Unfortunately, bad is a severe understatement. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before the regime starts raiding newsrooms.

This very bad

It was only "horrific" because it happened in a church. The Administration is trying to make it into a hate crime against Christians. But, the protest took place because the pastor is supposedly an ICE director:

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/19/protesters-interrupt-service-at-cities-church-in-st-paul-claiming-pastor-works-for-ice

Fascists shouldn't get to hide behind a pulpit.

Welcome to fascism! Enjoy your stay!

Horrific? A protest? People shouting to get attention and be heard is horrific?

It threatens their narrative. What could be more horrific?

Yeah the scene was horrific. Meanwhile, executing innocent people? A-OK

They did some wildly unprecedented legal maneuvers to try to get these warrants.

1. Went to magistrate duty judge, who approved 3/8 warrants.
2. Went to that judge's manager, Chief Judge Schlitz. He didn't outright deny the warrants, he just wanted to take a few days to think about it.
3. That wasn't good enough. They went to the judge-manager's manager, the 8th circuit court of appeals. In a sealed emergency petition for writ of mandamus.
4. Judge Schlitz was required to defend himself in this mandamus action with two hours of notice and he wasn't even allowed to read the papers.

Since the mandamus action failed, it seems likely that the government has gotten a grand jury indictment. Which process bypasses judges nearly entirely.

Note that it's pretty normal to get indictments first in the federal courts (before the current times), because if the feds arrest someone on a complaint, they have a 30 day deadline to get that indictment. If they don't arrest first, there's no deadline and they can retry as many times as they want.

So normally the feds only use complaints when they need to get someone off the street urgently. These feds use complaints because they only care about splashing the perp walk on social media. They don't care what happens to the case after that.

They may have gotten an indictment through a grand jury.

Exactly. Shame it wasn’t Van “Today he becomes A President” Jones. Or fucking Chuck Todd.

Yeah you thought we forgot about you, huh Chuck Todd.

Pretty obvious by now Democrats will go quietly into the good night.

Spoiler: They won't.

When they stop supporting fascism.

Don Lemon was there as an independent reporter interviewing the protestors and church people as the protest was going on. I just watched Legal Eagle's video about the protest yesterday.

Basically, it boils down to the federal government pushing to get a perp walk (photos of the alleged criminal in handcuffs being walked by "authorities") to plaster photos of them all over social media to make the accused look bad. As Legal Eagle says, it's the federal government making content and doing it for the memes.

Once they're arrested, federal lawyers TRY to get them in front of a judge to get them (protestors and Don't Lemon now) convicted of something, but in this case a whole bunch of judges have said, "What you're doing doesn't make sense and hasn't been done before, but if you want to try this case in front a grand jury - go ahead." The judge knows they won't because they'll lose so the case eventually gets dropped - but hey, they got some good photos of people they don't like!

There's a concept in law enforcement whereby arresting one person dissuades others from doing similar things.

It doesn't even have to be about being arrested. The threat of lawsuit, broadcasting licences not being renewed, or business acquisition of a media company by another not being approved by the government elicits enough fear to corporate journalists. These are done well before using threat of arrest to suppress free press.