of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Silverio Villegas González, and Keith Porter Jr. by federal agents."
"While Trump and other right-wing politicians are slandering them as 'terrorists,' the video evidence makes it clear beyond all doubt: They were gunned down in broad daylight simply for exercising their First Amendment right to protest mass deportation," the campaign continued.
"Every day, ICE, Border Patrol, and other enforcers of Trump’s racist agenda are going into our communities to kidnap our neighbors and sow fear," the protest organizers added. "It is time for us to all stand up together in a nationwide shutdown and say enough is enough!"
BREAKING: For the second week in a row Minneapolis came out in full force for the nationwide shutdown demanding ICE out of everywhere. pic.twitter.com/bOnN8nWEI4
— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) January 30, 2026
One week after an estimated 50,000 protesters marched in downtown Minneapolis for the "ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom" rally, at least tens of thousands of people braved subzero wind chill temperatures to protest the ongoing Operation Metro Surge blitz in the Twin Cities.
Rock icon Bruce Springsteen—who this week released a song called “Streets of Minneapolis" to pay tribute to activists fighting Trump's assault on immigrants and American democracy—made a surprise appearance at a benefit concert for the families of Good and Pretti.
Maine Public Radio reported that over 150 businesses, mostly in the Portland area, closed their doors Friday amid Operation Catch of the Day, during which ICE enforcers have arrested hundreds of people in the Pine Tree State.
"Today, the working class of Portland has sent a clear message to those in power: Your power is derived from our labor, and we are not afraid to withhold our labor for the safety of our neighbors," South Portland retail worker Keeli Parker told MPR.
In Chicago—where ICE's Operation Midway Blitz prompted a special commission appointed by Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to recommend the prosecution of federal agents who violate people's constitutional rights—Nick Mayor, co-owner of Brewed Coffee in the Avondale neighborhood, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the cost of closing his business for the day "pales in comparison to the cost of what is happening to other people and their families, with their lives getting taken and torn apart.”
More than 1,000 people packed into Washington Square in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, where protesters chanted slogans including “Power to the people, no one is illegal,” and, “No justice, no peace, we want ICE off our streets!”
Three hundred miles southwest of Salt Lake City in St. George, Utah, dozens of demonstrators rallied in the city center, holding signs reading, "ICE Out" and "the wrong ICE is melting." One disapproving motorist yelled, "Go back to California" while driving by, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
In Los Angeles, Proof Bakery, a worker-owned cooperative in Atwater Village, also shut its doors for the day.
"We want to show solidarity," Proof Bakery worker-owner Daniela Diaz told KABC. "We've seen historically that strikes work. I hope the violence stops. I want ICE out of our communities."
Incredible scene at Brown University as thousands of schools across the country stage walkouts to protest ICE’s reign of terror.History will remember who stood up and who stayed silent against state sanctioned murder.
[image or embed]
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 11:26 AM
Hundreds of high school students walked out of their classrooms in Asheville, North Carolina, where sophomore Henry Pope told the Mountain XPress, “We reject the ICE terror that’s sweeping across our communities."
“We reject everything this far-right, billionaire administration stands for, and we need justice to be brought to Jonathan Ross and every other killer ICE agent in this country," Pope added, referring to the officer who fatally shot Good earlier this month.
Kelia Harold, a senior at the University of Florida in Gainesville, rallied on campus with around 100 other students.
“Instead of sitting on my own and being helpless, it really helps to come out here,” she told the New York Times, noting Pretti's killing.
“If that could happen to him," she said, "I don’t see why it couldn’t happen to anyone else.”
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Rights Groups Warn Trump DOJ Is 'Trying to Scare Journalists' With Lemon, Fort Arrests
“The arrests today of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering an anti-ICE protest are a blatant attempt to intimidate others from covering criticism of the administration and its policies," said an Amnesty International official.
Jan 30, 2026
The arrests of two US journalists on Friday over their reporting on a protest at a church in Saint Paul earlier this month sent shockwaves through rights organizations that have long defended reporters around the world from similarly blatant attacks on press freedom.
"The Trump administration cannot send federal agents after reporters simply because they don't like the stories being reported," said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders North America.
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon, now an independent journalist, and Georgia Fort, an independent reporter based in Minnesota, reported on and filmed a protest organized by local residents on January 18 against a pastor at a church who was also reported to be working as a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer.
On Friday morning, federal law enforcement agents took the two journalists into custody, accusing them of a "coordinated attack on Cities Church." The Department of Homeland Security said Lemon was being charged with conspiracy and interfering with the First Amendment rights of worshippers, and cited the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—a law that prohibits intimidating or using force against people who try to access reproductive health services but also contains provisions covering places of worship.
Local political candidates Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy were also arrested over the protest. Fort was released Friday afternoon.
"I should be protected under the First Amendment," she said upon her release. "I've been advocating for mainstream media journalists who have been brutalized for months. Do we have a Constitution? That is the pressing question that should be on the front of everyone's minds."
Shortly after Georgia Fort's release from federal custody, law enforcement in riot gear cleared out the 1st floor of the US District courthouse in downtown #Mpls, forcing everyone outside. The independent journalist spoke to reporters there. Here is a clip @FOX9 pic.twitter.com/VsAmClM3YY
— Paul Blume (@PaulBlume_FOX9) January 30, 2026
Weimers emphasized that federal authorities had previously filed a criminal complaint against Lemon over the protest, but it was rejected by a federal magistrate judge, which "enraged" Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“Time and time again we are seeing the Trump administration clamping down on free speech rather than upholding human rights. Black and Brown journalists have been particularly targeted for exercising their rights to freedom of expression."
Amnesty International USA also emphasized that the arrests were not just attacks on Lemon's and Fort's rights, but also "a critical threat to our human rights.”
“US authorities must immediately release journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, said Tarah Demant. "Journalism is not a crime. Reporting on protests is not a crime. Arresting journalists for their reporting is a clear example of an authoritarian practice."
“The arrests today of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering an anti-ICE protest are a blatant attempt to intimidate others from covering criticism of the administration and its policies," Demant said, noting that the arrests came as top Trump administration officials and agents on the ground have made clear the White House views people who film ICE agents—an action that is broadly protected by the First Amendment—are "domestic terrorists."
“Time and time again we are seeing the Trump administration clamping down on free speech rather than upholding human rights," she said. "Black and Brown journalists have been particularly targeted for exercising their rights to freedom of expression."
Chip Gibbons, policy director for Defending Rights and Dissent, noted that "journalists have an important role to play in covering protests" like the ones that have been taking place in Minneapolis and all over the country against Trump's deployment of federal immigration agents to detain and deport immigrants and US citizens alike, the majority of whom have had no criminal backgrounds despite the president's claim that the operation is targeting "the worst of the worst."
"Social movements are often vital parts of our nation’s history and it is essential that they be documented in real time," said Gibbons. "By covering the protesters and their message, journalists help to inform our public debates, helping Americans get vital information about sides of an issue that otherwise go ignored."
"It is for precisely this reason that we have repeatedly seen journalists covering protests across the United States being subject to brutality, false arrests, and bogus charges," he added. "The arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are clearly part of that shameful practice... Abusing the legal process to stage retaliatory arrests of a journalist is an attack on our democracy. We call on the charges to be dropped and any public officials involved with pushing them to resign from office immediately."
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law president Damon T. Hewitt also noted that "targeting two acclaimed Black independent journalists for criminal prosecution sends a chilling message at a moment when independent Black media is more necessary than ever."
"Freedom of the press is not optional—it is foundational to a thriving multiracial democracy and is a vital constraint on government overreach," said Hewitt. "This is not just stifling dissent—it’s chilling speech and stifling basic access to information and facts, targeting viewpoints the administration dislikes, and retaliating against law firms, universities, nonprofit organizations, and now reporters who value truth, equality, and justice. This is authoritarianism. And it must not stand.”
Emily Peterson-Cassin, policy director for Demand Progress, said the Trump administration was "trying to scare journalists away from covering the events in Minnesota" by arresting Lemon and Fort.
"The Trump administration, she said, "is clearly waging an ongoing, unconstitutional campaign to intimidate a free and fearless press into submission and must be held accountable.”
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