Appeals Court Rejects Doj’s Emergency Bid To Arrest Don Lemon, Church Demonstrators

A federal appeals court brushed back a secretive, emergency effort by the Justice Department to revive rejected arrest warrants for Don Lemon and four other people prosecutors say committed crimes by barging into a St. Paul church last weekend.

A federal magistrate judge earlier this week turned down arrest warrants for five people connected to the protesters — who disrupted a Sunday service to oppose the Trump administration’s deportation operations in Minnesota.

Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko said prosecutors had failed to present evidence to justify the arrests. Among the rejected arrest warrants were those for former CNN anchor Don Lemon and one of his producers, who had advance notice of the protest and were at the church as the events unfolded. Senior DOJ officials have specifically called out Lemon, a longtime antagonist of President Donald Trump, and argued that his role as a journalist would not shield him from criminal charges.

Micko did authorize arrest warrants for three people whom prosecutors described as leaders of the intrusion into the church, although he rejected one of the charges the Justice Department sought against those individuals, who were taken into custody earlier this week and then released.

In a series of previously unreported moves, the Trump administration rushed to demand that a federal judge overturn Micko’s refusal to charge the five others, then quickly escalated the fight to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals after Minnesota’s chief district judge Patrick Schiltz declined to take immediate action, calling the gambit “unprecedented.” Federal prosecutors raced to the 8th Circuit, asking the court to issue a rarely used “writ of mandamus” to force Schiltz to grant the government’s request.

Late Friday, a three-judge panel of the appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s demand. The panel included Obama appointee Jane Kelly and two Trump appointees, Steven Grasz and Jonathan Kobes.

Before the appeals court ruled, Schiltz — a George W. Bush appointee — sharply rebuked the Justice Department’s handling of the matter, saying the drive to seek additional arrests related to what he called “the church invasion” did not warrant an urgent response.

“There is absolutely no emergency,” Schiltz wrote.

Despite Schiltz’ insistence that the church protest presented no emergency, the pair of missives he sent to the St. Louis-based appeals court Thursday did convey the impression of a federal judiciary in Minnesota under siege and struggling to maintain its operations in the face of a massive surge of federal law enforcement into the region, widespread public protests and the arrests of thousands of immigrants, including what the judge called “the illegal detention of many detainees” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Judges in Minnesota have been ordering bond hearings or release for dozens of people detained by ICE since the federal surge began.

The 8th Circuit filings were unsealed as law enforcement braced for fallout from another fatal shooting of a Minnesota resident by federal agents Saturday morning, the details of which began to emerge Saturday afternoon.

In his initial letter to the appeals court, Schiltz described being disrupted at home, just minutes after Micko rejected the arrest warrants, while caring for his mentally disabled adult son. He said the demand by federal prosecutors was “unheard of in our district, or, as best as I can tell, any other district in the Eighth Circuit.”

“The reason why this never happens is likely that, if the government does not like the magistrate judge's decision, it can either improve the affidavit and present it again to the same magistrate judge or it can present its case to a grand jury and seek an indictment,” Schiltz wrote.

Schiltz said he had intended to meet with fellow judges to discuss prosecutors’ request, but the meeting was postponed until Tuesday due to security concerns around Vice President JD Vance and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s visit to Minneapolis. But he said DOJ rejected the delay because of a claim that “copycats” might disrupt church services this weekend unless the arrests are effectuated.

“The government has also argued that I must accept this as true because they said it, and they are the government,” Schiltz wrote. “And that is where things stand. The five people whom the government seeks to arrest are accused of entering a church, and the worst behavior alleged about any of them is yelling horrible things at the members of the church. None committed any acts of violence.”

In a second message to the appeals court, Schiltz said flatly he saw no indication that Lemon or his producer committed any crime at the St. Paul church Sunday.

“The government lumps all eight protestors together and says things that are true of some but not all of them,” the chief judge wrote. “Two of the five protestors were not protestors at all; instead, they were a journalist and his producer. There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.”

While Schiltz said the prosecutors could have brought their case to a grand jury earlier this week, the Justice Department’s filing with the appeals court said no federal grand jury is scheduled to convene in the state until Jan. 27.

In their ruling Friday, two of the 8th Circuit judges, Kelly and Kobes, offered no explanation for turning down the Trump administration’s request.

The third appeals judge, Grasz, issued a brief concurring opinion saying he believed there was “clearly” sufficient evidence to charge the five proposed defendants with crimes — but no immediate need for the appeals court to intervene.

“The Complaint and Affidavit clearly establish probable cause for all five arrest warrants, and while there is no discretion to refuse to issue an arrest warrant once probable cause for its issuance has been shown … the government has failed to establish that it has no other adequate means of obtaining the requested relief,” Grasz wrote.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and for Lemon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.