A preschool teacher was arrested on camera as soon as she finished a TV interview criticizing Donald Trump, fueling the debate over protest policing and free speech.
Jessica Plichta, 22, said she was the only person arrested among roughly 200 demonstrators at an anti-war protest in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday, hours after Nicolas Maduro was detained in Caracas by the U.S. military.
In the broadcast footage, two officers could be seen approaching from behind as she wrapped her interview with WZZM, the city’s ABC affiliate, then escorted her away as she told them, “I am not resisting arrest.”
WZZM said an officer cited “obstructing a roadway and failure to obey a lawful command,” and that Plichta had been charged with failure to obey a lawful command.
Plichta later told Zeteo: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as soon as I finished an interview speaking on Venezuela, I was arrested.”
She told the outlet the officers shoved her into the back of a patrol car without fastening her seat belt, then drove a short distance down the street—out of view of cameras and bystanders.
According to Plichta, they stopped again, pulled her out, bent her over the vehicle, patted her down, and took her belongings. She recalled one officer saying they moved her because she was “making a scene.”
She also said officers repeatedly pressed her on whether she was Venezuelan, what her connection to Venezuela was, and why she had attended the protest. Plichta claimed they tried to get her to identify other demonstrators.
“We are so accustomed to, and used to, repression when we speak out on anti-war topics. When we speak out for Venezuela, when we speak out for Palestine, we expect the police to want to shut that down,” she told Zeteo.
“It just shows how much they feel they can get away with things, how easy it is for them to isolate people from the public eye when they’re doing this.”
Plichta said she largely stayed quiet as officers took her to jail, where she said the same questions continued. She was released about three hours later after other protesters gathered to demand she be freed and was seen punching the air in a video shared on Facebook.
The Grand Rapids Police Department disputed her claims in a statement to the Daily Beast.
A spokesperson said more than “25 announcements were made from the PA system of a marked police cruiser for the group [of protesters] to leave the roadway and relocate their activities to the sidewalk,” but that they had “refused lawful orders” to move to the sidewalk and “began blocking intersections.”
Adding that supervisors told officers they could arrest anyone who could be “positively identified,” the spokesperson confirmed only one arrest was made. The Beast followed up to ask why only Plichta had been arrested, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
The mayor of Grand Rapids is David LaGrand, a Democrat.
The incident came to light as Trump, 79, tries to sell the Maduro operation at home, despite signs of public unease.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found about one in three Americans approve of the U.S. strike, while 72 percent worry the U.S. will become too involved.
It is also a small part of a much larger information war that has even seen Trump amplify mislabeled footage on Truth Social to claim mass celebrations after the Maduro capture—a video that fact-checkers traced to an unrelated 2024 protest.
