When federal agents arrived at Georgia Fort’s front door to arrest her, she knew what to do: be a journalist.

Fort, an independent Minnesota reporter who faces criminal charges after covering a protest inside a St Paul church, took out her phone and spoke directly to the camera, livestreaming to her audience that her lawyer advised her to go with the agents. Her three kids were in the house at the time, she said.

“I’m going to have to hop off here and surrender to agents,” she said in the video on 30 January. “As a member of the press, I filmed the church protest a few weeks ago, and now I’m being arrested for that. It’s hard to understand how we have a constitution, constitutional rights, when you can just be arrested for being a member of the press.”

Fort was one of two journalists, alongside Don Lemon, charged for covering the 18 January protest during services at St Paul’s Cities church, where a pastor reportedly works as a field director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I decided to go live [during my arrest] because I felt like it was necessary to be able to tell my story about who I am and my longstanding commitment to journalism,” she said, “and to alert the public that this was a violation of my first amendment rights.”

The two Black, independent journalists, and the protesters, were charged with unusual violations of law. Charging journalists is in general unusual. Trump has long cast the media as a foe and, during his second administration, has ramped up attacks on the press as part of his campaign of retribution.

During the height of “Operation Metro Surge” in January, days after a federal agent killed Renee Good, dozens of people entered the church to call attention to one of its pastors, who reportedly served as an acting field director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Nearly 40 people have been charged over the protest in a sprawling case that pits the first amendment rights to protest and report against the free exercise of religion. The Trump administration has made clear that the case is a high priority. Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the civil rights division at the Department of Justice, has said the government is “going to pursue this to the ends of the earth”, which the government said in legal filings was not a political statement but “mere promises to vigorously enforce federal criminal law”.

Fort, 38, has worked as a journalist for nearly two decades and has been independent for roughly the last eight years, producing her own award-winning television show on a local Twin Cities station. She shares her reporting with her online audience of nearly 160,000 followers on Facebook and more than 130,000 on Instagram, and she’s highly involved in the journalism community, working to train the next generation of reporters.

She has seen her work affected by the charges. She’s entangled with a host of local sources as co-defendants in a case she would ordinarily be covering as a journalist, especially as one who focuses on constitutional rights and amplifying underrepresented voices.

“It’s a slap in the face to be prosecuted in the same courts in which I’ve been credentialed as a member of the press,” she said.

In 2020, she saw the CNN journalist Omar Jimenez arrested live on television by Minnesota state patrol. If that could happen to a CNN reporter live on TV, it could easily happen to an independent journalist, she said.

“I think that if your reporting upholds the status quo, no, you probably won’t be targeted,” she said. “But if you’re a journalist like me who is committed to exposing the truth and documenting injustices, yeah, it probably will make you more of a target under this administration.”

The government has charged the Minnesota protesters with a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994 (Face Act), a law used to charge people who vandalize a reproductive healthcare clinic, or who threaten, obstruct or injure someone who is trying to access that clinic. The law includes a previously unused provision that prohibits interfering with the exercise of religious freedom at a place of worship. While the administration has brought the charges under that portion, it has virtually stopped prosecuting under the provisions that prevent intimidation at reproductive care clinics and accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the act. Trump has also pardoned nearly two dozen anti-abortion activists convicted of violating the clinic access provision.

The protesters face a second charge of conspiracy to deprive others of rights, a law originally created during the Reconstruction era to protect Black southerners from the Ku Klux Klan.

These types of charges against journalists are “unprecedented”, said Gabe Rottman, vice-president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. In the rare instance where a journalist is charged, it’s typically for trespassing, and those charges are often dismissed, he said.

“It’s another escalation on the part of the second Trump administration,” he said. “It’s exceedingly rare, so much so that it hasn’t happened before. These particular statutes haven’t been used to charge a journalist.”

The journalists will have strong defenses in this case, Rottman said. Prosecutors would need to prove that the journalists acted with an intent to deprive people of their rights, he said.

Using these laws “is a really dramatic overcharge”, he said.

The Cities church protest

After a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good in the streets of Minneapolis on 7 January, Fort worked every day for up to 18 hours a day.

She had been covering immigration agents’ raids in the Twin Cities well before the surge. She covers stories of importance to Black and brown communities, she said, and violations of civil, constitutional and human rights. When George Floyd was killed by a police officer in 2020, she reported on the uprisings and aftermath extensively.

The day of the church protest was no different: “I woke up to document what was happening in community.”

Video shows a few dozen protesters entering Cities church on 18 January, disrupting a service. They chant “ICE out” and stand in the aisles. In Fort’s video about the protest, organizer Nekima Levy Armstrong holds a microphone and explains why they’re at the church: one of the pastors is an acting field director at ICE.

“How dare you claim to be a pastor of God and you are involved in evil in our community,” Armstrong says on the video.

Lemon interviews a pastor inside the church, who says they asked the protesters to leave but they wouldn’t.

The government’s indictment of the first batch of protesters and the two journalists alleges the congregants feared for their safety. The government claims the interview with the pastor was “an attempt to oppress and intimidate him”. The indictment mentions Lemon more than Fort, but claims she interviewed Armstrong in front of a minivan that was preparing to depart the church.

“The indictment itself describes Ms Fort as ‘interview[ing]’ Ms Armstrong: a quintessential journalistic function,” defense lawyers wrote in a filing. “That is confirmed by internal surveillance footage from the church … in which Ms Fort can be seen capturing the events using a professional-grade camera and microphone and livestreaming Mr Lemon’s interview of the Cities church pastor.”

“I am a journalist, and I have published all of the footage I captured that day,” Fort said. “It speaks for itself.”

The church protest was quickly condemned by the right, and Trump administration officials vowed to prosecute. When Armstrong was arrested, White House social media accounts doctored her image to make it appear like she was crying. After a first round of indictments, the government filed dozens more and is now charging 38 people.

A federal judge first refused to charge the journalists, and an appeals court also rejected the charges. The justice department eventually secured a grand jury indictment. Fort and Lemon’s lawyers are seeking access to grand jury documents, arguing the irregular approach to get charges could mean the grand jury was misled or misinstructed.

“To date, everything in this case has been irregular. We can assume the grand jury proceedings were too,” a filing seeking access to grand jury materials says. “In the United States of America, we do not prosecute journalists for doing their job. That happens in Russia, China, Iran and other authoritarian regimes. And yet the government sold this unconstitutional mess to the grand jury.”

In a response filing, the government said this quest to bring charges wasn’t “improper”, but an attempt to prevent copycat crimes.

“The Government was trying to protect the First Amendment rights of all people to worship freely in their houses of worship and avoid violence and injuries happening at houses of worship across the country,” the filing says.

In a video analyzing the church protest before she was arrested, Fort asked how Lemon became the story. Maybe, she said, it was to “divert attention” from the focus of the protest: David Easterwood, the pastor who apparently worked for ICE.

“It’s become more about the charges and less about the reason why community was there in the first place,” she said.

A journalist muzzled

While the case lingers, Fort’s ability to do her job is compromised. The effects on her family weigh heavily on her, and she fears what will happen if she’s convicted. The charges carry potential for prison time, though the sentence could vary widely.

“It’s one day at a time. It’s a lot,” she said. “For the most part, I’m good, but I have worked really hard to provide a good life for my kids, and my daughters mean the world to me. And so the thought of that being taken away, it crushes me, just the thought of it.”

Her daughters – aged 17, eight and seven – are still dealing with the aftermath of her arrest. They were terrified when agents banged on the door and stayed outside their home for hours after her arrest, she said. Her eldest drove the two younger girls to their aunt’s house with her husband in a car behind them.Agents stopped them coming out of the driveway to ask whether they had their mother’s laptop or cellphone.

“My eight-year-old talks about ICE every single day. My oldest daughter has had nightmares, and my youngest daughter, she doesn’t quite understand, but she does see the way that it’s affected everybody, and so you can see now how it’s starting to affect her as well,” she said. “It’s disrupted their sense of security. And I think it’s going to take a really long time for our family to heal.”

She doesn’t understand why the agents couldn’t wait until her children had left for school or why two dozen agents were needed to arrest a journalist at her home.

Her eldest daughter spoke publicly at a press conference after Fort’s arrest, telling reporters that her mother was doing her job.

“She is not a protester. She is not an activist. She is a mom working to provide for her children through the only way she knows how, documenting and sharing stories of the community and truth of what’s happening here every day in our state,” her daughter said then.

Covering the case carries ethical and legal concerns, Fort said. Anything she reports on it could be used against her in the case. She has produced some videos about the case, but not to the extent she normally would cover it as a reporter. Charging her is an attempt to “muzzle” her and her reporting, she said.

When she’s received tips about other actions where there could be civil disobedience, she has refrained from going to report.

“There’s things I’m not covering right now because it’s too dangerous,” she said. “And as much as I do want to serve my community and make sure they’re informed and make sure that there is an accurate document of what’s happening, I also want to be with my kids just as much, if not more. I want to be able to see my daughter’s birthday. So my risk tolerance is zero these days.”

Fort often highlights attacks on journalists in her coverage, and she brings up the sustained attack on press freedom globally as context for her arrest. She points to journalists like Mario Guevara, a Latino journalist in Georgia who was deported by the Trump administration, and the hundreds of journalists killed in Gaza.

These attacks on journalists aren’t just personal – they are an attack on the public’s right to know, she said.

“Why would anybody not want you to know truth and facts?” she said. “Why would someone want to arrest and criminalize the people whose job it is to simply keep you informed?”