The Justice Department on Friday announced it was charging 30 additional defendants for their roles in a January anti-ICE protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a criminal civil rights case that has also ensnared journalist and former CNN anchor Don Lemon.
The department moved to unseal the superseding indictment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement on X said that 25 of the 30 have been arrested, with more to come.
The original nine defendants in the case, including Lemon and another fellow journalist, have all pleaded not guilty.
The new version of the indictment does not add any additional criminal charges.
It accuses all 39 people of violating two civil rights laws. One is a misdemeanor offense in the FACE Act, which prohibits people from intimidating or interfering with people exercising their constitutional freedom to practice religion. The other is a felony charge of conspiring to interfere with individuals’ religious rights.
Former Justice Department civil rights attorneys previously told CBS News they see weakness in the case and predict it could be dismissed.
That’s because the section in the FACE Act criminalizing interference at houses of worship fundamentally misstates the rights people have under the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protects individuals’ religious freedom from government interference. But it does not protect them from interference by private individuals, like the protesters and journalists charged in the indictment, they say.
Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994 to address rising concerns about threats and intimidation that women were facing at reproductive health clinics.
Since then, it has only been used by the Justice Department to prosecute people accused of interfering with access to medical care at such clinics — and not at houses of worship — because courts have found that interfering with access to a reproductive health clinic impacts interstate commerce.
Before obtaining the first indictment in the case, the Justice Department tried to charge some of the defendants with a criminal complaint. But a magistrate judge rejected five of the arrest warrants, including those against the journalists, for a lack of probable cause. That same judge also rejected the FACE Act charge against several other defendants on the same grounds.
Lemon and Georgia Fort, the other journalist charged in the case, have asked the court to consider disclosing the grand jury transcripts, which are rarely made public due to grand jury secrecy rules.
“Grand jury proceedings are presumed regular and, with some exceptions, ordinarily protected from outside scrutiny. But the government has squandered that presumption here. Its conduct has been highly unusual, nakedly political, and inconsistent with practice in this District,” they wrote.
“Multiple judges considered the government’s ‘evidence’ against Don Lemon and Georgia Fort and declined charges. Undeterred, the government took the prosecution President Trump demanded to a grand jury and obtained an indictment,” Lemon and Fort argued. “These circumstances—never before seen in this District, and for good reason—raise serious concerns about the government’s presentation to the grand jury.”
