BREACHED
On Speed, Spectacle, and the Arrest of Witnesses
If these twelve days changed how you’re seeing this country, consider becoming a paying reader. It keeps UNSPUN independent, gives you full access to the archive and the work behind it, and tells me—plainly—that you want this record to continue.— T
Update, Feb. 1: Since this essay was published, both Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy have been released from federal custody on personal recognizance bonds, with court dates and pretrial conditions still hanging over them. They are out of a cell, but not out of the state’s grip.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
— Frederick Douglass
Yesterday morning began with four arrests.
By afternoon, two were released.
Don Lemon and Georgia Fort walked free after federal detention, released not because the charges dissolved, but because the machinery paused. Trahern Crews and Jamael Lundy remain in custody.12 The difference in their fates speaks its own language about whose bodies the state finds more useful to hold, whose freedom becomes negotiable theater.
This essay isn’t about relief. Release is not exoneration. The arrests themselves were the message, delivered, received, and now circulating through every newsroom, every protest formation, every journalist weighing whether to bring their camera to the next scene of state violence. The warning has already done its work.
What follows is an examination of what happens when a democracy performs its own dismantling in real time, when the spectacle of enforcement becomes indistinguishable from the enforcement itself, when the law that was written to protect becomes the weapon turned back on those it was meant to shield.
Twelve days. That’s how long it took to move from coverage to arrest. Not a slow legal process. A rapid escalation. Not justice finding its course. A demonstration of velocity.
The releases don’t change what happened between January 18 and January 30. They don’t unmake the choice to arrest journalists for witnessing. They don’t restore the boundary that was crossed when federal agents showed up at doors in Los Angeles and Minnesota with warrants for people whose only documented crime was holding cameras while others held signs.
This is about the breach itself, not the aftermath, but the act. Not who gets released, but who was targeted in the first place. Not whether the charges stick, but what it means that they were filed at all.
The alarm rang yesterday morning. It’s still ringing.
What follows is what happens when we refuse to treat the alarm as background noise.
THE VELOCITY PROBLEM:
Why Twelve Days Matters More Than the Charges
Speed is not incidental to power. Speed is the demonstration.
Twelve days from coverage to custody. Twelve days from camera to cuffs.
This is not the timeline of careful jurisprudence.
This is the timeline of message delivery.
The conventional analysis will focus on the charges themselves, whether they meet legal standards, whether they constitute overreach, whether they violate the First Amendment. These questions matter. But they obscure the more fundamental transformation happening in plain sight: the acceleration itself is the enforcement mechanism.
Consider the sequence.
January 7: ICE agent Jonathan Ross shoots Renee Good in the head. She’s in her car. White woman. Poet. Mother of three. Married to a woman. US citizen. Trained rapid responder protecting her immigrant neighbors in south Minneapolis. The Trump administration calls her a domestic terrorist. Federal officials claim she tried to run over the agent. Video evidence shows the opposite, the agent firing into her vehicle as it drives away from him, not toward him. He’s filming on his phone with one hand while shooting with the other. He mutters “fucking bitch” after killing her. Trump claims the agent is “recovering in the hospital.” Video shows him walking around uninjured.
January 18: protesters enter Cities Church in St. Paul during service, chanting Renee’s name. The pastor leading worship is also an ICE field director, the same agency that killed her. Journalists document the protest.3 4
January 28: a federal magistrate judge reviews warrant applications and rejects them for lack of probable cause.
January 29: the Department of Justice empanels a grand jury Thursday night.
January 30: federal agents arrest four people before dawn.
A magistrate judge said no. The machinery said yes anyway.
This is not how legal processes are supposed to work. Magistrate judges exist precisely to create friction in the system, to slow the apparatus of arrest, to require the state to meet basic evidentiary thresholds before deploying its power to detain. When the Department of Justice encounters that friction and simply routes around it, empaneling a grand jury overnight to obtain indictments that bypass the magistrate’s refusal, the message is not about legal procedure.
The message is about the irrelevance of legal procedure when the state has decided on its target.
The velocity communicates intent.
Not “We are building a careful case,” but “We are demonstrating capacity.”
Renee Good was killed on January 7. The protesters naming her death were targeted for arrest on January 30. Twenty-three days from killing to criminalization of those who named the killing.
The speed isn’t about justice for Renee. There’s a federal investigation that excludes local authorities, that investigates federal agents by federal agents, that hides behind the same masks the agents wear during enforcement. The speed is about making sure anyone who witnesses what happened to Renee, anyone who documents protest about what happened to Renee, anyone who refuses to accept the state’s narrative about what happened to Renee, understands the consequence.
The consequence is federal arrest. The consequence is rapid.
The consequence is inevitable.
What does twelve days tell every journalist who might consider covering the next protest? What does it tell organizers planning the next action? What does it tell anyone who believes documentation creates accountability?
It tells them the distance between witnessing and detention has collapsed. It tells them that even being a white US citizen didn’t protect Renee Good when she stood with her immigrant neighbors. It tells them that her queerness disqualified her from the protection whiteness is supposed to provide. It tells them that solidarity is redefined as terrorism and documentation is redefined as conspiracy.
This is a different kind of enforcement architecture. Traditional models of press freedom violations involve slow accumulation, harassment that builds over time, legal pressure that mounts gradually, informal warnings before formal consequences. The assumption is that democratic societies maintain buffer zones between journalism and arrest, that even when those zones narrow, they narrow slowly enough for correction, for public outcry, for institutional resistance.
Twelve days eliminates the buffer zone entirely.
The speed forecloses response. By the time press freedom organizations can mobilize, by the time editorial boards can draft statements, by the time legal teams can assess options, the arrests have already happened. The mug shots are already circulating. The White House has already posted celebratory memes. The demonstration is complete.
And then, crucial detail, two of the four are released by afternoon.
Not all four. Two.
The partial release is not mercy. It’s calibration. It extends the demonstration rather than ends it. Lemon and Fort go free, but Crews and Lundy remain in custody. The differential treatment creates a spectrum of consequence, a gradient of risk. It says: some of you will be detained briefly. Some of you will be held longer. None of you will know in advance which category you’ll occupy.
This is how uncertainty becomes a governance tool.
The speed of arrest combined with the unpredictability of release creates a climate where the calculation changes for anyone considering documentation of state action.
Not “Will I face consequences?” but “How quickly will consequences arrive, and how long will they last?”
Renee Good’s consequences were immediate and permanent. She was killed on the spot. Her wife witnessed it. Her six-year-old child lost a parent. Her rapid responder training, the whistles she blew when ICE showed up, the solidarity she practiced with her Somali and Latino neighbors, meant nothing to the agent who shot her. Her whiteness meant nothing because she was queer and in solidarity. Her citizenship meant nothing because the state decided she was a threat.
The journalists documenting protest about her death now face the same machinery. Not death yet, but detention. Not bullets yet, but federal prosecution. The escalation is visible. The pattern is clear. Witness state violence, document protest about state violence, face state consequences.
The velocity problem is not about whether the legal system eventually corrects itself. It’s about what happens in the time before correction becomes possible. It’s about the chilling effect of rapid response, the deterrent value of immediate consequence, the way swift enforcement bypasses the institutional mechanisms designed to check state power.
Twenty-three days from Renee’s killing to the arrests of those who named her killing. Twelve days from coverage to custody for the journalists. The machinery is accelerating. The message is sent. The warning is clear.
And the white purity complex that’s supposed to protect white citizens only protects when you align with power, when you perform acceptable identity, when you use your whiteness as distance from the vulnerable. Renee refused. She stood with her neighbors. She was married to a woman. She blew the whistle. And the state killed her, called her a terrorist, justified her death, and then arrested the people who documented protest about that death.
Twelve days is not a timeline. It’s a technology. And what it produces is not justice. It’s hesitation. In every journalist who now has to calculate whether their documentation is worth federal detention. In every organizer who has to weigh whether their protest will put their media witnesses in handcuffs. In every person who believes their phone camera is protection rather than provocation. In every white person who thought their citizenship would shield them from state violence if they just stayed in line.
Renee stayed out of line. She practiced solidarity. And she’s dead. The journalists documented protest about her death. And they’re facing federal prosecution.
The apparatus has announced its new operating speed. The message is sent. The arrests are the medium. The velocity is the meaning.
And the manufactured threat, the framing of Renee as terrorist, the framing of protesters as violent, the framing of journalists as conspirators, that’s not confusion. That’s strategy. That’s power protecting itself by redefining anyone who challenges it as enemy. That’s the white purity complex revealing its terms: whiteness protects only when it serves the state. Deviate, and you become expendable. Stand with the vulnerable, and you become the target.
Twelve days. Twenty-three days.
The distances are collapsing. The speed is the demonstration.
The velocity is the enforcement.
RECONSTRUCTION AS WEAPON:
The Klan Act Inverted
The law being used to arrest these four people was written in 1871 to do the opposite.
The Ku Klux Klan Act5, formally the Civil Rights Act of 1871, codified as 18 U.S.C. § 241, was Reconstruction legislation designed to protect Black citizens from white terror. It was written because state and local authorities in the South were either complicit in racial violence or unwilling to stop it. It gave the federal government power to prosecute conspiracies to deprive people of their constitutional rights when local law enforcement wouldn’t or couldn’t act.
The historical context is specific. After the Civil War, as formerly enslaved people began exercising political power, white supremacist groups formed to violently suppress that power. The Klan targeted Black voters, Black elected officials, Black journalists, Black teachers, anyone whose freedom threatened the racial order. Local sheriffs looked the other way. Local courts refused to prosecute. The federal government needed a tool to intervene.
The Klan Act was that tool. It said: when local authorities fail to protect constitutional rights, the federal government can step in. When conspiracies form to deprive citizens of their rights through intimidation or force, those conspiracies can be prosecuted federally.
Now that same law is being deployed against Black journalists covering a protest about a white woman killed by a federal agent, a woman killed precisely because she refused to let her whiteness separate her from her Black and brown neighbors.
The irony is not merely literary. It’s structural. The law designed to protect Black people from white terror is now being weaponized by the federal government against Black witnesses documenting federal violence. And the federal violence being documented killed a white woman whose queerness and solidarity disqualified her from the protection whiteness is supposed to provide.
This is not a misapplication of the statute. It’s an inversion of its purpose.
The government’s theory appears to be that the protesters, and the journalists documenting them, conspired to deprive the church congregation of their right to worship. The protesters entered during service, chanted, disrupted the proceedings. Therefore: conspiracy to interfere with constitutional rights.
But examine what this theory requires believing.
It requires believing that protesters chanting the name of Renee Good, a white US citizen killed by ICE while protecting her immigrant neighbors, constitute a conspiracy to deprive rights equivalent to the Klan’s campaign of racial terror. It requires believing that disruption of a church service led by a pastor who doubles as an ICE field director is the kind of rights violation that demands federal intervention. It requires believing that journalism documenting that disruption is participation in the conspiracy rather than observation of it.
Most fundamentally, it requires believing that the law written to protect Black people from state violence can be seamlessly redirected to prosecute Black people protesting state violence against a white woman whose solidarity with Black and brown communities got her killed.
The legal architecture permits this inversion. The statute is written broadly enough that “conspiracy to deprive constitutional rights” can theoretically encompass many actions. The question is not whether the law can be read to include these arrests. The question is what it means that the government chose to read it this way.
Because here’s what the statute was never intended to do: protect the powerful from accountability. The Klan Act was written to protect the vulnerable from the violent. It was written because formal legal structures had failed, because local power was being used to suppress rather than protect rights, because federal intervention was necessary to counter state-level complicity in terror.
The current deployment inverts every element of that original purpose.
The protesters were not suppressing anyone’s rights through violence or intimidation. They were exercising their own rights to protest, to speak, to demand accountability for Renee Good’s death. They were naming the fact that a pastor who directs ICE operations was leading worship while Renee, killed by the agency he directs, was being buried. The journalists were not conspiring to deprive anyone of anything. They were documenting a newsworthy event: a protest about a white woman whose queerness and solidarity made her expendable to the state, inside a church led by a man whose agency killed her.
The church was not a gathering of vulnerable people needing federal protection from local terror. It was a site where a pastor who doubles as an ICE field director was conducting service, a conflation of religious and federal authority that itself raises questions about the boundaries between sanctuary and state power.
And the federal government was not intervening to protect the powerless. It was intervening to prosecute those demanding answers about federal violence. Those demanding answers about why Renee Good is dead. Those refusing to accept the manufactured narrative that she was a terrorist, that she tried to run over an agent, that her killing was justified.
This is Reconstruction law used for counter-Reconstruction purposes.
The history matters here. The Klan Act exists because there was a brief moment in American history when the federal government attempted to use its power to protect Black citizenship against white supremacist violence. That moment was short. By the 1870s, the political will for Reconstruction was collapsing. By the 1880s, the federal government had largely withdrawn from enforcement. By the 1890s, Jim Crow was becoming the new constitutional order, and the Klan Act was essentially dormant.
It was revived in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, again to protect Black citizens and civil rights workers from racial terror, again because local authorities wouldn’t act. The murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964 were prosecuted under the Klan Act because state authorities refused to charge anyone.
The statute has a specific historical valence. It represents moments when the federal government has been pressured, by activism, by crisis, by moral reckoning, to use its power against racial violence rather than in service of it.
Now it’s being used to arrest Black journalists covering a protest about a white woman killed by a federal agent, a woman whose solidarity across racial lines, whose refusal to weaponize her whiteness, whose queerness and commitment to protecting vulnerable neighbors made her a target of the same state violence the Klan Act was written to prevent.
The inversion is not just ironic. It’s strategic. Using civil rights law to prosecute civil rights journalism provides legal cover for what is fundamentally a suppression of dissent. It allows the government to claim it’s protecting rights while actively curtailing them. It wraps enforcement in the language of justice while deploying it against those seeking accountability.
And it reveals how the white purity complex actually operates. Renee Good was white. That should have protected her. But her queerness marked her as deviant. Her solidarity marked her as disloyal. Her refusal to use her whiteness as a weapon against her neighbors marked her as enemy. So the state killed her, called her a terrorist, defended the killing.
And now the state is using a law written to protect Black people from white terror to prosecute Black journalists for documenting protest about a white woman killed for refusing to participate in that terror.
The machinery is fully inverted. White supremacy doesn’t just mean protecting all white people. It means protecting white people who serve white supremacy. Renee didn’t serve it. She stood against it. She practiced the kind of multiracial solidarity that white supremacy cannot tolerate. And she paid with her life.
The Black journalists documenting protest about her death are now paying with their freedom. Arrested under the Klan Act. The law that was supposed to protect them from terror is now the law used to prosecute them for witnessing the consequences of refusing white supremacy’s terms.
This is what happens when legal architecture becomes decoupled from legal purpose. The Klan Act still exists. Its text is unchanged. But its application has been inverted. The statute that once represented federal power used to protect Black citizenship now represents federal power used to prosecute Black witnesses. The statute that once protected people who crossed racial lines in solidarity now prosecutes people documenting what happens when white people cross those lines and refuse to come back.
History hasn’t been forgotten. It’s been aimed. The law remains. The language remains. But the direction has reversed. Power protecting power. White supremacy protecting itself by criminalizing those who document its violence, whether that violence is against Black people or against white people who refuse to distance themselves from Black people.
The question is not whether this use of the statute is legal in a technical sense. Courts will decide that. The question is what kind of democracy uses Reconstruction-era civil rights law to arrest journalists covering protests about state violence. What kind of democracy kills a white woman for protecting her immigrant neighbors and then arrests Black journalists for documenting protest about that killing.
The answer is a democracy that has decided the terms of whiteness require alignment with power. A democracy that has decided queerness disqualifies you from protection. A democracy that has decided solidarity is conspiracy.
A democracy that has decided the Klan Act, written to protect the vulnerable from terror, can be aimed at anyone who makes state violence visible.
The protesters were saying Renee Good’s name. The journalists were recording that saying. And the federal government is prosecuting them under a law written to protect people doing exactly that kind of witnessing, that kind of naming, that kind of refusing to let violence be forgotten or justified or normalized.
The law hasn’t changed. The purpose has been inverted. And the inversion reveals everything about how power operates when it’s threatened, not by violence, but by witnessing. Not by conspiracy, but by documentation. Not by terror, but by the refusal to accept manufactured narratives about who deserves to live and who deserves to die and who deserves to document the difference.
Renee Good deserved to live. She was killed anyway. The journalists covering protest about her death deserve protection. They were arrested anyway. The Klan Act was written to prevent this kind of state violence. It’s being used to enable it anyway. The inversion is total. The machinery is running.
And history is being aimed at those it was meant to protect, aimed by those it was meant to constrain.
SANCTUARY BREACH:
Churches as Sites of Redefinition
Cities Church in St. Paul is not incidental to this story. Neither is the man leading worship that Sunday morning.
The pastor is also an ICE field director.
Let that conflation sit for a moment. The same person who offers spiritual guidance on Sunday morning directs immigration enforcement operations the rest of the week. The same space where people come seeking sanctuary from the world is led by someone whose professional role involves federal detention and deportation. The sanctuary is supervised by the state.
And he wears a mask when he does the ICE work.
Not on Sundays. Just when he’s enforcing.
The mask is the confession. If you believe you’re doing righteous work, you don’t hide your face. If you believe immigration enforcement aligns with the teachings of Christ, who said “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” you don’t need anonymity. The mask reveals what the sermon obscures: he knows this work contradicts everything he preaches. Somewhere, deep enough to require covering, he understands the inversion. And he does it anyway.
This is not metaphor. This is structural arrangement.
The protest on January 18 was not random disruption. It was directed action. Activists entered during service specifically because the pastor is also an ICE field director, specifically because Renee Good had been shot and killed by an ICE agent eleven days earlier, specifically because they were naming the connection between religious authority and state violence.
Renee Good. White woman. Poet. Mother of three. Married to a woman. US citizen. Shot in the head by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7, 2026, while acting as a trained rapid responder protecting her immigrant neighbors.
The Trump administration called her a domestic terrorist. Federal officials defended the shooting as self-defense even as video evidence showed the agent firing into her vehicle as it drove away from him, not toward him. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Good “weaponized her vehicle.” President Trump said she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over” the agent who was “now recovering in the hospital,” a claim the video footage directly contradicts, showing the agent hopping backward, uninjured, then approaching the vehicle after the shots were fired.
The narrative required making Good into a threat. And her identity made that easier. Not just white, but queer. Not just a bystander, but actively trained in solidarity work. Not using her whiteness to distance herself from vulnerable communities but standing with them, blowing whistles when ICE showed up, documenting their operations, refusing to look away.
In the calculus of white supremacy, that solidarity disqualifies her from protection. Whiteness only protects when it aligns with power. When it serves the state. When it performs acceptable identity, straight, compliant, separate from those marked as other. Renee’s whiteness didn’t save her because she refused to weaponize it. Her queerness marked her as already deviant. Her solidarity marked her as enemy.
So when she was killed, the Federal Government didn’t apologize. It celebrated. It called her a terrorist. It justified her death. It made her shooting into evidence of why ICE needs more power, more weapons, more authority to use lethal force against “agitators.”
Imagine if Renee had been straight, married to a man. The narrative pressure would have been different. “Tragic mistake.” “Wrong place, wrong time.” “Confused woman caught in crossfire.” Her heterosexuality would have created space for the state to frame her death as accident rather than justified response. But married to a woman? That detail removes her from the category of innocent. In MAGA ideology, queerness is already threat, already outside the bounds of who deserves protection, already justification for diminished value.
Her wife was there. Witnessed the shooting. Screamed “You guys just killed my wife!” on video. That testimony is now treated as the ravings of an agitator rather than the grief of a witness to state murder.
The protesters were chanting Renee’s name in that church on January 18. They were naming what the state wanted forgotten. They were connecting the pastor’s dual role, spiritual leader on Sunday, enforcement director the rest of the week, to a woman’s death. They were saying: you cannot separate your religious authority from your state violence. You cannot offer sanctuary while directing operations that kill. Your position makes this church a legitimate site of protest.
The federal government’s response was to arrest the journalists who documented that protest.
This tells us how sanctuary is being redefined. And to understand that redefinement, we need to remember what actual terrorism against Black churches looks like.
September 15, 1963. Birmingham, Alabama. Four members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church during Sunday school.6
Four Black girls killed:
Addie Mae Collins, 14; Cynthia Wesley, 14; Carole Robertson, 14; Denise McNair, 11.The church was a central organizing site for civil rights protests. The bombing was designed to terrorize the Black community, to destroy their organizing infrastructure, to make clear that not even houses of worship were safe.
June 17, 2015. Charleston, South Carolina. Dylann Roof, white supremacist, sat through Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church.7 Then opened fire.
Nine Black people killed:
Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney; Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd; Susie Jackson; Ethel Lee Lance; Depayne Middleton-Doctor; Tywanza Sanders; Rev. Daniel Simmons; Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; Myra Thompson.Roof chose that church specifically because it was historic, because it was Black, because attacking it would send a message about where Black people could gather, pray, organize.
Those were attacks on churches.
Actual violence. Actual deaths. Actual terrorism.
The protest at Cities Church on January 18, 2026?
No one died. No one was injured. No bombs. No guns. No violence. Protesters entered. They chanted. They disrupted the service. They left.
Yet the MAGA movement screams about attacks on religious freedom, about sacred spaces being violated, about Christianity under assault. They would never think to invoke Birmingham or Charleston, those don’t register as attacks on Christianity worth remembering. But a peaceful protest inside a church led by an ICE field director? That becomes a federal case. That becomes conspiracy. That becomes justification for arresting journalists.
The selective outrage reveals everything. Black churches bombed and shot up by white supremacists are minimized, historicized, framed as the actions of “troubled individuals” or “a different time.” A temporary disruption of a service where the pastor moonlights as an enforcement agent becomes federal prosecution, celebrated arrests, deployment of Reconstruction-era civil rights law against Black witnesses.
What they’re protecting is not Christianity. It’s power wrapped in Christianity’s language. What they’re defending is not religious freedom. It’s the freedom for state authority to operate inside churches without accountability. What they’re outraged about is not violence against the faithful. It’s being named, witnessed, documented while doing violence in the faithful’s name.
This is the grift at the heart of the MAGA movement’s deployment of Christianity. They perform outrage over disruption while defending death. They frame chanting as assault while justifying bullets. They weaponize Christ’s name to defend actions Christ explicitly condemned.
The loudest claims of divine right point right, not left.
The performative Christianity, the public prayer, the invocation of God’s blessing on state power, it all serves to sanctify what cannot be justified. It wraps enforcement in theology. It makes deportation into mission. It turns ICE operations into spiritual warfare.
And anyone who names that inversion, anyone who points out that Jesus would not be directing raids but standing with those being raided, becomes the enemy. Becomes the threat. Becomes the target.
The protesters understood this. They entered the church not to violate sanctuary but to name that sanctuary had already been violated, by the presence of state authority in the position of spiritual authority, by the conflation of pastoral care and immigration enforcement, by the transformation of a church into an extension of federal power.
Renee Good understood this. She stood with her immigrant neighbors not because she was required to but because solidarity is a practice, because witnessing state violence is a choice, because her whiteness and citizenship gave her freedom to blow the whistle and she used it. And she chose to use it for her Somali and Latino neighbors being terrorized by the same agency this pastor directs.
And both the protesters and Renee paid for that understanding. Renee with her life. The protesters, and the journalists covering them, with federal arrest.
The federal government did not apologize for killing Renee. It justified her death. It called her a domestic terrorist for being in her car, for being trained as a rapid responder, for refusing to let ICE operate without witnesses. Her queerness made that justification easier. In the hierarchy of who deserves state protection, white women are protected, unless they’re queer, unless they’re in solidarity with brown and Black communities, unless they refuse to use their whiteness as distance from the vulnerable.
Then they become expendable. Then they become threats. Then their deaths become justified and their killers become heroes recovering in hospitals that video evidence shows they never needed.
There’s supposed to be an investigation. Federal officials announced it with the gravity of accountability promised. But watch what that investigation excludes: local law enforcement. Local oversight. Local authority that might actually challenge the federal narrative. The investigation is federal agents investigating federal agents. The same machinery that killed Renee Good now investigating whether killing Renee Good was justified.
This is the pattern. They wear masks during enforcement, hiding their faces, hiding their identities, hiding behind anonymity while exercising lethal authority. They conduct internal investigations, hiding the process, hiding the evidence, hiding behind federal jurisdiction that excludes local accountability. They operate as if the work requires secrecy, as if transparency would expose rather than vindicate.
And it would expose. That’s why they hide. The video is public. The witness testimony is public. Renee’s wife screaming “You guys just killed my wife!” is public. The agent muttering “fucking bitch” after shooting her is public. The fact that he was filming on his phone with one hand while shooting with the other is public. The fact that Trump claimed the agent was “recovering in the hospital” when video shows him walking around uninjured is public. The fact that Renee’s car was moving away from the agent, not toward him, when he fired is public.
It’s all public. And they hate that. They want control of the narrative, control of the investigation, control of the conclusion. They want the killing investigated by the same authority that authorized the killing, reviewed by the same chain of command that sent the agents in masks, examined by the same federal apparatus that called Renee a domestic terrorist.
Local authorities, Minneapolis police, the mayor who said “get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” the governor who called it “predictable” and “avoidable,” the city council that named Renee and said her life was “taken at the hands of the federal government,” those voices are excluded from the investigation. Because they might actually demand accountability. They might actually question whether an agent should be filming on his phone while shooting into a vehicle. They might actually ask why masked federal agents were terrorizing a neighborhood for six weeks. They might actually center Renee’s death as loss rather than as justified response to threat.
So the investigation remains federal. Internal. Controlled. Hidden behind the same masks they wear during enforcement. The secrecy is the system. The opacity is the operation. They investigate themselves and announce they’ve found nothing wrong, and anyone who questions that process becomes the problem, becomes the agitator, the threat, the one who doesn’t respect law enforcement.
But the killing is public. The video is public. The lies are public. And that’s what they can’t control. That’s what the protesters were naming in that church. That’s what the journalists were documenting. That’s what this essay is making visible.
The investigation will conclude what it was designed to conclude. But the truth is already public. Renee Good was killed while protecting her neighbors. The agent who killed her was not injured. The federal government lied about what happened. And then arrested the people who documented a protest about that killing.
The masks during enforcement. The internal investigation. The exclusion of local authority. The arrests of witnesses. It’s all the same machinery: power hiding while it operates, then punishing anyone who makes that operation visible.
The federal government did not apologize for arresting journalists covering a protest about Renee’s death. It celebrated the arrests. It posted memes. It framed documentation as conspiracy.
And the MAGA movement frames all of this, the killing, the arrests, the prosecution of witnesses, as defense of Christianity. As protection of religious freedom. As righteous response to those who would attack the faithful.
But Birmingham was an attack on a church. Charleston was an attack on a church. Those events don’t factor into their calculus of religious persecution because the victims were Black. The protest at Cities Church wasn’t an attack at all. It was accountability demanded of power that hides behind the pulpit while directing the agency that kills neighbors.
The difference matters. But the MAGA movement requires erasing that difference. It requires framing disruption as violence, solidarity as terrorism, documentation as conspiracy. Because without that framing, the truth becomes visible: they are not defending Christianity. They are weaponizing it. They are not protecting churches. They are protecting the state’s use of churches. They are not standing for religious freedom. They are standing for the freedom to enforce without accountability, to deport without witness, to kill without consequence.
The pastor wears a mask when he does ICE work. That mask is the only honest thing about the arrangement. It admits what the sermon denies: this work cannot be done in the light. This work requires hiding. This work contradicts the faith it claims to serve.
The mask reveals what the MAGA movement won’t admit: if the work were righteous, it wouldn’t require anonymity. If immigration enforcement aligned with Christ’s teachings, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” there would be no need to hide. The secrecy is the confession. Somewhere deep enough to require covering, even he knows this work inverts everything he preaches on Sunday. And he does it anyway.
That’s the true nature of the heart on display. Not the protesters who entered his church to name a woman killed by the agency he directs. Not the journalists who documented that naming. But the man who leads worship on Sunday and directs raids Monday through Saturday, who offers sanctuary from the pulpit while supervising the machinery that killed Renee Good, who believes in his work so strongly he has to hide his face while doing it.
And when protesters entered his church to name that contradiction, when journalists documented that naming, the machinery of the state responded with arrests. Not of the pastor who violates his faith every time he directs enforcement. But of the witnesses who documented the protest about a woman killed while protecting her neighbors.
Sanctuary has not been preserved. It has been redefined as a space where state power wears clerical robes, where enforcement authority holds the Bible, where the mask comes off on Sundays and goes back on Monday through Saturday.
The breach is not the protesters entering the church. The breach happened when the pastor put on the mask and started directing raids. The breach happened when ICE killed Renee Good. The breach happened when the state decided solidarity was terrorism and documentation was conspiracy.
The protesters were just the first to name it. The journalists were just the ones who recorded the naming.
And now they face federal prosecution under a law written to protect people from the Klan, prosecuted for documenting a protest about a white queer woman killed by the state, inside a church led by a man who directs the agency that killed her, in a nation that screams about religious persecution over peaceful disruption while ignoring bombs in Birmingham and bullets in Charleston.
The mask is off the ideology now. Or rather, the mask reveals the ideology: Christianity weaponized to protect state violence. Religious freedom redefined as freedom from accountability. Sanctuary transformed into state supervision. And anyone who names those truths, anyone who stands with vulnerable neighbors, anyone who documents the naming, anyone who refuses to pretend the conflation is holy, becoming the target.
Power protecting itself. Christ’s name as weapon. The church as enforcement site. And manufactured outrage over disruption while actual violence gets defended, celebrated, justified.
That’s the breach. And it happened long before the protesters walked through those doors.
THE FIRST AMENDMENT AS EVIDENCE:
Journalism Turned Inside Out
Georgia Fort said it clearly, on camera, as federal agents stood at her door:
“This is all stemming from the fact that I filmed a protest as a member of the media.”
She was right. And she was documenting her own arrest for documenting.
The recursion is dizzying. Fort filming federal agents arresting her for filming. The camera pointed at the enforcement of her arrest for pointing a camera. The documentation of consequences for documentation.
This is not a side effect. This is the design.
The First Amendment is not being ignored in these arrests. It’s being inverted. Journalism is not being excluded from legal protection, it’s being reclassified as criminal participation. The camera is not being confiscated, it’s being redefined as weapon.
Look at the government’s theory. The protesters entered the church. They chanted Renee Good’s name, a white woman, queer, mother of three, US citizen, killed by ICE while protecting her immigrant neighbors. They disrupted the service led by a pastor who directs the agency that killed her. The journalists filmed the protest. Therefore, according to the charges, the journalists were part of the conspiracy.
The logic requires collapsing the distinction between observation and participation, between documentation and action, between witnessing and conspiring. It requires treating the presence of cameras as equivalent to the presence of protesters, treating the act of recording as equivalent to the act of disrupting, treating journalism as a form of material support for the underlying offense.
This is not a novel theory, legally speaking. Courts have sometimes struggled with the line between journalism and participation, especially in contexts involving protests, civil disobedience, or criminal activity. The question of when a journalist’s presence crosses from documentation to involvement has a contested legal history.
But here’s what’s distinct about this moment: the government is not arguing that these journalists crossed a line. It’s arguing there is no line. The filming itself is the conspiracy. The documentation itself is the crime. The journalism itself is the violation.
Georgia Fort was not accused of entering the church. She was not accused of disrupting the service. She was not accused of chanting or blocking or physically interfering with anything. She was accused of filming people who did those things. People who were saying Renee Good’s name. People who were demanding accountability for why a white woman who refused to weaponize her whiteness, who practiced solidarity with her vulnerable neighbors, who was trained as a rapid responder, ended up shot in the head by a federal agent.
And for filming that, Fort was arrested by federal agents.
This turns the First Amendment inside out. Press freedom traditionally means protection for journalism, even, especially, when that journalism documents uncomfortable truths, challenges power, or covers controversial events. The whole point of press protection is that journalists can witness and report on things without being treated as participants in those things. If a journalist covers a protest, they’re not a protester. If a journalist covers a crime, they’re not a criminal. If a journalist documents state violence, they’re not violent. The documentation is separate from the documented event.
That separation is not absolute, there are edge cases, situations where journalists cross into participation, but the presumption is separation. The default is that documenting something is not the same as doing it.
The arrests of these four people collapse that presumption. They make documentation equivalent to participation. They treat the camera as conspiracy.
And in doing so, they transform the First Amendment from shield to evidence. Fort’s status as media didn’t protect her. It became part of the case against her. She was arrested not despite being a journalist but because she was a journalist at that location with that equipment documenting that event.
The constitutional right became the criminal act.
The protest was about Renee Good. About why she’s dead. About why a white US citizen was killed by ICE and then called a domestic terrorist by the federal government. About why her queerness made that justification easier, why her solidarity made her expendable, why the white purity complex only protects whiteness that serves power.
The journalists were documenting that protest. They were making visible the naming of Renee Good, the connection between her death and the pastor directing the agency that killed her, the refusal to accept the manufactured narrative that she was a threat.
And that documentation, that making visible, is what got them arrested.
This has been done before, of course. Journalists have been arrested covering protests throughout American history, particularly Black journalists, particularly journalists covering civil rights actions, particularly journalists whose documentation threatens powerful interests. The Civil Rights Movement saw countless instances of journalists arrested, harassed, beaten for documenting the violence of segregation and the resistance to it.
But those arrests were usually framed differently. Either journalists were accused of unrelated offenses, trespassing, failure to disperse, disorderly conduct, or they were caught in mass arrests where police didn’t distinguish between protesters and journalists. The journalism itself was rarely the explicit basis for arrest.
What’s distinct here is the directness. The government is not saying Fort violated a neutral law that happened to apply to her. The government is saying Fort’s journalism was conspiracy. The filming was the crime.
And what was she filming? A protest about a white woman whose refusal to align her whiteness with state power got her killed. A protest naming the fact that Renee Good practiced solidarity, blew whistles when ICE showed up, stood with her Somali and Latino neighbors, and ended up shot in the head for it. A protest demanding to know why the state kills people like Renee, people who refuse the terms of the white purity complex, people who won’t use their citizenship as weapon, people who practice the kind of multiracial solidarity that threatens the machinery of enforcement.
The journalists were making that visible. And visibility is the threat. Not the protest itself, the state can handle protest. But the documentation of protest, the circulation of images, the creation of evidence that contradicts the state’s narrative, that’s what cannot be tolerated.
Because the state’s narrative about Renee Good requires believing she was a terrorist. That she tried to run over an agent. That her killing was justified. The video evidence contradicts all of this, shows the agent filming on his phone while shooting, shows him firing into the vehicle as it drives away, shows him muttering “fucking bitch” after killing her, shows him walking around uninjured despite Trump’s claim he was “recovering in the hospital.”
The video makes the lie visible. And the journalists documenting protest about that lie make the protest visible. And visibility threatens the narrative. So visibility becomes criminal.
This has a chilling effect that extends far beyond these four people.
Every journalist now covering protests has to calculate: will my documentation be treated as participation? Every newsroom now has to weigh: are we putting our reporters at risk of federal prosecution by sending them to cover protests? Every person with a phone camera at a demonstration now has to wonder: am I witnessing or am I conspiring?
The uncertainty is the enforcement mechanism. When the line between protected journalism and criminal conspiracy becomes this unclear, the safest choice is not to document at all. Don’t bring the camera. Don’t file the report. Don’t be the one who captures what happens when protesters challenge power.
This is how a free press becomes a careful press.
Then a quiet press. Then no press at all.
And here’s the crucial detail: Fort wasn’t arrested at the protest. Neither was Lemon. Neither were Crews or Lundy. They were arrested twelve days later, in their homes, after the fact. The arrests weren’t about stopping disruption in the moment. They were about creating consequences after the fact. They were about sending a message to the next journalist covering the next protest.
The message: your camera makes you a target. Your documentation of state violence, whether that violence is killing Renee Good or arresting people who name her killing, puts you in federal custody. Your journalism about solidarity across racial lines, about white people refusing to weaponize their whiteness, about the consequences of standing with vulnerable neighbors, becomes evidence of conspiracy.
Fort filmed her own arrest. That footage now circulates as documentation of what happens when you document. The video shows federal agents at her door. It shows her calm narration of what’s happening. It shows her naming the reason for the arrest: she filmed a protest as a member of the media.
That footage is now evidence of the very thing it’s documenting. Fort’s journalism about her arrest for journalism becomes more journalism that could theoretically support more charges. The documentation multiplies. The liability multiplies. The recursion continues.
This is what it looks like when the First Amendment becomes evidence rather than protection. When journalism becomes criminal act rather than constitutional right. When the camera becomes conspiracy rather than documentation.
The government is not saying journalism is illegal. The government is saying this journalism, in this context, for this purpose, documenting these people, becomes participation. Which means every journalist covering every protest now has to wonder: which journalism crosses the line? Which documentation becomes conspiracy?
And since that line is now invisible, unstable, and retroactively defined, the answer is: maybe all of it. Maybe any of it. Maybe yours.
Especially if you’re documenting protests about people like Renee Good. People who refused to let their whiteness separate them from vulnerable communities. People whose queerness disqualified them from the protection the white purity complex is supposed to provide. People who practiced solidarity and ended up dead, with the state calling them terrorists and celebrating their deaths.
Document that, and you become the target. Make visible what the state wants hidden, that it kills people for solidarity, that it lies about those killings, that it manufactures threats to justify violence, and your documentation becomes conspiracy.
Fort knew what she was documenting when she filmed that protest on January 18. She knew she was witnessing something that mattered. She knew the protesters were naming Renee Good. She knew they were challenging a pastor who doubles as an ICE field director. She knew this was newsworthy. She knew Renee’s story, white woman killed for refusing to weaponize her whiteness, mattered.
She did not know that twelve days later, federal agents would arrive at her door.
But now she does. And now everyone else does too.
The First Amendment hasn’t been repealed. It’s been inverted. It still exists as text, as law, as constitutional protection. But its application has been turned inside out. The journalism that should be protected becomes the evidence. The documentation that should be separate becomes the participation. The witnessing that should be safe becomes the crime.
Fort filmed her arrest for filming. And that footage now demonstrates exactly what happens when documentation becomes dangerous, when witnessing becomes conspiracy, when making visible the consequences of refusing white supremacy’s terms becomes federal offense.
The camera was on. The camera is always on now. But the camera no longer protects the person holding it. The camera makes them visible. And visibility, when you’re documenting state violence against people who refuse to align with power, is its own form of target.
Renee Good was visible. She blew whistles. She stood with her neighbors. She made ICE operations visible. And she was killed for it.
The journalists made the protest about her death visible. And they were arrested for it. The pattern is clear. The First Amendment, inverted.
Journalism, redefined as conspiracy. Documentation, transformed into evidence. And anyone who makes state violence visible, whether that violence is against Renee Good or against the people naming Renee Good, becoming the next target of the machinery they tried to document.
By now the machinery is visible; what remains is how it is sold to us.
THE SPECTACLE MACHINE:
Why the White House Posted Memes
The White House didn’t just announce the arrests. It celebrated them.
A meme was posted, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement presented as triumph, formatted for maximum shareability, designed for circulation. The aesthetic was deliberate: not a dry press release, not a formal statement of law enforcement action, but content optimized for social media engagement, complete with visual emphasis and celebration framing.
The medium is the message.
And the message is: this is entertainment.
This is where we need to examine the mechanics of spectacle as governance. Because what happened on January 30 was not just law enforcement. It was a performance of law enforcement designed for audience consumption, for viral spread, for demonstration effect.
The arrests themselves were theatrical. Don Lemon taken into custody in Los Angeles while covering the Grammys, maximizing visibility, ensuring media attention, creating a visual contrast between celebrity journalism and federal detention. Georgia Fort filming agents at her door in Minnesota, creating the recursive loop of journalism documenting its own suppression, ensuring the footage would circulate as both evidence and warning. The timing coordinated across time zones for maximum impact. The messaging synchronized across platforms for maximum reach.
This is not how law enforcement typically operates. Federal arrests usually happen quietly. Warrants are served with minimal fanfare. Publicity is something law enforcement tolerates rather than orchestrates. The goal is generally to execute the law, not to perform it.
But when the White House posts memes celebrating arrests, the performance is no longer secondary to the law enforcement. The performance is the law enforcement.
This is spectacle as technology. Not spectacle as distraction, though it functions that way too, but spectacle as the primary mechanism of power. The arrest creates the image. The image circulates. The circulation is the enforcement.
Think about who the intended audience is. Not judges, they don’t care about memes. Not legal scholars, they’ll analyze the statute regardless of social media. Not even the people directly affected, they’re already in custody or processing what custody means.
The audience is everyone else. Every journalist considering covering the next protest. Every activist planning the next action. Every person with a phone camera wondering whether documentation is safe. Every newsroom editor weighing whether to send reporters to demonstrations. Every person watching from home, seeing federal agents at doors, seeing mug shots circulating, seeing the White House celebrate arrests of journalists.
And every person who might think about practicing the kind of solidarity Renee Good practiced. Every white person who might consider standing with their immigrant neighbors. Every person who might blow a whistle when ICE shows up. Every person who might refuse to weaponize their whiteness, their citizenship, their supposed protection.
The spectacle is the message: this can happen to you.
This will be public. This will be celebrated. Your arrest will be content.
Renee Good’s killing was already spectacular. Video circulated. Her wife’s screams circulated. The agent muttering “fucking bitch” circulated. The lies from Trump and federal officials circulated. The manufactured narrative, that she was a terrorist, that she tried to run over an agent, that her killing was justified, all of it circulated as spectacle.
But that spectacle didn’t deter the protesters. They entered the church anyway. They chanted her name anyway. They demanded accountability anyway. They refused to accept the manufactured threat narrative anyway.
So the state needed a new spectacle. Not just the killing. Not just the lies about the killing. But the arrest of anyone who documents protest about the killing. The arrest of Black journalists covering a protest about a white woman killed for refusing to separate herself from Black and brown communities.
That’s the spectacle that does the work. That’s the image that circulates with warning attached. That’s the meme that says: document this kind of solidarity, face federal consequences.
This is a different kind of deterrent than traditional law enforcement. Traditional deterrence works through consequence: if you do X, Y will happen to you. The calculation is individual. The risk is personal. The consequence is private.
Spectacular deterrence works through circulation: when you do X, Y will happen to you and everyone will watch. The calculation is still individual, but the consequence is public. Your arrest becomes media. Your detention becomes meme. Your prosecution becomes content that circulates as warning to everyone else.
The distinction matters because spectacular deterrence doesn’t require conviction. It doesn’t even require trial. The arrest itself, amplified through circulation, performs the deterrent function. Whether charges are eventually dropped, whether convictions are obtained, whether appeals succeed, all of that happens later, slower, with less viral reach.
The spectacle happens first. And the spectacle is what works.
This is why the White House posted memes. Not because memes are effective legal arguments, they’re not. Not because memes convince judges, they don’t. But because memes circulate. They travel across platforms. They get quoted. They get screenshot and shared and discussed and debated. They become part of the ambient information environment that everyone exists within.
And in that circulation, they do their work. They make the arrests visible to people who would never read a DOJ press release. They frame the arrests as victory rather than violation. They position state power as something to celebrate rather than question. They make the spectacular enforcement feel normal, justified, even entertaining.
The meme is the enforcement mechanism. The circulation is the consequence. The visibility is the violence.
And here’s what makes this particularly effective: the same technology that enables journalism, social media, viral spread, rapid circulation, becomes the technology that amplifies the suppression of journalism. Georgia Fort’s arrest footage circulates on the same platforms as the White House’s celebratory meme. The documentation and the demonstration travel together, reinforcing each other, creating a closed loop where journalism documenting its own suppression becomes content celebrating that suppression.
The spectacle eats itself. Or rather, the spectacle eats journalism. And then posts about it.
But there’s a deeper layer here. The spectacle isn’t just about deterring journalism. It’s about managing the narrative around who deserves protection and who deserves prosecution.
Renee Good was white. That should have protected her. But the spectacle of her killing, the manufactured threat narrative, the framing of her as domestic terrorist, the celebration of her death, required redefining whiteness. Not all white people deserve protection. Only white people who align with power. Only white people who weaponize their whiteness against vulnerable communities. Only white people who refuse solidarity, who maintain distance, who serve the state.
Renee refused all of that. So she became expendable. So her killing became justified. So the spectacle of her death became a demonstration: this is what happens when white people refuse to stay in line.
And the spectacle of the arrests extends that demonstration. Four Black journalists arrested for documenting protest about a white woman killed for solidarity. The racial dynamics are deliberate. The message is layered.
To Black journalists: document at your own risk.
To white people considering solidarity: look what happened to Renee.
To everyone: the state decides who deserves protection, and deviation means death or detention.
The White House meme celebrating the arrests is not just about suppressing journalism. It’s about performing the white purity complex. It’s about demonstrating that whiteness only protects when it serves power. It’s about making visible the consequences of crossing racial lines in ways that threaten enforcement.
This is not new in kind, governments have always used media to demonstrate power, to warn opposition, to perform authority. Public executions were spectacles. Wanted posters were spectacles. Perp walks are spectacles. The performance of state power has always had an audience.
But what’s distinct about the current moment is the velocity and penetration of that performance. A meme travels faster than a press release. A screenshot reaches more people than an official statement. A viral post shapes public understanding more effectively than careful legal analysis.
The White House knows this. The meme was not accidental. It was strategic. It was recognition that in the current media environment, the performance of power is more important than the procedural legitimacy of power. The image is more powerful than the law. The circulation is more consequential than the conviction.
And so the arrests become content. The journalists become memes. The prosecution becomes entertainment. And the enforcement happens not primarily in courtrooms but in feeds, not primarily through verdicts but through virality, not primarily via legal process but through spectacle.
This is governance by demonstration. Authority performed for audience. Power exercised through visibility rather than through legitimacy.
The White House posted a meme celebrating the arrest of journalists covering a protest about a white woman killed for practicing solidarity with her immigrant neighbors. That’s the story. Not what the meme said, what it was. Not its content, its form. Not its argument, its existence.
Because the existence of the meme tells you everything you need to know about how power is operating here. It’s not trying to be right. It’s trying to be seen. It’s not trying to convince. It’s trying to circulate. It’s not trying to build legal legitimacy. It’s trying to create spectacular deterrence.
And based on the speed of circulation, the volume of discussion, the number of people now aware that journalists covering protests can be arrested and that arrests can be celebrated, the spectacle is working.
The spectacle warns white people: don’t be like Renee. Don’t stand with vulnerable communities. Don’t blow whistles. Don’t practice solidarity. Your whiteness won’t protect you if you refuse to weaponize it.
The spectacle warns Black journalists: don’t document protests about people like Renee. Don’t make visible the connections between solidarity and state violence. Don’t challenge the manufactured threat narratives. Your documentation becomes conspiracy.
The spectacle warns everyone: the state decides the terms. Deviate and face consequences. Those consequences will be public. Those consequences will be celebrated. Those consequences will circulate as warning.
The machine is running. The content is flowing. The message is sent. The image is circulating. The meme is doing its job.
This is what enforcement looks like when the medium is the message and the message is the medium and both are working together to turn journalism into spectacle and spectacle into warning and warning into silence.
The White House didn’t have to post anything. The arrests could have been quiet, procedural, minimally publicized. But quiet doesn’t perform. Procedural doesn’t circulate. Minimal publicity doesn’t deter.
The spectacle does. And so the spectacle was made. And so the spectacle was shared. And so the spectacle is now working exactly as intended.
The arrests were on January 30. The meme is forever. That’s how spectacle as governance works. The event is temporary. The circulation is permanent. The image outlasts the incident. The performance outlasts the prosecution.
And everyone watching learns the lesson: this is what happens when you document power. This is what happens when you witness violence. This is what happens when you point your camera at authority. This is what happens when you refuse to weaponize your whiteness. This is what happens when you practice solidarity. This is what happens when you stand with the vulnerable.
You become content. You become meme. You become warning. You become spectacle.
And the spectacle, once created, never stops circulating.
Renee Good became spectacle. Her killing, her manufactured threat narrative, her framing as terrorist, all spectacle. All circulation. All demonstration of what happens when white people refuse the terms of white supremacy.
The journalists became spectacle. Their arrests, their mug shots, their documentation of their own detention, all spectacle. All circulation. All demonstration of what happens when you make state violence visible.
And now the spectacle continues. This essay is part of it. The conversation around these arrests is part of it. The circulation of information about Renee Good, about the journalists, about the pastor who wears a mask, about the White House meme, all of it is spectacle.
The question is not whether we can escape the spectacle. We can’t. The question is what we do inside it. Whether we let the spectacle do its deterrent work. Whether we accept the manufactured narratives. Whether we stop documenting, stop witnessing, stop practicing solidarity because the consequences have been made spectacular.
Or whether we recognize that the spectacle’s power depends on our compliance. That the circulation can carry counter-narratives. That documentation of suppression is still documentation. That making visible the machinery of spectacular deterrence is itself a form of resistance to that machinery.
The White House posted a meme. The spectacle machine is running. The enforcement is happening through visibility, through circulation, through performance.
But visibility cuts both ways. The machine that makes arrests spectacular also makes the arrests visible. The circulation that warns also informs. The spectacle that demonstrates state power also demonstrates state violence.
Renee Good is dead. The journalists are facing federal prosecution. The White House is celebrating. The meme is circulating.
And we decide, each of us, watching the spectacle, participating in its circulation, making choices about what we document and what we share and what we refuse to accept, whether the spectacle succeeds in its work.
The machine is running. But we don’t have to be quiet about it.
DIFFERENTIAL RELEASE:
The Strategy of Selective Freedom
Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were released on January 30 afternoon.
Trahern Crews and Jamael Lundy were not.
This is not an accident. This is architecture.
The differential release does more work than uniform detention could do. If all four remained in custody, the narrative would be simple: unjust arrest, continued detention, clear suppression. If all four were released immediately, the narrative would be: overreach quickly corrected, system working as designed, minimal harm done.
But releasing two while holding two creates something more complex and more useful to the state: a demonstration of discretion, a gradient of consequence, a message that outcomes are unpredictable and therefore the risk calculation becomes impossible. This is how uncertainty becomes a tool.
Let’s examine what the differential treatment accomplishes.
First, it fractures solidarity. The four were arrested together, charged under the same theory, facing the same statute. They were arrested for documenting a protest about Renee Good, a white woman killed for practicing solidarity with her immigrant neighbors, for refusing to weaponize her whiteness, for standing with vulnerable communities despite the protection her citizenship was supposed to provide.
But now the four arrested for documenting protest about that solidarity occupy different positions. Two are free to speak publicly, to organize their defense, to return to their work. Two remain in custody, facing continued detention, unable to participate in their own public defense with the same freedom.
The fracture is not personal, these are not people who will abandon each other. But it’s structural. The state has created different conditions for people facing the same charges. That difference will require different strategies, different resources, different public narratives. The unity of the four arrested together begins to split into the complexity of two released and two detained.
Second, it creates the appearance of responsiveness. Look, the state can say, we released some of them. We’re not unreasonable. We’re not overreaching. We’re making distinctions, exercising judgment, responding to circumstances. The fact that two were released becomes evidence that the system is working, that there are offramps, that consequences are not absolute.
This appearance of responsiveness obscures the fact that all four arrests were unjustified to begin with. The releases don’t undo the arrests. They don’t vindicate the detained. They don’t acknowledge error. They just create the illusion that the state is being measured, careful, appropriately discriminating in its use of force.
Just like the illusion that Renee Good’s killing is being investigated. Federal agents investigating federal agents. The same machinery that killed her now determining whether killing her was justified. Local authorities excluded. Transparency denied. The investigation hidden behind the same masks the agents wear during enforcement.
The differential release operates the same way. It creates the appearance of process, of consideration, of justice being carefully calibrated. But underneath is the same machinery: power deciding who stays and who goes based on criteria that serve power’s interests, not justice.
Third, and this is the most insidious function, it makes the calculation impossible for the next person considering whether to document a protest. If all journalists covering protests were arrested and detained indefinitely, the risk would be clear. Don’t do it. The consequence is certain, severe, extended. If all journalists were arrested and immediately released, the risk would be clear too. The arrest happens, but it’s brief, manageable, more harassment than true consequence.
But when some are released and some are not, when the difference seems arbitrary or based on factors not publicly explained, when there’s no clear rule determining who gets out and who stays in, that’s when the calculation becomes paralyzing.
Will you be Lemon or Crews? Fort or Lundy? Released by afternoon or held indefinitely? There’s no way to know in advance. And that uncertainty is more deterring than certainty of consequence would be.
This is a documented phenomenon in deterrence theory. Unpredictable consequences create more compliance than predictable ones. If you know exactly what will happen when you do X, you can decide whether the consequence is worth it. But if you don’t know whether X will result in minor inconvenience or extended detention, the risk becomes incalculable. And incalculable risk tends to produce risk avoidance.
The differential release operationalizes that theory. It creates a spectrum of consequence where there should be binary: either journalism is protected or it’s prosecuted. But now journalism is sometimes prosecuted and sometimes released and sometimes detained and the difference between those outcomes is opaque.
Just like the difference between white people who get killed by the state and white people who don’t. Renee Good was white. US citizen. That should have protected her. But she was queer. She practiced solidarity. She refused to weaponize her whiteness. So she became expendable. So her killing became justified.
The calculus is impossible. Which white people are protected? Which aren’t? What makes the difference? The opacity is strategic. If the rules were clear, they could be followed or challenged. But when the rules shift based on factors like queerness, like solidarity, like whether you blow whistles or stay silent, the safest choice is compliance. Don’t deviate. Don’t practice solidarity. Don’t stand with vulnerable communities. Don’t risk discovering you’re in the expendable category.
The differential release extends that logic to journalism. Which journalists are detained? Which are released? What makes the difference? The opacity prevents prediction. And the inability to predict creates maximum deterrence.
So what determines the difference? Why were Lemon and Fort released while Crews and Lundy were not?
The public doesn’t know. Maybe it’s about legal representation, who has lawyers who could mobilize quickly. Maybe it’s about public profile, Lemon’s name recognition creating more pressure for release. Maybe it’s about the specific facts of each person’s alleged involvement. Maybe it’s about bail conditions or flight risk or prosecutorial discretion or any number of factors that aren’t publicly visible.
The opacity is the point. If the criteria for release were clear and publicly announced, they could be criticized, challenged, used to predict future outcomes. But when the criteria are invisible or inconsistently applied, prediction becomes impossible. And impossibility of prediction creates maximum deterrence.
Fourth, the differential release extends the story. If all four were released on January 30, the news cycle would move on. Story over, charges still pending but no immediate detention to focus attention. If all four remained in custody, there would be sustained pressure for release, unified advocacy, clear demand.
But with two released and two detained, the story continues in a different form. Now there’s advocacy for the two still held. Now there’s comparison, why them and not the others? Now there’s ongoing uncertainty about what happens next. The arrests don’t resolve into clear narrative. They split into ongoing complexity that maintains attention without creating unified opposition.
The state benefits from that extended complexity. Every day Crews and Lundy remain in custody while Lemon and Fort are free is another day of demonstrating that the state holds discretion over journalists’ freedom. Another day of showing that documentation of protests can result in detention whose duration is determined by factors outside public view. Another day of warning.
Just like every day since Renee Good’s killing is another day of demonstrating what happens when white people refuse to align with power. Another day of showing that whiteness only protects when it serves the state. Another day of warning everyone who might consider the kind of solidarity she practiced.
The machinery keeps running. The demonstration keeps going. The spectacle continues.
And fifth, perhaps most importantly, the differential release allows the state to claim it’s being reasonable while maintaining the core demonstration. Look, we released the famous ones, the government can say. We’re not trying to suppress all journalism. We’re making appropriate distinctions.
But the distinction is not between legitimate journalism and illegitimate journalism. The distinction is between who the state chooses to release and who it chooses to hold. That’s not a legal distinction. It’s an exercise of power.
Just like the distinction between white people who deserve protection and white people who don’t. Renee Good was white. But she was queer. She practiced solidarity. She refused to weaponize her citizenship. So the state killed her and called it justified. The distinction wasn’t about law. It was about power deciding who deserves to live based on whether they serve power’s interests.
The differential release operates the same way. Power deciding who deserves freedom based on whether releasing them serves power’s interests. Maybe releasing Lemon and Fort reduces pressure. Maybe it creates the appearance of reasonableness. Maybe it allows the state to say: see, we’re not suppressing all journalism, just the journalism we decide is conspiracy.
But underneath that appearance is the same core message: we can arrest journalists for covering protests, we can hold some and release others, and our criteria for who gets released are ours to determine.
So when you’re the next journalist covering the next protest, you have to ask: if arrested, will I be released like Lemon and Fort? Or detained like Crews and Lundy? Will I be out by afternoon, or held indefinitely? Will my name recognition protect me or make me more of a target? Will my legal resources matter or will prosecutorial discretion override them?
You can’t know. And that’s the design. The uncertainty is the enforcement mechanism. The unpredictability is the deterrent. The differential treatment is the technology.
And if you’re a white person considering the kind of solidarity Renee Good practiced, you have to ask: will my whiteness protect me? Or will my queerness disqualify me? Will my solidarity mark me as terrorist? Will my refusal to weaponize my citizenship result in bullets?
You can’t know. The rules aren’t clear. The protection isn’t guaranteed. The only safety is compliance, stay in line, maintain distance, don’t practice solidarity, don’t blow whistles, don’t stand with vulnerable communities.
This is more sophisticated than blanket suppression. Blanket suppression creates unified opposition, clear narrative, obvious tyranny. But selective suppression, arrest some, release some, detain others, apply pressure unevenly, create gradients of consequence, creates confusion, fragments opposition, makes resistance harder to organize because the target keeps moving.
Renee Good is dead. That’s certain. The journalists who documented protest about her death were arrested. That’s certain. Two were released. Two remain in custody. That’s the current state.
But what happens next? Who else gets arrested? Who gets released? Who gets detained? How long? Based on what criteria?
All uncertain. All opaque. All designed to maximize the chilling effect.
Crews and Lundy are still in custody as of this writing. That fact sits alongside the fact that Lemon and Fort were released. Both facts are true. Both facts are part of the same enforcement action. And together, those facts create a picture of state power that is more complex, more calibrated, more difficult to resist than simple uniform detention would be.
The differential release is not mercy. It’s not the system self-correcting. It’s not evidence that the arrests were appropriate but the detention was not.
It’s strategy. It’s the state demonstrating that it can make distinctions, exercise discretion, release some while holding others, all while maintaining the core message: document protests at your own risk. We’ll determine the consequence. You won’t know in advance what that consequence will be. But you’ll know it can include federal arrest and indefinite detention.
And if you’re lucky, if you’re connected, if you’re famous, if you have resources, if you’re the one we choose for reasons we don’t have to explain, maybe you’ll be released by afternoon.
Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll be Crews. Maybe you’ll be Lundy. Maybe you’ll be the one who stays behind while others go free.
Just like maybe you’ll be Renee Good. White, citizen, but queer and in solidarity and therefore expendable. Maybe you’ll practice the kind of multiracial community care that threatens the machinery of enforcement. Maybe you’ll refuse to weaponize your whiteness. Maybe you’ll blow whistles when ICE shows up.
And maybe you’ll end up shot in the head, called a terrorist, your killing justified, your death turned into spectacle, your name chanted by protesters who then get arrested, documented by journalists who then face federal prosecution.
You won’t know until after you’ve documented. Until after you’ve practiced solidarity. Until after you’ve pointed the camera. Until after you’ve blown the whistle. Until after you’ve stood with your neighbors. Until after the agents arrive.
By then it’s too late to know.
And that’s exactly how the system is designed to work.
The differential release extends the demonstration. It doesn’t end it. It creates ongoing uncertainty about who deserves freedom and who deserves detention, just like Renee Good’s killing created ongoing uncertainty about who deserves protection and who deserves death.
The white purity complex only protects when you serve power. Solidarity disqualifies you. Queerness disqualifies you. Deviation means you become expendable.
The journalism that documents that reality faces the same machinery. Some released. Some detained. The difference opaque. The criteria hidden. The outcome unpredictable.
And the uncertainty, the opacity, the unpredictability, that’s not a bug. That’s the entire design.
Crews and Lundy remain in custody. The demonstration continues. The machinery keeps running. And everyone watching learns the lesson about what happens when you document state violence, when you make visible the consequences of refusing to align with power, when you point your camera at the arrests of people protesting about a woman killed for solidarity.
You become part of the demonstration. You become evidence of what the state can do. You become warning to everyone else.
And whether you’re released by afternoon or held indefinitely, that’s not up to you. That’s up to power. That’s the point.
Let that be enough—for now.
Author’s Note
I wrote the initial alert, BREACHED, within hours of the arrests. It went out as emergency notice, as alarm, as refusal to treat this as normal. By the time you’re reading this extended essay, some facts may have shifted. Charges may have been modified or dropped. More people may have been released or detained. The legal proceedings will continue to unfold in ways I cannot predict from this moment of writing.
But the arrests themselves cannot be undone. The message sent by those arrests cannot be unsent. The demonstration of state power cannot be undemonstrated.
This essay is not primarily about what happens next in court. It’s about what happened when federal agents arrested four Black journalists and activists for covering a protest about a white woman killed by a federal agent, a woman killed precisely because she refused to let her whiteness separate her from her Black and brown neighbors.
It’s about what it means that this happened in twelve days. It’s about what it means that Reconstruction-era civil rights law was weaponized against Black witnesses. It’s about what it means that a church led by an ICE field director became a site where journalism was redefined as conspiracy. It’s about what it means that the First Amendment was inverted into evidence. It’s about what it means that the White House celebrated these arrests with memes. It’s about what it means that some were released while others remain detained.
These meanings don’t change based on legal outcomes. They exist in the act itself, in the choice to arrest, in the speed of the arrests, in the spectacle of the arrests, in the differential consequences of the arrests.
I wrote this at the threshold of Black History Month 2026. That timing is not incidental. February is when we are told to remember the history of Black resistance, Black journalism, Black witnesses who documented the violence of their time. We celebrate Ida B. Wells for documenting lynching. We honor the Black photographers who captured the brutality of Jim Crow. We remember the journalists who covered the Civil Rights Movement at great personal risk.
And then, in that same month, we watch the federal government arrest Black journalists for documenting a protest about a woman killed by a federal agent.
The lesson is supposed to be that this happened in the past, that we’ve moved beyond it, that we honor those historical witnesses because we no longer suppress contemporary ones. But the arrests on January 30 make clear: the suppression never stopped. It just changed form. It got faster. It got more spectacular. It wrapped itself in civil rights law and claimed to be protecting the very rights it was violating.
This is not history. This is present tense. This is happening now. This is the machinery operating in real time, recalibrating what’s possible, demonstrating new capacities, testing new boundaries.
I am writing this as someone who understands that documentation is not neutral, that witnessing is not passive, that journalism is always already political because it makes visible what power would prefer to keep hidden. I am writing this as someone who knows that Black journalists have always occupied a particular position in American media, simultaneously essential and expendable, celebrated in retrospect and suppressed in the present, honored as history and criminalized as contemporaries.
I am writing this because the alarm is still ringing. Because Trahern Crews and Jamael Lundy are still in custody as I write this sentence. Because the next protest will happen soon and journalists will have to decide whether to cover it. Because that decision is now complicated by the knowledge that coverage can result in federal arrest within twelve days.
I am writing this because silence in the face of these arrests would be complicity. Because treating this as normal would normalize it. Because accepting the spectacle as merely newsworthy rather than as governance strategy would miss the mechanism at work.
And I am writing this because we are at a threshold. Not the threshold between democracy and authoritarianism, we crossed that boundary long ago in various ways, for various populations, through various mechanisms. But the threshold between journalism as protected constitutional right and journalism as prosecutable conspiracy. Between witnessing as civic function and witnessing as criminal act. Between documentation as accountability and documentation as evidence against the documenter.
These arrests are that threshold being crossed in public, in real time, with celebration and memes and federal authority backing it.
So this essay is not prediction. It’s documentation. Not analysis of what might happen. But examination of what has already happened. Not warning about future suppression. But naming current suppression. Not asking what we should do if journalism becomes dangerous. But recognizing that journalism has been made dangerous and responding accordingly.
The four people arrested on January 30 were doing their work. Covering a protest. Documenting dissent. Witnessing the naming of Renee Good, a woman killed by the state. That work resulted in federal custody.
This essay is my work. Analyzing that arrest. Examining its mechanics. Refusing its normalization. Naming its implications.
I don’t know what will happen to Trahern Crews and Jamael Lundy in the days after I finish this sentence. I don’t know what will happen to the charges against all four. I don’t know what the next protest will bring or whether journalists will cover it or what consequences that coverage will carry.
But I know this: the machinery has announced itself. The arrests are the announcement. The velocity is the message. The spectacle is the enforcement. The differential release is the strategy. And the silence in response to all of this would be acceptance.
So this is refusal. This is documentation of the documentation’s suppression. This is witnessing of the criminalization of witnessing. This is journalism about the arrest of journalists.
This is the alarm, still ringing, refusing to be background noise.
Renee Good’s name was being chanted in that church on January 18. The protesters made sure her name was spoken. The journalists made sure the speaking was documented. And now those journalists face federal prosecution for that documentation.
Her name is in this essay too. Her death is the context these arrests try to erase. Her killing by an ICE agent is what the protest was naming. Her absence is what the state would prefer not to be documented.
But she was documented. The protest was documented. And now the arrests of the documenters are being documented.
The chain of witnessing continues. Each act of documentation creates the conditions for the next. Each attempt to suppress documentation creates more documentation of suppression.
This is how journalism works when journalism becomes dangerous. You document the danger. You name the suppression. You refuse the silence. You make visible what power tries to hide. And you accept that visibility itself may carry consequence.
I am visible writing this. You are visible reading this. We are all visible now in ways that matter, in ways that carry risk, in ways that previous moments didn’t require us to calculate.
But visibility is not the same as vulnerability. Documentation is not the same as defenselessness. Witnessing is not passive. And journalism that names the suppression of journalism is itself a form of resistance to that suppression.
So this essay stands as documentation. As witness. As refusal. As alarm. As analysis of how power is operating in this moment. As warning about what these arrests mean for everyone who might document the next protest, the next act of state violence, the next moment when someone needs to say a name out loud and someone else needs to record that speaking.
The arrests happened on January 30. This essay exists now. The charges remain pending. The machinery keeps operating. The alarm keeps ringing.
And we decide, each of us, in our various positions, with our various capacities, whether to hear it.
UNSPUN publishes longform essays, editorial encounters, and visual documents tracing the language of power as it operates in real time.
This work appears as part of UNSPUN’s ongoing inquiry into how authority circulates, how permission is granted, and how silence functions as structure rather than absence.
If something in this piece altered your footing, that alteration is intentional.
What follows does not ask for agreement. It asks for attention.
UNSPUN continues for those willing to stay with the work as it unfolds.
Sources
NYT piece on Lemon’s arrest and release + naming Fort and the church protest. nytimes, January 30, 2026.
Pam Bondi, “At my direction, early this morning federal agents arrested Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, Trahern Crews, and Jamael Lundy…,” X (formally Twitter), January 30. 2026.
FOX 9 Staff, “Activists Call for Cities Church Pastor to Resign over ICE Leadership Conflict,” FOX 9 Minneapolis–St. Paul, January 19, 2026.
18 U.S.C. § 241 (“Conspiracy against rights”), derived from the Civil Rights Act of 1871, makes it a federal crime for “two or more persons [to] conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
On September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four Black girls—Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Denise McNair (11)—in an attack aimed at a key civil-rights organizing church.
On June 17, 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire during a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, murdering nine Black parishioners: Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton‑Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., Rev. Sharonda Coleman‑Singleton, and Myra Thompson.
Still learning my friend. I value your work and trust you see what I am trying to accomplish. Still learning the norms and culture. I value your insight
Health And Wealth
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