Don Lemon made his first televised appearance following his arrest at an anti-ICE protest on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
As he announced his guest, host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that Lemon was arrested last week for “committing journalism, which is a very serious crime under our current administration.” Lemon admitted that he’s not sure how he feels after the incident, which took place in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I don’t know,” Lemon said when asked how he is. “I’m okay. I’m not going to let them take my joy.”
Lemon was arrested less than two weeks after he was on the ground covering an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service in Minneapolis. Lemon entered Cities Church on Jan. 18 with a group of demonstrators rallying against ICE’s deadly presence in the city. The demonstrators stormed Cities Church because its pastor, David Easterwood, is an ICE director. The Justice Department attempted to bring charges against several people involved in the demonstration, but a magistrate judge approved them for only three protesters, rejecting them against Lemon.
Lemon, a former CNN reporter and the current host of The Don Lemon Show, was present at the protest to interview some of the attendees. Kimmel asked whether there is a difference between whether the protesters had the right to enter the church and whether a credentialed journalist had the right to go in to cover them entering the church.
“Obviously I’m in the middle of this so I can’t say a lot,” Lemon replied. “There’s a lot that I cannot say. But what I will say is that I’m not a protester. I went there to be a journalist. I went there to chronicle and document and record what was happening. I was following that one group around. And so that’s what I did: I reported on them. But I do think there is a difference between a protester and a journalist.”
The day after Lemon reported on the protest, Donald Trump called for him to be arrested. At first, Lemon didn’t think it was a real threat. But the “drip, drip, drip” of people starting to talk about made him concerned.
“After that I retained an attorney,” Lemon said. “And the attorney reached out to them and said basically, ‘I understand you have an interest because you folks have been talking about it and so if you are serious about this then let’s do it the right way. He’s perfectly willing to self-report, which means to turn yourself in.’ And we never heard back from them.”
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Typically, he added, people accused of a crime are “allowed the courtesy” of turning themselves in. “I mean, Donald Trump was allowed the courtesy to turn himself in,” Lemon said.
Two judges and an appeals court refused to charge Lemon. Ultimately, it was a grand jury who agreed. Lemon, local journalist Georgia Fort, and several of the protesters were eventually arrested on Thursday. Lemon was arrested at his hotel in Los Angeles ahead of the Grammys.
“I pressed the elevator button and all of a sudden I feel myself being jostled and people trying to grab me and put me in handcuffs,” he recalled. “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And they said, ‘We came to arrest you.’… It had to be maybe a dozen people, which is a waste of resources.”
Lemon recounted how he was taken to a holding cell, but never got his one phone call. Instead, he was told he could speak to his attorney when allowed by the court. “I had my Apple Watch on and I called my husband,” he said. “I said, ‘Hey Siri, call Tim.’ He was asleep and it went to his voicemail.’”
He eventually managed convinced an FBI agent to remove his diamond bracelet and return it to his husband upstairs in the hotel. “That’s how my husband found out,” Lemon said. “Otherwise no one would have known where I was.”
Lemon and Kimmel discussed how Lemon passed the time in his holding cell, and how he wanted to keep mental notes about the incident as a journalist. He said he was treated okay while in holding because “not all federal agents are the same.”
“The guys who work for Homeland Security and the FBI are not the guys you see out there with ICE who have 47 days of training [and] who are violating people’s due process rights,” Lemon said. “They are completely different people. I have always had a very good relationship with law enforcement, especially federal law enforcement… These guys were professional, they were courteous, and they were kind. But not the original Homeland Security guys that took me in.”
Lemon thanked his fellow journalists, as well as the general public, for the support. Lemon said he ended up attending the Grammys, but didn’t cover them as planned because he had become the story. He concluded by explaining how important it is to have reporters on the ground who are not bound by corporate media.
“We don’t need the gatekeepers,” he said. “That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, because I think there’s a real need right now. This is an important time. This is not the time for folly.”
From Rolling Stone US
