David Colburn

In January, Minnesota became the most dangerous state in the country for working journalists.
Not New York. Not California. Minnesota.
As federal immigration enforcement ramped up under the Trump administration and protests escalated across the Twin Cities, reporters covering those events were hit with projectiles, exposed to chemical agents, and pushed back or detained while doing their jobs.
That’s not a debate about press freedom. That’s reporters taking hits.
It would be easy to write that off as the byproduct of a tense moment, a flashpoint where protests and law enforcement collided and everyone in the vicinity took their chances. But the pattern that’s emerging suggests something more than that.
The Press Freedom Tracker has described the opening weeks of 2026 as a troubling period for press freedom nationwide, marked by a rise in assaults, detentions, and interference with reporting. Much of it has occurred at protests, particularly around immigration enforcement where journalists have increasingly been treated as part of the problem rather than neutral witnesses.
Increasingly, reporters are being handled less like observers and more like obstacles. Detentions often end without charges, but that doesn’t make them harmless. If a reporter is pulled out of the moment, even briefly, the story changes. What gets seen, what gets recorded, what gets reported, all of it shifts.
And the pressure isn’t limited to federal agents or protest lines.
It has shown up in newsrooms, too.
In 2023, police in Marion, Kansas, executed illegal search warrants on the newsroom of the Marion County Record and the home of its publisher, seizing computers, phones, and reporting materials. Courts later found the warrants lacked a lawful basis, a rare and direct rebuke.
Publisher Joan Meyer, 98, died the next day after the shock of the raid.
Marion wasn’t an outlier.
Since 2017, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented more than 120 incidents in which law enforcement searched or seized journalists’ equipment. While some occurred during protests, dozens happened far from them, at reporters’ homes, in newsrooms, at courthouses, and even at airports and border crossings.
In many of those cases, equipment was taken first and held for months or years while courts sorted out whether the seizures were legal. In some instances, that equipment has never been returned.
You don’t have to shut down a newsroom to do damage. You just have to take its tools.
When that happens, even temporarily, reporting stops. Sources go quiet. The public sees less.
At the same time, pressure on the press has been building from above.
Under the Trump administration and its allies, there have been growing efforts to limit media access to officials and events, reshape which outlets are included in press pools, and challenge the credibility of journalists and news organizations. President Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to the press as “the enemy of the people,” language that has echoed through political discourse in recent years. Federal funding for public media outlets such as NPR and PBS has been cut, raising questions about how journalism is supported and who gets to participate in it.
None of these developments, on their own, shuts down a free press.
But taken together, they start to narrow the space in which journalism operates.
At the street level, reporters face physical risk and interference. At the institutional level, they face restrictions on access, funding pressures, and a steady stream of rhetoric aimed at undermining their work.
Different pressures, coming from different directions, landing in the same place.
And it shows up in the broader picture.
In the latest World Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders, the United States ranked 57th in the world, down from 55th the year before.
It now sits behind not only Canada and the United Kingdom, but also countries such as Jamaica, Namibia, and Costa Rica.
That’s not where most Americans would expect to find themselves, particularly given that freedom of the press is written directly into the First Amendment.
The Constitution hasn’t changed, but the environment around it has.
The index doesn’t measure just legal protections. It looks at the conditions journalists work under, including safety, political pressure, and the ability to report without interference. On those fronts, the United States is trending in the wrong direction.
None of this means the country no longer has a free press. Journalists are still reporting, still publishing, still asking hard questions.
But the work is getting harder to do.
Covering protests now carries a greater risk of being caught in the middle or treated as part of the problem. Access to information can be restricted or selectively granted. Smaller news organizations, especially at the local level, can find themselves particularly exposed when faced with legal pressure or the loss of equipment.
And when those pressures build, the effects ripple outward.
If reporting becomes more difficult or more dangerous, fewer people will do it. If access is limited, the public sees less. If newsrooms are forced to spend time and resources defending themselves instead of reporting, communities lose coverage they depend on.
Minnesota’s spike in January wasn’t just a local anomaly. It was a clear snapshot of something larger taking shape.
The First Amendment still exists, but the environment surrounding it is changing in ways that make it harder, and riskier, to do the work it was meant to protect.