Press arrests used to silence protest coverage in 2025

While covering anything from protests to government meetings, journalists in 2025 were pulled from news scenes, placed in cuffs and held in custody from minutes to days — long enough for deadlines to pass and breaking news to go cold.

As of Dec. 15, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented at least 32 instances in which journalists were detained or charged just for doing their jobs. While that count is lower than the 50 documented last year, each one is a warning flare that something fundamental is shifting in how authorities police information and those who gather it. Most were released without charges or had them quickly dropped, but the impact extends far beyond the time spent in custody.

One journalist arrested while covering a protest told the Tracker his arrest stopped the news from getting out. “Talk about putting the brakes on press freedom,” he said.

Protest beat as battleground

Protests have long been where the fault lines of press freedom are most visible, and 2025 was no different. Nearly 90% of the arrests and detentions this year occurred while journalists were covering demonstrations.

They all also centered around a single issue: immigration.

Protest-related arrests began even before President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term. On Jan. 18, demonstrators marched in the Chicago suburb of Gary, Indiana, voicing their opposition near an airport often used for deportation flights.

Freelance photojournalist Matthew Kaplan was photographing alongside his colleague Lisa Kiselevich as police ordered demonstrators to get off the highway. Without warning, an officer grabbed Kaplan from behind and placed him under arrest.

“I thought I was just covering a march. I didn’t think I was going to be covering police action or my own arrest,” Kaplan told the Tracker at the time.

It was four months before another journalist was detained. Los Angeles, California, emerged as the first epicenter, as protests mounted in early June in response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Trump quickly deployed the military to support federal immigration officers as they raided workplaces and areas where immigrants gather in and around LA.

On June 9, at least 10 journalists were detained in a kettle by police, encircled and led out of the protest area with their hands behind their backs. The most visible of these was CNN correspondent Jason Carroll, who reported live from inside the cordon about his impending detention: an unsettling reminder of his fellow CNN reporter’s experience in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020.

While none of those journalists were charged, June saw the highest number of detentions in a single month since April 2021. Crucially, each affected journalist was deprived, at least temporarily, of their ability to observe, document and report.

The demonstrations continued in and around LA for months; two-thirds of the arrests or detentions of journalists this year were in California.

On Aug. 8, independent journalist Nate Gowdy was thrown to the ground and later detained by police while documenting protests outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown LA.

“They basically lined up and, without any provocation, in order to move people, started just swinging their batons indiscriminately,” he said of the Los Angeles Police Department. “They were so aggressive and wild-eyed and violent.”

Later that night, Gowdy was kettled alongside other members of the press and placed in flex cuffs, which he said were excessively tight and painful. He told the Tracker at the time that traumatic encounters such as his can discourage future press coverage.

“A lot of press opt not to cover this stuff for fear of injury and all that comes with doing this kind of coverage,” Gowdy told the Tracker. “When there’s this level of violence toward journalists while covering these kinds of events, what can that mean for the freedom of the press as we know it?”

Enacting violence as policy

Officers’ aggressive tactics toward Gowdy are consistent with law enforcement’s treatment of the press this year: The Tracker documented nearly as many assaults of journalists in 2025 as it did in the previous three years combined.

Moreover, half of those arrested this year were assaulted by officers in the lead-up to or in the course of being detained, with journalists treated as potential participants or even “agitators,” and a camera and notepad seen as threats rather than instruments of accountability.

As the focus of federal immigration enforcement shifted from California to Illinois following the announcement of Operation Midway Blitz in September, anti-deportation protests mounted in the Chicago area, and the journalists covering them found themselves targets once again.

Journalist Steve Held of Unraveled Press was arrested while covering a protest outside an immigration detention facility in Broadview, Illinois. Yet it wasn’t local or state law enforcement, but a Customs and Border Protection officer who arrested him.

“As soon as I even made the move to step, next thing I knew, I was on the ground and was being handcuffed. It happened very fast,” he told the Tracker. “They didn’t really care that I was a journalist, or didn’t care that they had left me no actual way out, or even an instant to think about how to get out.”

Held was taken into the detention facility and processed, but was ultimately released without charge about six hours later. He noted, however, that being tackled to the ground left him feeling like he’d been in “a mild car accident,” including a headache and a stiff neck and back.

“I think the message they want to send is that you’re not safe out there. And you know they are going to, at minimum, shoot at you or throw tear gas at you and potentially arrest you, even for essentially nothing,” Held added.

Protests continued outside the Broadview facility, and journalists continued to cover them. In October, freelance photojournalist Dave Decker, on assignment for PBS News’ show “Frontline,” was struck multiple times with a baton by Illinois State Police and then tackled to the ground in an aggressive attempt to arrest him.

In roughly six weeks in Broadview, journalists were assaulted 34 times. Held was the only one who was also arrested.

Near the end of November, Decker was covering a protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Miami when arrested by sheriff’s deputies. He was left in pain after hours in tight flex cuffs.

“I was cuffed for eight hours, more than three hours behind my back,” Decker told the Tracker, adding that his hands were still aching when he was released after 36 hours and in the days that followed.

Decker said that at least when the Illinois State Patrol troopers attempted to arrest him in October, they realized that he was a member of the press and pulled him out of the dogpile he was under. In Florida, by contrast, his November arrest came with neither warning nor care for his role as media.

Shackling the press

When a journalist is arrested, they’re in the middle of their workday, Adam Rose, chair of the press rights committee for the LA Press Club, told the Tracker. “We know this chills their rights,” he added, “but it also ends their shift.” Rose is also the deputy director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, of which the Tracker is a project.

That disruption can extend long past the journalist’s time in custody.

For Decker, in his Miami arrest, first there was the potential damage to his equipment, including the two cameras and five lenses around his neck, worth around $16,000. Then there was the unexpected financial toll; the photojournalist had to pay a total $1,250 for bonds on the two charges and another $600 to retrieve his car from an impound lot.

Most frustrating by far, Decker told the Tracker, was his inability to get his photos and videos to the three outlets he had been on assignment for that day. “News is only news for a couple hours, when it’s breaking like that,” he said.

Decker added that he saw no other professional media covering the demonstration. “They stopped the news from getting out. Talk about putting the brakes on press freedom,” he said.

Held echoed Decker’s frustrations, telling the Tracker that his September arrest in Illinois not only prevented him from covering the protests that night, but also disrupted the work of his colleagues, as they contacted attorneys on his behalf. And after having documented the Broadview protests almost daily for weeks, he said at the time that he hadn’t been back since.

The Tracker’s database — now spanning nine years and including nearly 400 arrests of journalists — shows that most such incidents never lead to prosecution. Charges against journalists are typically dropped or dismissed.

Indeed, 90% of the journalists detained or arrested in 2025 were not charged, or the charges have since been dropped. Decker is just one of two journalists arrested this year still facing charges as of publication. (An attorney for the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office indicated via email that a decision has been made to drop Decker’s charges in the coming days.)

The second is independent journalist Crystal Heath, arrested at an anti-deportation protest in LA in June, who told the Tracker that during her arraignment, a judge informed her that prosecutors were declining to pursue the charge against her for failure to disperse. But that could change in the year until the statute of limitations runs out, and she was advised to call each month to confirm whether her case had been reactivated.

Heath said that having the charge hang over her has made her less comfortable covering protests.

“I guess I’m less naive now. I assumed that the police know the law and that they would follow the law, but I saw firsthand how they are using excessive force on people,” Heath said. “They’re not following the law, and it’s outrageous how the whole court system and apparatus has allowed these sort of charges to continue to hang over my head, allowing this sort of stifling of our First Amendment to continue.”

Continuing to criminalize newsgathering

This message is not unique to 2025: It is a continuation of a trend observed by the Tracker for the past two years, in which journalists are being detained or charged in connection with routine assignments or for standard journalistic practices.

On a single day in June, three journalists more than 2,000 miles apart were charged for engaging in the most commonplace newsgathering actions: covering a public meeting and publishing a police blotter.

In New Jersey, two journalists with hyperlocal news website Redbankgreen refused to unpublish details about an arrest that had been included in a police blotter. The reporter and publisher were both charged with “disclosure of an expungement order.”

Meanwhile, in Texas, David Flash — reporter and publisher for the Big Bend Times — was grabbed, handcuffed and forcibly removed by sheriff’s deputies from a county commissioners’ meeting in Fort Davis.

Flash told the Tracker he had set up his camera where a sheriff’s deputy instructed, and was sitting and observing the meeting, occasionally moving around the room to take photos. An officer later accused him of disrupting the meeting and arrested him for alleged disorderly conduct.

These arrests and charges demonstrate that, as in years past, authorities either poorly understand the elements of routine newsgathering or purposefully use prosecutions to chill future reporting.

The LA Press Club’s Rose told the Tracker that, once a member of the press is placed in handcuffs, they can’t operate a camera, take notes or observe unfolding events.

“But I know one reporter who mastered a new skill they don’t teach in journalism school,” he added. “While his hands are behind him in zip ties, he can pull out his phone and still type out emergency messages asking for help. I’ve been on the receiving end of quite a few of those.

“This should not be what’s needed to cover protests,” said Rose, “but it’s where we are in 2025.”