Georgia Fort, a regional Emmy-winning independent journalist, woke to the sound of federal agents banging on her door on the morning of January 30, 2026, with a warrant for her arrest in relation to her reporting. It is the kind of scenario familiar to journalists working under repressive governments. But Fort was at her home in the suburbs of St. Paul, Minnesota.
During President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has attacked media freedoms with a flurry of executive actions and irregular use of agencies at an alarming rate. Media access to White House pool events and the Pentagon has been restricted; the president and his associates have filed lawsuits against the media; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has threatened to revoke broadcasting licenses; and at least one reporter has been deported in retaliation for his work, despite being in the country legally.
A free press provides unrestricted access to information that keeps the public informed and fosters debate, discussion, and dissent – a role that is increasingly at odds with President Trump’s authoritarian agenda. With rising federal interference, press freedom is facing an existential threat in the United States.
Federal authorities had built the indictment against Fort—as well as three other reporters, Don Lemon, Junn Bollmann, and Michael Walker Beute, on her coverage of a January 18 protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity that ended in a church where one of the pastors was the acting field director for the St. Paul ICE field office. After Fort was served the warrant, she was held at a federal facility and was released that evening following public outcry. Lemon, Bollmann, and Beute were similarly arrested and released. They are all facing federal criminal charges that carry up to 10 years in prison, as well as a misdemeanor that carries up to six months in jail. Their cases are ongoing.
As civil society organizations like ours noted at the time, it is highly unusual for federal agents to arrest reporters for their protest coverage. It is even rarer — perhaps unprecedented — for those reporters to face felony charges from the Justice Department. These charges set a very dangerous precedent. Fort’s work has centered on marginalized voices, particularly the Black community in Minnesota. She is the founder of both the Center for Broadcast Journalism and BLCK Press. Discrediting Fort serves to control the narrative, while warning other journalists that they could face a similar fate. Fort’s case is a chilling example of the height of press repression in the U.S., enabled by an unprecedented, indirect collaboration between federal agencies to target journalists.
These indictments also point to the Trump administration’s broader sensitivity around coverage of its immigration enforcement policies, which have contributed to a dip in the president’s approval ratings. This immigration crackdown has targeted non-citizen journalists with legal status. ICE detained journalists Mario Guevara and Estefany Rodríguez, who both covered immigration in their communities for Spanish-language outlets. Guevara was ultimately deported.
The goal in all of these cases is the same—to intimidate and silence reporting—and the effect is a chilling one for the entire press corps.
Fort’s case has a familiar ring to anyone who covers press freedom globally. Governments that want to silence journalists don’t ban journalism — they criminalize it. In Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai is serving 20 years for “national security” offenses. In Kuwait, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was detained for seven weeks by authorities for posting online images, taken and verified by reputable news organizations, related to the Iran War.The accusations vary; the function is always the same: to make the cost of reporting too high to bear. In charging Fort, Lemon, Bollmann and Beute, the U.S. government has adopted a practice pulled directly from the authoritarian playbook.
As we mark World Press Freedom Day, the Department of Justice must drop the charges against Fort and her colleagues.
The Department of Homeland Security must end its campaign of intimidation against journalists that has produced unlawful detentions and deportations. Freedom of the press is not merely a constitutional right—it is a human right, enshrined in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Without journalists willing and able to cover protests, immigration enforcement, and government abuses, the public is left without the information it needs to hold power to account. The government’s case against Fort and other reporters is not an outlier, it is part of a larger pattern to silence critical voices. If the relentless targeting of journalists continues, cruelty will go unreported and injustices will remain uncovered. We must take action to end the silencing of journalists and erasure of independent media.
After her release from federal custody, Fort was met by a scrum of reporters, and asked, “Do we have a Constitution?” It’s a question that the president would do well to consider.
Tell authorities to drop all charges against members of the press!