Trump Administration ‘Wanted to Use Us as a Trophy,’ Says Minnesota School Board Member Arrested Over Anti-ICE Protest

Trahern Crews, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, led protests after the murder of George Floyd that helped spark a national movement against police brutality and has served as a commissioner for one of the first reparations panels in the country.

On Jan. 30, one of Minnesota’s central figures in the movement for protecting the rights of Black Americans found himself outside of his home being handcuffed by federal agents. He was one of nine journalists and activists who were arrested and indicted after taking part in or covering a Jan. 18 protest at a St. Paul church where a pastor serves as an acting field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has flooded the Twin Cities with 3,000 federal agents in recent months.

“To be on the White House’s radar is astonishing to me. I think it’s because we’re effective,” Crews told Capital & Main in an interview Sunday. “I know what we’re doing is big, but sometimes you don’t realize how big.” 

Trahern Crews leads a chant during a demonstration on April 2, 2021, in St Paul, Minnesota. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images.

Chauntyll Allen, a member of the Saint Paul School Board and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Twin Cities, who was also arrested, said she believes the Trump administration was trying to frighten her and other organizers. 

“They definitely wanted to use us as a trophy, that’s the reality of all this,” Allen said in an interview Monday with Capital & Main. “They wanted to scare the activists in our country to not want to do anything, to not wanna stand up.” 

Allen and Crews are among nine prominent Black activists and journalists facing federal charges of conspiracy and interfering with the exercise of the right of religious freedom at a place of worship, as part of a protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, where one of the pastors, David Easterwood, is a field director for ICE. Eight of them, including journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, were taken into federal custody in a series of arrests carried out over several days by armed officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ICE and the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to videos and photos of the arrests. One person turned himself in.

After the Jan. 18 protest and in the days leading to his arrest, Crews said he began noticing federal agents monitoring him, including one occasion in which Homeland Security vehicles followed him on a walk to a protest at a nearby high school. 

On Jan. 30, Crews said, he stepped out of his St. Paul home around 4 a.m. and was approached by armed Homeland Security, FBI and ICE agents. He said he was hustled into an unmarked car, and was never shown a warrant for his arrest. He was transported to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building where detained immigrants and protesters are being held. Crews pointed out that the facility is located in Fort Snelling, near the historic military fort where Dred and Harriet Scott were enslaved before suing for their freedom in 1843. The Supreme Court ruled in its 1857 Dred Scott decision that Black people could not be U.S. citizens or enjoy the protections they are granted under the Constitution, and had no rights to sue for their freedom.

“They put the shackles on my legs, and that’s really where I was like ‘Wow, this is similar to what Dred was experiencing,’” Crews said. “One of the most scariest parts was when they said, ‘What are we about to do with him?’ I didn’t know if I was going to get killed in that moment.”

Crews said that custody officers asked the team detaining him if he was an “immigrant or agitator.” The label “agitator” dates back to at least the Civil Rights era, and was used by segregationists against Black activists like Martin Luther King Jr. Crews was brought to an isolated area of the facility, he said. From his cell he could hear his co-defendants being brought in.

Chauntyll Allen.

Allen was arrested on Jan. 22, alongside Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney, founder of the Racial Justice Network and former candidate for mayor of Minneapolis. The White House later posted a digitally manipulated photo of Levy Armstrong that depicted her with darker skin and made it look like she was sobbing. In the original photo, Levy Armstrong held her head high, remaining calm and resolute.

Allen said that while in custody she was forced to pose in several photos with different teams of federal agents.

“They pulled me out and reshackled me, recuffed me like three different times so that different groups of agents could take pictures with me, like photo shoots. It made me wonder, like, is this protocol?” Allen said. “There was definitely a point when one of the U.S. marshals implied that that wasn’t typical protocol, ’cause he was taking my actual mug shot and he was like, ‘Yeah, this is your actual mugshot. I don’t know what all that other stuff was that went on.’”

Allen, who while on the school board has helped create a policy banning pension investments in prison labor companies and was instrumental in the opening of the district’s first Afro-centric school, said she was never shown a warrant for her arrest. 

Crews was released several hours after his arrest. Allen spent a day in custody while the federal government appealed to keep her and Levy Armstrong behind bars. 

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to emailed requests for comment. 

Jamael Lundy, the intergovernmental relations manager for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and candidate for Minnesota state Senate, was also taken into custody. Jerome Richardson, who was assisting with Lemon’s coverage of the event, turned himself in on Feb. 2. All nine of the people charged have been released. All except Lundy, who already had an arraignment hearing, are expected to be arraigned in the next few days.

Allen and Crews both said they believed their activism around Black issues drew the animus of the Trump administration. 

Trump has a long-documented history of racism against Black people. He launched his political career spreading the racist “birther” lie that the first Black president was not a U.S. citizen and, days after the arrests, in the opening days of Black History Month, he posted, then deleted, a video depicting Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as apes. Trump has signed an executive order directing federal agencies to cease diversity, equity and inclusion programs, has smeared Somali Americans with bigoted remarks, and his administration has moved to end temporary protected status for immigrants from Somalia, Haiti and other majority-Black nations. 

Trump has also been a longtime critic of Black Lives Matter. During his first term, in a July 2020 post on Twitter, now X, Trump said Black Lives Matter was a “symbol of hate” in response to a proposal to have the phrase painted on a New York City street. 

After the arrests of journalists and advocates over last month’s church protest began, Trump has said he had no advance knowledge of “the Don Lemon thing,” but the White House went on to celebrate his arrest in an X post. The arrests and charges have been criticized by legal experts and press freedom advocates as a baseless effort to chill and intimidate speech critical of the president.

Crews said he has known for years there was a chance his activism could have a negative consequence.

“Every time we do something I know there’s the chance we could get arrested, so I’m always aware that that is a possibility. But I just didn’t think it would be Pam Bondi or ‘the United States of America versus us,’” he said. “It’s traumatizing, but you gotta just keep pushing through. I don’t want the next generation to go through what we went through.” 

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