OAN Staff Katherine Mosack and Abril Elfi
9:50 AM – Saturday, October 4, 2025
President Donald Trump said that anyone who burns the American flag “will be immediately arrested” and face one year in prison.
“To ICE, Border Patrol, Law Enforcement, and all U.S. Military: As per my August 25, 2025 Executive Order, please be advised that, from this point forward, anybody burning the American Flag will be subject to one year in prison,” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday evening.
“You will be immediately arrested. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Trump’s declaration on social media references to an Executive Order (EO) he had signed in August that criminalizes flag burning, punishable by a year in prison.
Supreme Court rulings in “Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) held that flag burning is protected by the First Amendment as symbolic speech. Trump’s EO, however, argues that flag burning incites violence and therefore must be penalized.
“President Trump will not allow the American Flag, a special symbol of our country’s greatness, to be used as a tool to incite violence and riots that jeopardize the safety of everyday Americans,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital. “President Trump will always protect the First Amendment, while simultaneously implementing commonsense, tough-on-crime policies to prevent violence and chaos.”
The executive order comes after a night of tumultuous demonstrations outside of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland, Oregon, where conservative journalist Nick Sortor was caught on camera being arrested.
According to the Portland Police Bureau, the arrest occurred after they reported “monitoring the protest during the evening and observed some protest participants engaging in fights.” Sortor was accused of second-degree disorderly conduct.
“This was as big of a surprise to me as it was to everybody else. All of a sudden, you know, I’m being jumped by Antifa thugs,” Sortor told Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin following his release. “I get back up, I stumble away and go back toward cops where I think, you know, at least, all right, well, maybe that’ll be a safer place for me to go… never suspected that I was going to be the target of the arrest, that they were coming in to me.”
“And when they put me into handcuffs, the first thing that went to my mind wasn’t, ‘Oh, you’re being arrested.’ It’s, ‘Oh, they’re trying to help you and get you out of here and make it look like they’re doing something.’ Because they weren’t telling me what they were doing. They weren’t telling me I was under arrest. They weren’t telling me what I was being charged with. And it took over an hour for me to find out what I was charged with,” Sortor claimed.
Sortor also told Fox News that, “the Antifa people out here don’t exactly love the First Amendment.”
“They act like they do until it’s reciprocated on them. I have every right to stand out here and film them. We saw them get in the way of federal agents trying to come out of the ICE facility here, and they end up pushing up against ICE agents. And what happens? They get maced. Okay, so I go in, and I film that aftermath,” Sortor said.
According to the Portland Police Bureau, “PPB Dialogue Officers (DLOs) saw two guys fighting close to the ICE building driveway at approximately 8:09 p.m.
Three people were taken into custody by Portland police’s Rapid Response Team at approximately 11:16 p.m. They were all charged with disorderly conduct in the second degree and put into the Multnomah County Detention Center (MCDC).
The individuals detained on suspicion of disorderly conduct were identified by the police as Angela Davis, 49, of Vernonia, Oregon; Son Mi Yi, 43, of Portland; and Nicholas Sortor, 27, of Washington, D.C.
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