Justice Department files ethics complaint against Minnesota federal judges; Politico, September 30, 2026

 JOSH GERSTEIN and  KYLE CHENEY , Politico; Justice Department files ethics complaint against Minnesota federal judges

"The Justice Department has filed a formal complaint against nearly all of the federal district court judges in Minnesota, alleging that they violated the judicial ethics code by speaking out about the impact of the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement surge on their court...

The complaint contends that former Chief District Judge Patrick Schiltz, Judge John Tunheim and other “anonymous district judges” from Minnesota who spoke to The New York Times for an article published earlier this month expressed bias against the government. 

DOJ contends that the judges’ remarks about agencies involved in the federal immigration surge there breached the ethics rules preventing judges from commenting on matters still before the courts or likely to wind up there...

In a statement Wednesday, Schiltz defended his actions.

“As legal-ethics experts have confirmed, I was acting well within the ethical rules that apply to federal judges in speaking to the New York Times,” Schiltzsaid “Indeed, in February of this year, the Committee on Codes of Conduct issued an advisory opinion to emphasize that federal judges may ‘[speak] and [write] on core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law and judicial independence.’ That is exactly what I did.”

A court spokesperson responded on behalf of Tunheim, echoing Schiltz’sstatement that the comments were permitted under federal rules for judges."

City Bar Urges Senate Judiciary Committee to Reject Todd Blanche as U.S. Attorney General; New York City Bar, July 13, 2026

 New York City Bar; City Bar Urges Senate Judiciary Committee to Reject Todd Blanche as U.S. Attorney General

"In a letter to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, the New York City Bar Association urges the Committee to reject the nomination of Todd Blanche to serve as Attorney General of the United States.

“Mr. Blanche has taken actions that we believe make him unfit to lead an ethical and independent department of justice that is essential to our nation’s democracy,” the City Bar writes. “Mr. Blanche’s record – particularly the actions he has undertaken as Deputy Attorney General and Acting Attorney General – conclusively demonstrates his lack of commitment to the integrity, professionalism and independence that the Senate should require and the American people should expect of the highest law enforcement official in the land.”

The City Bar writes that despite Mr. Blanche’s formal credentials, his actions, both as Deputy Attorney General and as Acting Attorney General, have “repeatedly demonstrated that his primary loyalty is not to the United States Constitution or the rule of law but to President Donald J. Trump, whom Mr. Blanche previously represented as a private attorney and whose personal interests he has continued to protect. As a result, his actions have been detrimental to the Department of Justice and the rule of law. Specifically, Mr. Blanche has compromised the integrity and independence of the Department he has been nominated to lead.”"

Skill games are unlawful, Pennsylvania Supreme Court finds; Pennsylvania Capital-Star, June 15, 2026

PETER HALL, Pennsylvania Capital-Star; Skill games are unlawful, Pennsylvania Supreme Court finds

"State Attorney General Dave Sunday issued a statement calling the decision a “significant victory for consumers, taxpayers and the rule of law in Pennsylvania.”

“The Supreme Court recognized what our office has argued from the beginning – these machines operate as gambling devices and cannot legally exist without the same oversight, regulation and accountability as other forms of legalized gaming in the Commonwealth. Pennsylvanians deserve protections that ensure games are fair, transparent and operated within the bounds of the law,” Sunday said."

The Kennedy Center Is a Metaphor for De-Trumpification; The Atlantic, June 11, 2026

 David A. Graham, The Atlantic; The Kennedy Center Is a Metaphor for De-Trumpification

"No event at the Kennedy Center in recent months has drawn as much anticipation in Washington as the removal of President Trump’s name from the building’s facade. The date and time of the performance are not yet public, but residents and reporters are on alert to watch workers pull down the letters that were hastily added in December, when the institution was ungrammatically rechristened “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Already, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reported last week, Trump’s name has been removed from the center’s website, as well as from “email signatures, email communications, letterhead, website, brochures, promotional materials, press releases, signs, references in contracts, MOUs, and other agreements.” These are signs of the center moving to comply with a judge’s ruling late last month that ordered it to revert to its statutory name.

The re-renaming is a welcome win for the rule of law, but the precarious path ahead for the Kennedy Center is a useful metaphor for the United States in the Trump era as a whole. Removing Trump’s name is the easy part—a discrete step that a judge can straightforwardly mandate—but repairing the damage will be a much longer and more difficult process, assuming it’s possible at all."

‘Weak Case’: Fox’s Jonathan Turley Deeply Skeptical of Trump DOJ’s New Indictment of James Comey; Mediaite, April 28, 2026

 Isaac Schorr, Mediaite; ‘Weak Case’: Fox’s Jonathan Turley Deeply Skeptical of Trump DOJ’s New Indictment of James Comey 

"Is showing a picture of shells that say ’86 47′ is that-, I mean, that could be could be taken as a threat, but does it amount to one to you?” followed up John Roberts.

“In my view, it would very likely be viewed as protected speech if it was the basis of a criminal indictment. That alone would have a hard time standing up in court,” answered Turley. “I’ve seen that reporting, and we’ll have to see how they would stick that landing in an indictment, but just showing a picture like that would be a very difficult foundation, a very unstable foundation for a prosecution, because right out of the gate will come a First Amendment challenge that the court, I think, would consider first and foremost.”"

The 85-Year-Old Widow Snagged by Trump’s Immigration Crackdown; The New York Times, April 25, 2026

 Catherine Porter, The New York Times; The 85-Year-Old Widow Snagged by Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

"Her story gives a glimpse into the opaque labyrinth of immigrant-detention sites operated by the Trump administration, where many like her see no lawyer, have no sense of where they are and understand little of why they are held or, in her case, later released. It also raises questions about how that system may be weaponized: A judge said in a ruling that she believed that Ms. Ross-Mahé’s stepson Tony Ross, who had been fighting with her over her late husband’s estate, instigated her arrest.

The New York Times could not independently confirm the details of her experience in detention, but it aligns with the accounts of others who have been detained in similar circumstances. Tony and his brother, Gary Ross, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did their lawyer.

The experience stunned Ms. Ross-Mahé, who previously considered herself a supporter of President Trump and so admired his policy to deport illegal immigrants that she thought it should be adopted in France.

“I didn’t think these things existed,” she said of the immigration facilities she was held in. “I thought that when we arrested them, we would treat them properly. It really shocked me.”

She added, “They treat them like dogs, not in a human way.”

Asked for comment, the Homeland Security Department said in a statement that “all detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.” It added that “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens” and is “regularly audited and inspected by external agencies.”"

ABA Law Day events to focus on the ‘The Rule of Law and the American Dream’; ABA Journal, April 21, 2026

 ABA Journal; ABA Law Day events to focus on the ‘The Rule of Law and the American Dream’

"The American Bar Association will host various events to mark Law Day 2026 that address the theme, “The Rule of Law and the American Dream.”

May 1 is designated as the official Law Day."

The Rules of Law: How librarians can help patrons with legal questions; American Libraries, March 2, 2026

Elyse H. Fox, American Libraries; The Rules of Law: How librarians can help patrons with legal questions

"Librarians are used to being generalists, able to research all kinds of questions. But when someone seeks help filling out a form or understanding their rights, those same staffers may be wary of crossing the line from legal reference to unauthorized practice of law. Moreover, public library collections often have few legal resources for patrons.

Within these limitations, though, library workers can develop their legal reference skills and provide appropriate referrals. The American Association of Law Libraries’ (AALL) 2014 report Law Libraries and Access to Justice offers tips for how to do this. In the decade since this report was released, demand for services has remained high, with many low-income Americans unable to get adequate help for their civil legal problems. Here are some takeaways from the report—and my 40 years in law librarianship—that are still relevant in bridging the justice gap."

‘Trump is aiming for dictatorship’. That’s the verdict of the world’s most credible democracy watchdog; The Guardian, March 17, 2026

 Martin Gelin, The Guardian; ‘Trump is aiming for dictatorship’. That’s the verdict of the world’s most credible democracy watchdog

"The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey.

“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.

Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”...

A record 41% (3.4 billion) of the world’s population currently resides in countries where democracy is deteriorating, the report claims, adding that Washington is leading this global turn away from democracy.

The researchers use 48 different metrics to assess democratic health, such as the freedom of expression and the media, the quality of elections and the observance of the rule of law. The resulting “liberal democracy index” shows that the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency”, Lindberg says. Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the “checks and balances” (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s."

The Trump Administration Floats a New Way to Humiliate the Legal Profession; The New York Times, March 13, 2026

 Deborah Pearlstein , The New York Times; The Trump Administration Floats a New Way to Humiliate the Legal Profession

"To fill those empty seats, the department has begun an increasingly desperate effort to recruit hires. (“Don’t be scared off by the transcript requirement,” a conservative law school reportedly told its students. “G.P.A. is not a strong factor.”) Even so, it seems too few lawyers are willing to take the chance. So the Trump administration last week offered up a different solution: a proposed rule that aims to shield Department of Justice lawyers from independent ethics investigations.

Such an arrangement would run afoul of a federal law known as the McDade Amendment, which says that government lawyers are subject to the ethics rules of the states in which they practice, “to the same extent and in the same manner” as every other lawyer licensed in the state. The proposed rule would be challenged in court immediately if it ever took effect. It shouldn’t get that far, however. It would do much more than potentially give department lawyers a free pass to lie on the president’s behalf. It would severely limit the courts’ ability to offer any kind of independent check on the executive branch.

Rules requiring lawyers to serve as honest officers of the court have been adopted by every state and the District of Columbia. They serve a host of purposes, starting with the basic right to fairness. These rules are also critical to the independence of the courts, which depend on access to reliable evidence and accurate representations by counsel.

Such rules serve an especially critical function in constitutional democracies, which distinguish themselves from authoritarian regimes in part by insisting that truth and falsehood exist separately from whatever the government may assert...

The move against state bars is of a piece with the administration’s broader strategy against universities, the media and law firms — any set of organizations capable of challenging the president’s power. And few things threaten it more than holding it to the truth."

Introducing The Anthropic Institute; Anthropic, March 11, 2026

 Anthropic; Introducing The Anthropic Institute

"We’re launching The Anthropic Institute, a new effort to confront the most significant challenges that powerful AI will pose to our societies. The Anthropic Institute will draw on research from across Anthropic to provide information that other researchers and the public can use during our transition to a world containing much more powerful AI systems.

In the five years since Anthropic began, AI progress has moved incredibly quickly. It took us two years to release our first commercial model, and just three more to develop models that can discover severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities, take on a wide range of real work, and even begin to accelerate the pace of AI development itself.

We predict that far more dramatic progress will follow in the next two years. One of our company’s core convictions is that AI development is accelerating: that the improvements we make are compounding over time. Because of this, extremely powerful AI, like the kind our CEO Dario Amodei describes in Machines of Loving Grace, is coming far sooner than many think.

If this is right, society is shortly going to need to confront many massive challenges. How will powerful AI systems reshape our jobs and economies? What kinds of opportunities for greater societal resilience will they give us? What kinds of threats will they magnify or introduce? What are the expressed “values” of AI systems and how will society help companies determine what the appropriate values are? And, if the recursive self-improvement of AI systems does begin to occur, who in the world should be made aware, and how should these systems be governed?

The Anthropic Institute’s goal is to tell the world what we’re learning about these challenges as we build frontier AI systems, and to partner with external audiences to help address the risks we must confront. Whether our societies are able to do so will determine whether or not transformative AI delivers the radical upsides that we believe are possible in science, economic development, and human agency.

The Institute is led by our co-founder Jack Clark, who will assume a new role as Anthropic’s Head of Public Benefit. It has an interdisciplinary staff of machine learning engineers, economists, and social scientists, bringing together and expanding three of Anthropic’s research teams: the Frontier Red Team, which stress-tests AI systems to understand the outermost limits of their current capabilities; Societal Impacts, which studies how AI is being used in the real world; and Economic Research, which tracks its impact on jobs and the larger economy. The Institute will also incubate new teams, and is currently working on efforts around forecasting AI progress and better understanding how powerful AI will interact with the legal system.

The Institute has a unique vantage point: it has access to information that only the builders of frontier AI systems possess. It will use this to its full advantage, reporting candidly about what we’re learning about the shape of the technology we’re making. At the same time, the Institute is a two-way street. It will engage with workers and industries facing displacement, and with the people and communities who feel the future bearing down on them but are unsure how to respond. What we learn will inform what the Institute studies, and how our company as a whole chooses to act.

The Anthropic Institute has made several founding hires:

• Matt Botvinick, a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School and previously Senior Director of Research at Google DeepMind and Professor in Neural Computation at Princeton, is joining the Institute to lead its work on AI and the rule of law.
• Anton Korinek is joining the Economic Research team, on leave from his role as Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia, to lead an effort studying how transformative AI could reshape the very nature of economic activity.
• Zoë Hitzig, who previously studied AI’s social and economic impacts at OpenAI, is joining to connect our economics work to model training and development."

D.C. Bar Begins Disciplinary Proceedings Against Ed Martin; The New York Times, March 10, 2026

 Devlin Barrett, The New York Times ; D.C. Bar Begins Disciplinary Proceedings Against Ed Martin

A new legal filing accused Mr. Martin, a senior Justice Department official, of an unethical pressure campaign against Georgetown University.

"The disciplinary body for lawyers in the District of Columbia has filed ethics charges against Ed Martin, a senior Justice Department official in the Trump administration, accusing him of misconduct in seeking to punish Georgetown University’s law school, according to a filing.

Mr. Martin, who has spearheaded efforts by President Trump to use the Justice Department to punish the president’s perceived enemies, faces two counts of misconduct. The filing, submitted on Friday before the D.C. Court of Appeals Board on Professional Responsibility, is comparable to a civil lawsuit complaint in court and was signed by Hamilton P. Fox III, the disciplinary counsel for the D.C. bar.

Mr. Martin, who was forced to step down as the U.S. attorney in Washington because he did not have the Senate votes for confirmation, instead became the Justice Department’s pardon attorney. In that role, he has had far more access and influence in the White House than many of his predecessors.

The complaint is a significant escalation in the efforts to use state and local bars to punish lawyers in the Trump administration for purported violations of ethics rules in pursuit of the president’s aims. Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi proposed a new rule to try to stall or delay bar associations from conducting such investigations into lawyers at the department."

Trump Administration, in Apparent Reversal, Tries to Continue Fight Against Law Firms; The New York Times, March 3, 2026

Michael S. Schmidt,Jonah E. Bromwich and Devlin Barrett, The New York Times; Trump Administration, in Apparent Reversal, Tries to Continue Fight Against Law Firms

The administration told a court on Monday that it was abandoning its defense of executive orders targeting the firms. But on Tuesday, the Justice Department appeared to abruptly change its position.

"The Trump administration indicated on Tuesday that it planned to renew its defense of executive orders that it had leveled against law firms, a sharp reversal a day after indicating that it would drop that fight in court, according to people familiar with the matter.

The situation remained fluid Tuesday morning. It was not immediately clear what legal strategy the administration would ultimately embrace or whether a court would allow the Justice Department to reverse course.

The Justice Department did not immediately comment. The White House declined to comment...

It was not immediately clear on Tuesday what had prompted the about-face. But one question that the administration’s decision a day earlier to abandon its cases raised was whether the deals it made with nine law firms would survive and whether those contracts — which were not made public — were considered unconstitutional given that the district court ruling would be final."

Nine Law Firms Surrendered. Four Law Firms Won.; The New York Times, March 3, 2026

 THE EDITORIAL BOARD, THE NEW YORK TIMES; Nine Law Firms Surrendered. Four Law Firms Won.

"The four law firms that last year chose to fight President Trump’s illegal intimidation campaign have won vindication. Federal judges had already struck down Mr. Trump’s executive orders trying to punish the firms for representing or employing people he considered to be his political enemies. On Monday, the Trump administration abandoned its appeals of those rulings, accepting defeat.

The victories of the four firms — Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale — are a triumph for justice and democracy. The executive orders that Mr. Trump signed early in his second term were based on the lie that the firms had done something wrong. In fact, their lawyers were merely doing their jobs. They happened to represent Democrats and liberal groups or participated in prior investigations of him. And his would-be punishments of the firms had the potential to damage them badly. The executive orders barred the firms’ lawyers from entering federal buildings and meeting with federal officials, activities that are a necessary part of many legal cases.

The larger goal of the executive orders was chilling. The president attacked a bedrock principle of the law, which is that everybody deserves legal representation. He sought to frighten lawyers from representing people who had the temerity to criticize him. By extension, he sought to frighten any Americans who might criticize him.

Fighting the executive orders took courage, and the four firms deserve praise and gratitude for standing up to the president. They all risked losing clients and even having their firms collapse. Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president. The deals included promises to perform millions of dollars of pro bono work on behalf of Trump-friendly clients.

These nine firms all failed a high-stakes character test. Their leaders faced a choice between submitting to a bully and doing the right thing. The firms are not household names to most Americans, but it is worth listing them here. We hope that clients looking for fearless attorneys and law students deciding where to work will remember which elite firms were unwilling to fight back. Meekness is not a quality most people seek in a lawyer.

The first firm to fold was Paul Weiss, whose chairman at the time, Brad Karp, undertook what Ruth Marcus of The New Yorker described as a “desperate” campaign to reach a deal with Mr. Trump. The other eight firms were A&O Shearman; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Milbank; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Skadden Arps; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher...

The four law firms that fought the White House read the situation correctly. They insisted on due process and relied on judges to protect their rights under the Constitution. The American legal system depends on due process. Nobody, not even the president, should be able simply to assert that a person or organization has behaved wrongly and then exact a punishment for that behavior."

Trump Administration Abandons Efforts to Impose Orders on Law Firms; The New York Times, March 2, 2026

 Jonah E. Bromwich and Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times; Trump Administration Abandons Efforts to Impose Orders on Law Firms

The move amounts to a surrender in a clash that has led many law firms to submit to the president rather than face the threat of his executive orders

"The Trump administration on Monday abandoned its attempts to impose potentially crippling executive orders against law firms that refused to capitulate to the president, walking away from its appeal of victories the firms had won against the White House.

With a brief due this week, Justice Department lawyers told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that they were no longer interested in pursuing the cases and were voluntarily asking the court to dismiss them.

The decision is the White House’s most significant acknowledgment that the executive orders cannot be successfully defended in court. The move is particularly striking given that some firms opted to reach deals in a bid to head off executive orders that President Trump’s Justice Department said it would no longer stand behind.

The battle over the executive orders had roiled the legal establishment and led many firms to submit to Mr. Trump rather than face the existential threat his directives represented. The orders barred the firms from government business and suggested that their clients could lose government contracts, spurring widespread panic in the legal profession."

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts; The New York Times, February 13, 2026

 Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac , The New York Times; Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

The department has sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, officials and tech workers said.

"The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.

In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.

The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court."

Meet Aliya Rahman, Disabled U.S. Citizen Assaulted, Jailed & Traumatized by ICE in Minneapolis; Democracy Now, February 9, 2026

 Democracy Now; Meet Aliya Rahman, Disabled U.S. Citizen Assaulted, Jailed & Traumatized by ICE in Minneapolis

"We speak with Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen who was violently dragged from her car by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis last month and detained at the Whipple Federal Building, which has become the epicenter of the government’s immigration crackdown in the city. Rahman says she repeatedly told agents she was disabled and had a brain injury, but they ignored her pleas for medical attention or other accommodation. “I was taken out of that place unconscious,” says Rahman, who describes lasting injuries and trauma from her detention. Rahman was not charged with any crime. “What I saw in that detention center was truly horrific.”

We also speak with attorney Alexa Van Brunt, director of the Illinois office of the MacArthur Justice Center, who says victims of ICE violence like Rahman can sue the federal government for violating their rights, “but they cannot sue the officers in their individual capacity.”"

 Mattathias Schwartz and Emily Cochrane, The New York Times ; Judge Orders Release of 5-Year-Old, Whose Detention Drew Outrage

The image of Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a blue winter hat and Spider-Man backpack while in the custody of immigration agents, fueled outrage across the country.

"A federal judge on Saturday ordered the release of a 5-year-old boy and his father from immigration custody, condemning their removal from their suburban Minneapolis neighborhood as unconstitutional.

The image of Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a Spider-Man backpack and an oversize fluffy blue winter hat as he was detained by officers earlier this month, spurred outrage at a moment when many were already incensed by the Trump administration’s immigration tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere across the country. The flood of immigration enforcement officers into Minneapolis, known as Operation Metro Surge, has led to mass demonstrations as well as the shooting deaths of two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, at the hands of federal agents.

In a blistering opinion ordering Liam’s release, Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas condemned “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty.” The boy’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was also arrested and the pair were taken to an immigration detention center outside San Antonio. A lawyer for the family previously said in court filings that Mr. Conejo Arias, who is from Ecuador, had legally entered the country under American guidelines for asylum. The Department of Homeland Security had charged that Mr. Conejo Arias had entered the country illegally in December 2024.

In a statement, Jennifer Scarborough and four other attorneys who represent Liam and his father praised the ruling. They said they were now working to quickly reunite the family. “We are pleased that the family will now be able to focus on being together and finding some peace after this traumatic ordeal,” they wrote."

Federal Agents Arrest Don Lemon Over Minnesota Church Protest; The New York Times, January 30, 2026

 Hamed Aleaziz, Devlin Barrett and Alan Feuer, The New York Times; Federal Agents Arrest Don Lemon Over Minnesota Church Protest

The former CNN anchor has said he was not demonstrating, but reporting as a journalist, during the interruption of a service inside a St. Paul church earlier this month.

"The former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested late Thursday night on charges that he violated federal law during a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minn., his lawyer said, in a case rejected last week by a magistrate judge.

Mr. Lemon has said he was simply reporting as a journalist when he entered the Cities Church on Jan. 18 to observe a demonstration against the immigration crackdown in the area.

The protesters interrupted a service at the church, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official serves as a pastor, and chanted “ICE out.” Afterward, the Trump administration sought to charge eight people over the episode, including Mr. Lemon, citing a law that protects people seeking to participate in a service in a house of worship.

But the magistrate judge who reviewed the evidence approved charges against only three of the people, rejecting the evidence against Mr. Lemon and the others as insufficient. The Justice Department then petitioned a federal appeals court to force the judge to issue the additional warrants, only to be denied."

Democrats Call for Release of 5-Year-Old Detained by ICE; The New York Times, January 29, 2026

 Aaron Boxerman and Lina Fisher , The New York Times; Democrats Call for Release of 5-Year-Old Detained by ICE

Representative Joaquin Castro said Liam Conejo Ramos appeared lethargic during a visit by lawmakers to the facility where he and his father are being held. The pair was detained in Minnesota.

"Democratic lawmakers called Wednesday for the immediate release of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old detained by federal agents in Minnesota, after visiting him and his father in an immigration holding facility.

The detention of the boy — seized while wearing a Spider-Man backpack — has become a flashpoint, as anger has continued to grow over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and deportation efforts. Critics called his detention emblematic of the callousness of the administration’s policies, while the Department of Homeland Security said the boy had not been targeted or arrested.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the pair in Columbia Heights, Minn., shortly after Adrian Conejo Arias, Liam’s father, collected him from school, according to local officials. They were then taken to an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, about 70 miles south of San Antonio."