IAPA Midyear Meeting. April 23 - 24, 2026.
Rounding out the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump’s administration has launched a variety of serious attacks on press freedom. Journalists across the country covering immigration policy protests face injury and attack by federal agents. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continues to threaten actions that would expand its discretionary ability to silence speech on public airwaves it doesn’t like. The Department of Defense advanced a policy that granted the government unbridled discretion to revoke press access to its Pentagon facility, prompting virtually the entire Pentagon press corps to relinquish their press passes. And the Department of Justice obtained and executed a search warrant at the home of a reporter and seized personal and professional electronic devices as part of a national security investigation of a federal contractor—an unprecedented action in U.S. history. These examples, and those further addressed in this report, illustrate how the news media in the United States continues to face an escalation of attacks on multiple fronts.
Physical attacks on journalists covering the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts and immigration court proceedings have continued particularly in Minneapolis, Minnesota. On December 1, 2025, President Trump announced “Operation Metro Surge,” deploying 3,000 federal immigration agents to Minnesota in what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called its largest operation ever. Operation Metro Surge drew large protests, resulting in the deaths of two U.S. citizens and Minnesota residents by federal immigration agents and an estimated 4,000 people arrested. Tom Homan, President Trump’s Border Czar announced the operation was ending on February 12, 2026. Journalists who covered the deployment and related protests reported being struck by less lethal munitions, such as rubber bullets, and exposed to chemical deterrents by federal law enforcement, usually while standing within an established perimeter and identified as press.
For example, Jana Shortal, an anchor and reporter with KARE11, a local Twin Cities NBC affiliate, was shoved and pepper sprayed by a federal agent while covering a protest, despite standing behind the established perimeter. Journalists doing routine coverage within the proximity of crowd control efforts reported exposure to a variety of fog chemicals, and being shot with projectiles, interrupting their ability to do their jobs effectively. Coverage of Operation Metro Surge protests took place throughout the winter months, with temperatures dipping to below zero degrees Fahrenheit, complicating journalists’ ability to wash away crowd-dispersal chemicals.
Even prior to the official launch of Operation Metro Surge, tensions between protesters and immigration officers in Minnesota were high. In November 2025, three photojournalists were injured by chemical irritants and less-lethal munitions while covering a deportation effort protest in St. Paul, Minnesota.
In March 2026, a Spanish-language reporter based in Nashville, Tennessee, was taken into custody shortly after covering Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in the area. The reporter had originally entered the United States from Colombia on a tourist visa but timely applied for political asylum based on threats she experienced while reporting on corruption. She received a work permit in 2022, which court filings state is valid through 2029. Most recently, she filed for permanent legal residence after marrying a United States citizen in January 2026.
Journalists and others have also brought federal lawsuits seeking court protections from being arrested for failure to disperse, among other things, while covering protests.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr continues to threaten enforcement actions to police perceived “bias” by broadcasters. The FCC’s public interest standard served as Chairman Carr’s basis for these statements, a sentiment which he has repeated before both the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and the House Subcommittee on Communication and Technology, during each body’s respective oversight hearings.
During both hearings, Chairman Carr invoked both the news distortion policy and the broadcast hoax rule as the potential basis for future enforcement activity against licensees. This threat is deeply troubling, as both the policy and the doctrine apply narrowly and require a high evidentiary bar to clear, and absent those guardrails, the policy and rule could be misuses to target news coverage that an administration may find unfavorable.
Carr also announced new enforcement guidelines for the Political Equal Opportunities Requirement, an agency rule that requires a broadcaster which provides a candidate for public office airtime to offer equal airtime to all opponents of that candidate unless the program qualifies for an exception, including an exception for “bona fide” news programming. Historically, talk shows like “Jimmy Kimmel Tonight,” and “The View,” have qualified under that exception and have been therefore exempt from the rule. However, the most recent guidance from the FCC stated that it could not identify any daytime or nighttime talk show program that would qualify.
Most recently Carr announced a formal enforcement action against daytime talk show “The View” for featuring James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, as a potential violation of the equal time rule. CBS pulled a similar segment with Talarico from “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” However, the interview still appeared on Colbert’s YouTube channel, as the FCC only has the power to regulate broadcast stations, and not internet streaming services.
Additionally, Carr referenced the public interest standard as a basis to threaten revocation of licenses to broadcasters based on their coverage of the United States’ military activity in Iran. Carr echoed Trump’s statements over the coverage of the conflict in Iran on social media, where the President directly criticized war coverage in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The FCC’s threats to revoke broadcast licenses based on a license holder’s war reporting—while having no legal basis—remain deeply troubling, even if doomed to fail in the courts. The FCC has no authority to regulate programming content on cable, the internet, or media other than over-the air broadcast.
The administration has taken several actions that raise concerns about the compelled disclosure of the identities of journalists’ confidential sources as part of “leak” cases.
For instance, on January 14, 2026, the FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a The Washington Post journalist, Hannah Natanson, reportedly as part of an investigation into a federal contractor’s alleged mishandling of classified government materials. It is the first time that we are aware of where the government has raided a journalist’s home in connection with an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of government secrets to the press. The search involved the seizure of numerous devices, including Natanson’s phone, a voice recorder, personal and work laptops, a smartwatch, and an external hard drive, which collectively contain “essentially her entire professional universe,” including communications with over 1,000 sources. The Post received a subpoena the same day seeking communications between the contractor and others at the newspaper.
Following the raid, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the search warrant was executed at the request of the Pentagon to look for evidence at Natanson’s home because she “was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.” Investigators reportedly told Natanson that she was “not the focus of the probe.”
Rather, the focus appears to be on an individual named Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a Navy veteran and systems administrator and technology specialist in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance as a government contractor. Perez-Lugones has been indicted for alleged violations of the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that criminalizes communication, delivery, transmittal, or retention of “information related to the national defense.”
Given that Perez-Lugones had already been charged with a violation of the Espionage Act and taken into custody when the raid took place, and that the government issued a grand jury subpoena to The Post seeking communications with Perez-Lugones, it is unclear why the FBI took the unprecedented step of obtaining a search warrant to enter a reporter’s home and seize virtually her entire electronic newsgathering and reporting toolkit.
Separately, journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were indicted for their presence at a January 18, 2026, anti-ICE protest inside Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. They have been charged with federal criminal civil rights violations under 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 248 for allegedly interrupting church services while covering the demonstration. This is the first time we are aware of where these statutes have been used in this manner, as journalists who follow protesters onto private property without permission typically face state trespass charges, if they are criminally charged at all. Lemon and Fort are not currently in custody while the case against them is pending in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota.
In October 2025, the Pentagon implemented a new policy that gave the Department of Defense effectively unbridled discretion to suspend, revoke, deny or not renew credentials. The policy also cited the solicitation of any information that the department had not cleared for release as a possible basis for pulling a reporter’s credential. When faced with a requirement to sign a policy that would place their credential in jeopardy for asking questions of Pentagon personnel, virtually the entire Pentagon press corps packed up their physical offices and had to relinquish their credentials. Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon announced a new corps of outlets that traditionally had not had a permanent presence in the Pentagon and were willing to sign the new policy.
In response to the restriction on coverage, The New York Times sued the Department of Defense in December 2025, alleging that the new Pentagon media access policy violates the First and Fifth Amendments. The Times’s complaint argued that the Pentagon’s new policy restricts the ability of journalists to “do what journalists have always done – ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.” On March 20, 2026, U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Paul Friedman ruled that the Pentagon’s media access policy violated the Constitution, concluding in part that the policy was intended to “weed out disfavored journalist” and replace them with reporters who are “favorable to or spoon fed by department leadership.” Since the ruling, the Pentagon has released a revised media policy, which The Times has challenged as still in violation of Judge Friedman’s March 20 order.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also recently barred photojournalists from attending Pentagon news briefings about the Iran war. The reason for the exclusion allegedly stems from Hegseth’s depiction in the photos taken at a briefing, which his staff deemed “unflattering,” though the Pentagon press secretary stated that the decision was made to use space effectively.
Meanwhile, The Associated Press’s lawsuit seeking restored access to cover events open to the White House press pool is ongoing. The outlet was banned from the Oval Office, Airforce One, and other spaces reserved for the press pool early last year for making the editorial decision to continue using the term “Gulf of Mexico,” while acknowledging when appropriate President Trump’s order renaming the body of water as the Gulf of America within the United States. The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments in November Thirty news organizations had previously sent a letter to the White House in support of the AP, stressing that “all news organizations covering the White House are negatively affected when one peer outlet is singled out in a manner that crosses a constitutional line.”
