Lydia Romero strained to hear her husband’s feeble voice through the phone. A week earlier, immigration agents had grabbed Julio César Peña from his front yard in Glendale, California. Now, he was in a hospital after suffering a ministroke. He was shackled to the bed by his hand and foot, he told Romero, and agents were in the room, listening to the call. He was scared he would die and wanted…
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As Americans reel from the Trump administration’s violent raids and plead Democrats for action, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) announced on Thursday that his big demand for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill is to bar the agency from deporting U.S. citizens — a practice that is already illegal. In a press conference on Thursday, Jeffries said that he…
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President Donald Trump admitted on Thursday evening that his administration is “not at all” deescalating its immigration raids in Minneapolis, confirming that his administration’s pledges to do so were lies, just hours after Senate Democrats folded on negotiations to prevent a government shutdown. When a reporter asked Trump on Thursday evening whether or not he would be drawing back in…
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President Donald Trump has sued the US Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns during his first term in the White House, when the president broke with decades of tradition by refusing to voluntarily divulge the records. The lawsuit — joined by Trump’s two eldest sons and his family business, the Trump Organization — was revealed…
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 30, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Journalist Don Lemon was taken into custody by federal law enforcement agents on Friday morning in Los Angeles, the latest escalation against the free press by the Justice Department under the control of President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi, both of whom have repeatedly targeted journalists for doing their jobs.
The former CNN anchor had been accused of misconduct by Trump following his coverage of an anti-ICE protest that took place inside a Minneapolis church on Jan. 18. While organizers and participants of that protest—aimed at the pastor of the congregation who is also a federal immigration enforcement official—chanted and disrupted the service, Lemon later interviewed the pastor and covered the events as they took place.
According to the Associated Press:
Lemon was taken into custody by federal agents in Los Angeles, where had been covering the Grammy Awards, his attorney Abbe Lowell said.
It is unclear what charge or charges Lemon is facing in the Jan. 18 protest. The arrest came after a magistrate judge last week rejected prosecutors’ initial bid to charge the journalist.
Lemon, who was fired from CNN in 2023, has said he has no affiliation to the organization that went into the church and that he was there as a journalist chronicling protesters.
Fellow journalists and free-press advocates swiftly came to Lemon’s defense and condemned the Trump DOJ over the arrest.
“Reporters in America are free to view, document, and share information with the public. This arrest is a constitutional violation, an outrage, an authoritarian breach, and utterly appalling.” —Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen
“They arrested Don Lemon. This is horrifying,” said Jemele Hill,
Fifteen years ago this month, a mass movement in Tunisia overthrew the 24-year reign of U.S.-backed despot Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. What seemed impossible merely weeks prior became real. Today, living in the United States, things feel daunting, hopeless, terrifying: It is hard to imagine how to reverse the intensification of the police state, the erosion of whatever pretenses of democracy…
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