(Daily Signal)—Federal judges in Minnesota have rejected the Justice Department’s charges against some of the anti-ICE agitators who invaded a church during service earlier this month, and others have released multiple defendants, even as the Justice Department has appealed some of these decisions.
After the Justice Department filed charges against eight agitators for depriving churchgoers of their rights to exercise their religion under the First Amendment, Magistrate Judge Douglas L. Micko declined to issue arrest warrants for five of the defendants, and struck down charges against the others.
The Justice Department appealed the denial of the arrest warrants, a move that Patrick Schlitz, chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Minnesota, said is unprecedented, at least in the courts under the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.
The Justice Department claimed that the agitators would likely disrupt a church service again, and many of the leaders have stood by their decision to disrupt the service.
Here are five things to know about the cases.
1. The Church Invasion
Between 30 and 40 anti-ICE agitators interrupted a Sunday service at Cities Church, a non-denominational Christian church in St. Paul, and shouted, “Justice for Renee Good!” as they surrounded members of the congregation.
Videos of the incident show the pastor and others repeatedly asking the agitators to leave, and the agitators chanting, “Who shut this down? We shut this down!”
According to the charging document, a member of the congregation said worshippers were “terrorized, our children were weeping.” One woman broke her arm. Agitators blocked about 50 members of the congregation from exiting, making it “nearly impossible for parishioners to get out and leave.”
The document also mentions that agitators prevented congregants from getting to their children, and one of the agitators reportedly told young children, “Do you know your parents are Nazis, they’re going to burn in hell?”
2. The Defendants
On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that law enforcement had arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Louisa Allen, and William Kelly, who posted videos of the invasion online under the handle “DaWoke Farmer.”
Yet Magistrate Judge Micko rejected arrest warrants for the other five defendants. While the published version of the charging document redacts the defendants’ names, clues in the document suggest that Lemon and Jamael Lundy each face charges.
The charging document quotes an exchange between Lemon and Cities Church Lead Pastor Jonathan Parnell. The pastor tells the former CNN host: “It’s shameful to interrupt a public gathering of Christians in worship.”
The document also notes that one defendant “identified himself as a current candidate for Minnesota State Senate, District 65.”
Lundy, the intergovernmental affairs director for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, is running to represent that district in the Minnesota Senate, and he appeared in videos with the organizers before the church invasion.
3. Church Invader Charges
The Justice Department brought two charges against the church invaders: deprivation of rights under the Ku Klux Klan Act and violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances or FACE Act. The Klan Act criminalizes depriving people of their civil rights, such as the free exercise of religion, while the FACE Act protects access to churches.
Judge Micko approved the warrants for Armstrong, Allen, and Kelly, but he struck the FACE Act charges, writing, “No probable cause.”
Micko denied the arrest warrants for the five other invaders.
Lemon’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, praised the magistrate judge’s decision.
“The magistrate’s reported actions confirm the nature of Don’s First Amendment protected work this weekend in Minnesota as a reporter,” Lowell told Fox News Digital.
4. The Appeal
Patrick Schiltz, chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Minnesota, explained in a letter how the Justice Department went about appealing Micko’s decisions.
“It is important to emphasize that what the U.S. Attorney requested is unheard of in our district or, as best I can tell, any other district in the Eighth Circuit,” Colloton wrote. If the prosecutor does not like a magistrate judge’s decision, he or she can either improve the filing and present it to the same magistrate judge, or present its case to a grand jury to seek an indictment.
Colloton said he would not make a decision until conferring with his colleagues at a bench meeting, but the meeting got postponed. He plans to make a decision after a lunch meeting on Tuesday.
Schiltz noted that the U.S. attorney’s office stated that “there are plans to disrupt Cities Church again on Sunday.” He said that the government “does not explain why the arrests of five more people—one of whom is a journalist and the other his producer—would make Cities Church any safer, especially because that would still leave ‘dozens’ of those who invaded the church on Sunday free to do it again.”
The Justice Department appealed to the Eighth Circuit, and a 3-judge panel rejected the appeal.
Judge L. Steven Grasz, wrote a brief opinion. He said the charging documents “clearly establish probable cause for all five arrest warrants,” and added that “there is no discretion to refuse to issue an arrest warrant once probable cause for its issuance has been shown.” In other words, Judge Micko should have issued the arrest warrants.
Grasz added, however, “the government has failed to establish that it has no other adequate means of obtaining the requested relief.”
In other words, the Justice Department may resolve these issues another way.
5. Church Invaders Released
The Sherburne County Jail, which had held the defendants, released them Friday after District Judge Laura Provinzino rejected the government’s appeal. Prosecutors claimed that Armstrong and Allen posed flight risks and requested that the court hold them or require them to post $10,000 cash bail.
Judges often grant pretrial detention in cases where defendants are accused of violent or other serious crimes or pose a flight risk.
Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, pledged to aggressively pursue these cases.
“We’re going to pursue this to the ends of the earth,” Dhillon told Megyn Kelly about the cases, particularly the charges against Lemon, the former CNN host.
Cities Church’s attorneys have suggested that they are considering civil cases against the church invaders.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.