The Trump administration has charged 30 more people for their alleged involvement in storming a Minnesota church during an anti-ICE demonstration last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday.
“YOU CANNOT ATTACK A HOUSE OF WORSHIP. If you do so, you cannot hide from us — we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you,” Bondi wrote in a post on X announcing the busts.
“At my direction, federal agents have already arrested 25 of them, with more to come throughout the day,” she wrote.
At least nine others, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, have previously been cuffed for the protest that took place at the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 18.
Lemon has maintained he can’t be held criminally, claiming he was merely reporting the news of the demonstration.
The protesters disrupted the church service after discovering that one of the church’s pastors shares a name with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. The Post has not been able to verify that the St. Paul ICE director and the pastor are the same person.
The “agitators” entered the church in a “coordinated takeover-style attack,” intimidating and obstructing worshippers, the indictment alleges.
“Young children were left to wonder, as one child put it, if their parents were going to die,” the court papers say.
Cities Church lawyer, Doug Wardlow lauded the new arrests, saying “The First Amendment does not give anyone — regardless of profession, prominence, or politics — license to storm a church and intimidate, threaten, and terrorize families and children worshipping inside.”
Tensions had been building in the North Star State over the presence of thousands of immigration officers as part of Trump’s Operation Metro Surge and in the wake of the Jan. 7 fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
A week after the storming of the church, Alex Pretti was killed by a federal officer in Minneapolis.
With Post Wires
