Democrats spent the weekend torn between two urgent crises: keeping their carefully choreographed ‘ICE Out’ protests in the spotlight, and loudly melting down over the arrest of Don Lemon.

Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor, was fired by the network in April 2023 after a string of on-air remarks and backstage drama finally made him more of a liability than a ratings boost.

Don Lemon now calls himself an independent journalist – and yet he ended up arrested recently by federal agents after his livestream coverage of an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a January worship service at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota on January 18. He has since been released on his own recognizance.

Prosecutors hit him and others with federal civil rights charges, accusing them of interfering with religious freedom by participating in a disturbance during the service – a move Lemon calls “journalism” and his supporters call his First Amendment right.

Gateway Pundit reports the unsealed indictment as saying that Lemon and his co- conspirators “oppressed, threatened, and intimidated the Church’s congregants and pastors by physically occupying most of the main aisle and rows of chairs near the front of the Church, engaging in menacing and threatening behavior,(for some) chanting and yelling loudly at the pastor and congregants, and/or physically obstructing them as they attempted to exit and/or move about within the Church.”

In a video on Rumble, Lemon said that he’s not scared about what is happening to him and added “if you think I was outspoken before this, hahaha (laughing)…just wait. Just wait.” He said he’s not worried about being locked up at all.

In the end, the leftist “ICE Out” protest struggled to compete with the louder, shinier outrage cycle surrounding Don Lemon and his legal drama. Ironically, the stories are connected – the church disruption stemmed from the same anti-ICE activism – but Democrats online treated them as rival plotlines instead of one coherent narrative. The result was a weekend where they were tripping over themselves trying to figure out what they should focus on.