FOX NEWS

Former CNN host Don Lemon was taken into custody by federal authorities on Friday over his involvement in the viral protest by anti-ICE agitators at a Minnesota church.

Earlier this month, Lemon livestreamed left-wing agitators who stormed St. Paul’s Cities Church under the suspicion that its pastor had collaborated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Lemon told viewers that “the freedom to protest” is what the First Amendment is all about, but Justice Department officials have been working to hold the participants accountable.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi wrote on X, “At my direction, early this morning federal agents arrested Don Lemon, Trahern Jeen Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lydell Lundy, in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

The specific charges against Lemon have not been announced. DOJ officials have previously suggested the former CNN star and the other anti-ICE agitators had violated the FACE Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act, among other crimes.

Lemon, who would make his first court appearance as early as Friday, was apprehended in Los Angeles while covering the Grammy Awards, according to his attorney, Abbe Lowell.

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Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, previously suggested Lemon could face significant consequences for allegedly partaking in the storming of the church.

Dhillon said Lemon had a presumption of innocence, but his role as a journalist wasn’t necessarily a “shield” for him being a potential party to a crime.

“Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility. He went into the facility, and then he began ‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part of a criminal conspiracy,” Dhillon said in an interview with Benny Johnson.

“It isn’t and so we’re getting our ducks in a row, putting the facts together, and this is a very serious matter,” she continued. “Come next Sunday, nobody should think in the United States that they’re going to be able to get away with this. Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long, long time.”