White House Digitally Alters Photo of Civil Rights Attorney to Make It Look Like She Was Crying

I’m old enough to remember when it was frowned upon—even considered very bad—for the White House to photoshop anything or digitally alter photos for the public record.

On Thursday, the official White House social media accounts posted a digitally altered photo of an arrested protester to make it look like she was crying. About thirty minutes earlier, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted what seems to be the original image of the arrest—in which the woman appears completely composed. The image posted by the White House also appears to have darkened her skin tone. Propaganda Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt retweeted Noem’s tweet.

The Trump administration’s official government accounts are seemingly run by a trove of 20-something trolls, who regularly post Nazi-coded propaganda, repost stories from far-right outlets like the Daily Wire, and label politicians critical of Trump with captions like “deranged” and “worst of the worst.” So it’s just another day in The Republic of North Korea the United States. Both the Guardian and the New York Times reported that the White House had digitally altered the image. The arresting officer’s face, of course, is blurred out in both.

The woman pictured is Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney who was arrested on Thursday for leading Sunday’s protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Protesters entered the church chanting, “ICE Out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” referring to the 37-year-old who was recently murdered by an ICE agent. The church’s pastor, David Easterwood, is reportedly the acting director of ICE’s field office for enforcement and removal operations in St. Paul.

Following the protest, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Sunday night that “attacks against law enforcement and the intimidation of Christians are being met with the full force of federal law.” The Justice Department then announced it was using a 1994 law—which prohibits interfering or intimidating someone during worship at a religious institution—to investigate.

On Thursday, Bondi announced Armstrong’s arrest, along with Chauntyll Louisa Allen, a member of St. Paul’s school board, and William Kelly, a protester who posted a TikTok daring authorities to arrest him. They also tried to arrest Don Lemon—the former CNN anchor who now works as an independent journalist—who reported on the protest and streamed it live to his YouTube channel. But a judge in Minnesota said Lemon could not be arrested for his reporting because of a pesky little thing in the U.S. Constitution known as the First Amendment.

“Our nation was settled and founded by people fleeing religious persecution,” Bondi said in a statement about the arrests. “Religious freedom is the bedrock of this country. We will protect our pastors. We will protect our churches. We will protect Americans of faith.” I know we all know this, but if there is a God, I imagine she abandons us a little more every time this administration confuses religious freedom with Christian nationalism.

To make it all even more infuriating, Bondi did not say what the three were being charged with, and the Washington Post reports there are still no publicly available court documents. Noem, however, said the three were being charged with conspiring to violate congregants’ constitutional rights, a felony punishable with up to 10 years in prison.

If nothing else, we can continue to count on this administration to consistently expose its own dysfunction and incompetence—all on its own social media accounts.

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