The Trump Administration Arrested Don Lemon Like He Was a Fugitive Slave

The Justice Department arrested two journalists, Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, in connection with their coverage of a protest that took place at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 18. The Justice Department also arrested two activists, Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy, for their roles in the protest. All four people arrested are black.

The arrests of the two journalists are clearly unconstitutional. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that arresting journalists covering the news is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Lemon’s arrest is also categorical illegal. Last week, the Trump administration went to a federal magistrate judge, Douglas L. Micko, to request an arrest warrant for Lemon. The judge refused. The Trump administration then appealed and lost that appeal. The court system literally said the government couldn’t arrest Lemon, but the government arrested him anyway, and they went all the way to Los Angeles (far from Minnesota) to arrest him.

Georgia Fort is a prominent Black journalist based in Minnesota. She was on the front lines covering the George Floyd protests and expertly covered the trial of his killer, Derek Chauvin. I am convinced that this prior information is part of the reason she was targeted by the Trump administration.

I know less about the activists: Crews is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, while Lundy works in the Hennepin County District Attorney’s office and recently announced his candidacy for the Minnesota State Senate. I also know that arresting people for protesting is a violation of the First Amendment.

In her tweet announcing the arrests, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the four were arrested “under my instructions.” Later reports suggested that the DOJ empaneled a federal grand jury that issued the arrest warrants for Lemon and Fort, but did not explain the reason for the arrest of Crews and Lundy. Going to a grand jury to obtain an arrest warrant that a judge and appeals court previously denied on constitutional grounds is highly unusual in a democracy, but I imagine that’s how the fascists play.

I expect, at a minimum, that Lemon and Fort’s arrests will eventually be thrown out in court, since at least one of them already has. I think the most important question is Why these four black people were arrested. To answer this question, we should start with the official White House tweet about Lemon’s arrest. They tweeted: “When life gives you lemons…” followed by a emoji chain. This ties Lemon’s arrest to this country’s history of slavery in a way that no sane person will miss.

Lemon’s arrest brings us back to an abandoned part of our original Constitution: the fugitive slave clause. This clause read as follows: “No person held to service or labor in any State, under the laws thereof, fleeing into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation thereof, be released from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up at the request of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” » This is relevant because the fugitive slave clause thwarted another amendment to the Constitution, the 10th, which explicitly reserved all “police power” to the states.

To put it simply, the 10th Amendment says that states are responsible for deciding who to arrest, but the fugitive slave clause states that the federal government can violate the 10th Amendment if it must capture black people. Basically, that’s what happened to Lemon. The federal government overstepped Minnesota’s constitutional authority to arrest a black man who fled. And we know that’s how they think, because they use literal chain emojis to congratulate themselves on their accomplishment.

What we are witnessing is a clear attempt to change the face of the victims of Trump’s fascism. I believe the Trump administration always assumed that the people on the front lines of resistance to its tactics would be black and brown. They believed that the people who would be brutalized in the streets and shot would be people of color. They did not think that the victim of their brutality would be a white man, a nurse for veterans. They didn’t think it would be a white woman with children’s stuffed animals in her glove compartment.

Arresting black journalists and activists, while using explicit images of slavery, is an attempt to inflame the black community and remind white people who the culprits are. real the targets are. Support for ICE and the Trump administration is generally declining among whites. Trump wants to remind these white people that he is just trying to stop dangerous black people.

Trump and Steven Miller to want a racial war. They think they are going to win. They think white people will notice. Their operating theory is that most white people are viciously racist, like them, and that most white people secretly yearn to live in apartheid South Africa.

I don’t think they’re right — and I say this as someone who isn’t known for having a particularly high opinion of the moral clarity of white Americans. I’ve always read that most white people in this country are like most people who eat meat in this country: they want to enjoy a good steak, but they don’t want to go to a slaughterhouse and put a bolt gun in a cow. White people enjoy their privilege, but they don’t really want to see how their privilege is obtained.

Arresting a reporter like Lemon – who is not only “famous black” like Fort is, but also famous among white people – is just as likely to inflame the white community as the black community. Lemon was arrested last night while covering the Grammys, of all things, not the Image Awards.

The arrests of journalists cannot stand legally. (The activists’ arrests also shouldn’t stand legally, since Bondi claims the activist violated the worshipers’ First Amendment rights, while Bondi violates the protesters’ First Amendment rights.) This is a shredding of the First Amendment that I don’t think even Trump’s Supreme Court plants can represent (with the exception of Clarence Thomas, who is probably stunned by the appropriateness of using the fugitive slave clause as the basis for his dissenting opinion of the part of the most sensible). members of the court). I also don’t think the arrests will hold up socially. I don’t think they will change the narrative like Trump and Miller probably hope.

Of course, the road to bad takes is paved with trust in white people to do the right thing. I don’t think it will work, legally or culturally, but I will need white people to prove me right.