Journalist Don Lemon was arrested this week on charges stemming from his participation in an invasion of a St. Paul, Minnesota, church during its Sunday services.

As he accompanied anti-ICE protesters inside, Lemon claimed to be merely a journalist, documenting the trespassers as they protested and disrupted the religious service. Federal authorities say he was no bystander but rather a participant in the action, which they say violates a federal law.

Lemon and his supporters see this as a First Amendment issue. So do the feds. Is there an exception to the freedom of religion that allows it to be disrupted because of freedom of the press?

Press freedoms are essential to a republic, but they do not amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. If Lemon had remained outside the church and simply interviewed protesters and parishioners, he would have been well within his rights, no matter what opinions he offered in support of one side or the other. But when he joined the mob and entered the church, he committed the same crime they did in disrupting the rights of the worshipers there.

His arrest was no prosecutorial overreach.

The protesters were charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act), which was passed in 1994 following the murder of a prominent abortionist, Dr. David Gunn, outside his clinic. The law banned protesters from hindering anyone from entering an abortion clinic or injuring or intimidating them. This law would seem unrelated to the church invasion, but a second, rarely-used section of the FACE Act applies the same rules to those who would injure, intimidate, or interfere with people practicing their religion at a house of worship.

FACE Act prosecutions usually involve the first section of the law, the abortion clinic protections, and the Biden administration was not shy about using it. In 2023, for example, they charged an 89-year-old woman, Eva Edl, along with six others with the same crime. Edl was alleged to have been “sitting in front of one entrance with a doorstop wedged under the door”. If the law is broad enough to say that an elderly woman sitting on the floor was a threat, it should certainly cover a shouting mob of (much younger) people invading a church.

That was enough to arrest the invasion’s organizers days ago. But what of Lemon’s claim that he was there “as a journalist”? According to the indictment, Lemon was a part of the planning process and livestreamed the event beginning as the invaders were on their way to the church, even warning his co-conspirators that they were streaming and should keep the location of the raid a secret. He was doing the same thing the rest of the invaders were doing — does holding a camera while you commit a crime confer immunity?

Of course, it does not. Freedom of the press is not a grant of special status to a special class of people. It is a right enjoyed by all Americans, the right to publish your words, ideas, and opinions — the technological amplifier to the freedom of speech. And no one here is attempting to take that away from Lemon. His arrest will probably win him new viewers for the vlog that few knew even existed. He has the freedom of the press, but videotaping your crime spree does not give you immunity from prosecution; it just creates more evidence for prosecutors to use against you.

Or, at least so the prosecutors said and the grand jury agreed. Will a Minnesota trial jury come to the same conclusion? That still remains to be seen.