Cities Church Defendants Move to Dismiss, Alleging Selective FACE Act Prosecution and 92 DHS Customs Summonses

Attorneys for the 38 people charged over the January 18 anti-ICE protest at Cities Church in St. Paul filed more than five dozen motions on Monday, August 31, 2026, including requests to dismiss the charges. All 38 have pleaded not guilty. The defendants include journalists who covered the protest — former CNN anchor Don Lemon, independent journalist Georgia Fort, and civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong (2026-01-29–cities-church-protest-federal-indictment-18-usc-241-face-act).

The selective-prosecution motion

One motion argues the defendants have been singled out for selective or vindictive prosecution under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act — a 1994 statute passed in response to violent anti-abortion clinic protests, which also protects access to worship services from intimidation or physical obstruction. Prosecutors allege the demonstrators engaged in “intimidation, threats, interference and physical obstruction.” The protest targeted the church because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, was serving as acting Field Director of ICE’s St. Paul field office (2026-01-18–anti-ice-protesters-disrupt-st-paul-church-service).

The defense’s comparison class is the point of the motion. It argues the administration enforces a double standard on the political content of protest, citing protests targeting LGBTQ-friendly churches in Texas and Florida that drew no comparable charges:

“Not only has the administration left similar church protests unprosecuted, but it has also pardoned and dismissed cases involving recidivist and even violent anti-abortion offenders.”

Attorneys further allege a government “permissive attitude” toward undercover ICE agents conducting surveillance in churches — pointing at the Minnesota 15 case (2026-06-16–minnesota-us-attorney-indicts-15-direct-action-minnesota-antifa-ties), where disclosed HSI files showed an undercover officer surveilling inside University Baptist Church (2026-08-20–synod-plaintiffs-file-non-compliance-motion-whipple-shield-roi-university-baptist). The asymmetry named here is the whole structure in one sentence: protesting inside a church is charged as a federal civil-rights conspiracy; the government’s own agents operating inside churches under an injunction barring them (2026-08-15–dhs-surveilled-five-midwest-churches-saylor-injunction-violation-university-baptist) draws no charge at all.

The 92 customs summonses

A separate dismissal motion attacks the investigative authority behind the case: DHS, through HSI, used 92 customs administrative summonses to investigate and prosecute these defendants. The recipients were “telecommunications, airlines, social-media and internet platforms, a rental-car company, a retailer, a state employment agency, and other third parties.”

“DHS does not possess general jurisdiction to investigate every federal crime; its investigative authority is limited to the functions Congress expressly assigned, transferred, or otherwise vested in the Department and its components.”

This is the same mechanism the Guardian documented at scale days earlier — customs-import authority under 19 U.S.C. § 1509 used to obtain records with no judge in the path (2026-08-29–dhs-19-usc-1509-customs-summonses-journalists-unions-nonprofits-no-judicial-review). The Cities Church filing supplies the count inside a single prosecution: 92 summonses, none requiring judicial approval, against a set of defendants that includes working journalists. The government has answered earlier challenges to its investigative authority by accusing defendants of attempting to “micromanage the government’s prosecution.”

Posture

The filings land after an order last month requiring the government to turn over all grand jury materials for judicial review — an unusual step, given that grand jury proceedings are ordinarily secret. MPR ties the heightened scrutiny to a federal judge in Chicago who uncovered prosecutorial misconduct in a case involving anti-ICE activists, which led to charges being dropped. Separately, the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office declined to bring state charges over the demonstration, citing insufficient evidence; the prosecution is federal only.

A hearing in the church-injunction non-compliance case is set for Friday in Massachusetts.

Sourcing note. The dollar-free specifics above — the 92 summonses, the recipient categories, and both quoted passages — are as reported by MPR News from the motions themselves; the motions were not read directly. The pastor’s name and ICE title are carried from canon (2026-01-18–anti-ice-protesters-disrupt-st-paul-church-service), not from this reporting. The Star Tribune report is cited as independent confirmation of the filing; its full text was not retrievable (HTTP 429) at the time of writing.

Own-words pass (2026-09-02). The defendants’ own accounts were gathered and verified at primary sources after this entry was written: own-words-pass-cities-church-prosecution-defendants-2026 in cascade-research. All three named defendants are deployable as witnesses. Georgia Fort narrated her own arrest on livestream — “This is all stemming from the fact that I filmed a protest as a member of the media” — and later described the prosecution’s effect on her work: “I also worry that if I return to Cities Church to cover the ongoing protests taking place there, I will be arrested again.” Nekima Levy Armstrong, who defends the protest as a protest rather than as coverage, puts the theology against the church’s: “The core of the gospel message is to love thy neighbor as you love yourself. And ICE has been doing the opposite of that.” Note that the three are not one voice — two say they were there as journalists, one as an organizer — and that Lemon’s widely-quoted “we do not prosecute journalists for doing their job” line is his legal motion’s language, not his own speech.