For people organizing against state violence and carceral expansion, state repression is not just a possibility—it is a certainty. Criminalization of dissenters has been a throughline of recent years. From mass arrests during the George Floyd uprisings to the brutal repression of pro-Palestine student protesters, police have consistently been the state’s go-to response, shielding power from accountability and attempting to crush movements before they can gain momentum. This has always been true in the United States, but as fascism increases its hold on state power, so does the repression’s scale and intensity. The state is expanding its tools, increasingly using conspiracy charges—particularly Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, better known as RICO—to criminalize entire movements.
Atlanta, where both of us have lived and organized, has been a hotbed for the criminalization of protest. Over the last several years, it has been home to Stop Cop City, a movement attempting to stop the destruction of over 170 acres of critical forest land and the construction of a $120 million police militarization center. Led by local Democrats who have eagerly worked in partnership with state Republicans, the state’s response to the Stop Cop City movement has featured some of the most expansive criminalization of dissent in the country—including wide-ranging criminal conspiracy charges, recurring raids of activists’ encampments and homes, extensive surveillance of organizers, doxxing of residents opposed to Cop City, and the police killing of forest defender Manuel Paez Terán (Tortuguita), who put their body on the line to prevent the project from moving forward.
The fact of this repression is nothing new. It echoes a long history of state violence against movements for racial, environmental, and social justice, in Atlanta and beyond. But while police repression of movements is longstanding, the infrastructure and tools at the state’s disposal only continue to grow—with severe consequences for abolitionist, anti-capitalist, and social justice movements, particularly with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Punishment infrastructure is a prerequisite for fascism. Mass criminalization of dissent requires various capacities, including surveillance technology to identify and track state enemies; media organs to demonize those enemies; state agents to round them up; laws (however pretextual) to charge them with breaking; and jails and prisons to put them in. You can’t be surveilled by a camera that hasn’t been installed; you can’t be arrested and dragged away in the middle of the night by a police force that hasn’t been funded and staffed; and you can’t be put in a cage that hasn’t been built. In her 1971 essay “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” Angela Y. Davis wrote that “fascism is a process” and identified the U.S. punishment infrastructure as its early foothold, honed over decades to suppress the struggle for racial and class justice. What we see now is its full-fledged form.
The state’s capacity for punishment is all around us, built up over decades via bipartisan consensus at every level of government. Indeed, the crackdown on political dissidents we’ve already seen from Trump has been entirely dependent on preexisting infrastructure. Palestinian Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was stolen from his wife by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which Trump was only able to deploy to spread terror across cities because of its years of bipartisan funding and staffing. The most recent manifestation is the Laken Riley Act: named for a Georgia nursing student killed last year, the law requires federal officials to detain undocumented immigrants simply accused of shoplifting or other crimes—or risk being sued by state attorneys general. The bill received vocal support from both sides of the aisle (and votes from both of Georgia’s Democratic senators). Likewise, Trump has been able to disappear migrants to Guantanamo Bay only because the extraterritorial detention center still exists, maintained by various Democratic and Republican administrations for years and staffed by agents of the state. The administration is able to kidnap people and send them to El Salvador in part because the Alien Enemies Act—used to round up Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II—has never been repealed.
And, while this kind of violence has often been deployed against non-citizens first, history shows us that these same tools will not remain confined to immigrant populations. The legal and physical infrastructure used to detain, deport, and disappear migrants can and will be turned against U.S. citizens who are deemed threats to the state’s interests. The infrastructure of punishment does not discriminate. It only expands.
In the coming years, we should expect to see an increase in criminal conspiracy and terrorism charges, sometimes together, to nakedly target political dissidents—a tool of repression that Atlanta organizers are all too familiar with. As we prepare for and respond to the intensified onslaught, Atlanta has some lessons to offer dissenters of all stripes.
In August 2023 a grand jury in Atlanta indicted sixty-one people in a wide-reaching RICO prosecution claiming that the Stop Cop City movement is a criminal conspiracy of violent anarchists working to terrorize the populace. Nearly two years after the indictment, however, there is still no trial in sight—only charges punishable by thirty years in prison hanging over people’s heads, limiting their life possibilities, physical movement, and ability to communicate while sapping energy from the many others working to support them. The RICO indictment was predated by a number of raids, both of activists’ homes and of activist encampments in the Weelaunee Forest, including the January 2023 raid during which Tortuguita was slain by police.
The RICO prosecution in Atlanta is legally spearheaded by Georgia’s white Republican attorney general, Chris Carr; rhetorically fueled by Atlanta’s Black Democratic mayor Andre Dickens’s designation of environmental and abolitionist protesters as domestic terrorists; and materially propelled by the (shoddy) police work of combined local, state, and federal police forces. Protesters have been sent to Atlanta-area jails so dangerous that one facility has been under federal control for the better part of two decades (and remains so). Defendants have been doxxed, lost jobs, had their bank accounts closed, and been banned from university campuses.
Looking ahead, organizers must anticipate this kind of repression and develop strategies to weather the storm. As Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizer and RICO defendant Marlon Kautz argues in a forthcoming anthology on the Stop Cop City movement (coedited by Micah): “A plan to avoid repression is a plan to lose. Movements that intend to win must plan from the beginning to withstand repression.”
The escalation, to be clear, has already begun. ICE is kidnapping students off the streets and whisking them off to migrant detention cages in Louisiana. The Trump administration has laid bare the myth of rule of law in its defiance of federal court orders to, for example, turn around planes filled with criminalized migrants, prevent the government from transporting detained green card holders out of state, and return illegally deported U.S. residents from an El Salvador mega-prison dubbed the “Terrorist Confinement Center.” The Department of Justice just announced that it is looking into whether Columbia University students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza violated federal terrorism laws. Billions of dollars in federal funding are being held hostage from universities, with many institutions preemptively complying with the administration’s demands. And just recently, Trump’s attorney general, Pamela Bondi, made clear that the terrorism label will be applied broadly, announcing charges carrying up to twenty years in prison against three people who allegedly vandalized empty Tesla dealerships and charging stations in what Bondi characterized as a “wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties.”
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The domestic terrorism and conspiracy labels might feel shocking, but activists’ experiences in Atlanta show that these labels are not ultimately about people’s conduct—they are about the threat that collective and direct action pose to the state. The Stop Cop City RICO indictment makes clear that, to those in power, the intertwined acts of practicing mutual aid and fighting to secure a livable planet are acts of criminal conspiracy—in the state’s eyes, they are domestic terrorism. As attorneys Zohra Ahmed and Elizabeth Taxel write, the indictment “describes ordinary forms of political community, like offering emotional support to a fellow activist, as seditious acts that threaten the state.” And that’s actually not an inaccurate characterization: to a state hell-bent on dividing people along racial, class, and other lines, active solidarity across the masses is a threat to its power—which is precisely why the state is so intent on crushing the opposition through RICO and other extreme charges.
The current administration seems intent on expanding on Georgia’s bipartisan blueprint for repression. Take Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to surveil, criminalize, and deport pro-Palestinian and anti-capitalist protesters, which draws directly from these same tactics. Designed to embolden an ascendant Christian nationalism, Project Esther weaponizes government infrastructure to systematically target dissenters. Exploiting lingering establishment fears from the 2020 uprisings—the plan’s authors even describe the anti-Zionist movement as an intended “George Floyd–style event to spring onto center stage and grab a giant microphone”—Project Esther would rely on guilt-by-association prosecutions under RICO and FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act); targeted revocation of tax-exempt status for nonprofits engaged in anti-Zionist or anti-colonial work; intensified surveillance of organizers; and broader efforts to erode protesters’ ability to participate in civic life. It is not just about repression: the strategy hinges on sowing discord, dismantling movements from within whenever possible, and ensuring that opposition is consistently met with the full force of the state.
While Project Esther and the related Project 2025 grew out of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, the use of terrorism and conspiracy charges isn’t limited to Republicans or the Trump era, nor is it of such recent vintage (much of what we’ve discussed predates it by years). And it is clearly only just ramping up. As we were writing this article, we learned of new felony vandalism and conspiracy charges filed against twelve pro-Palestine Stanford students and graduates by Santa Clara district attorney Jeffrey Rosen, a Democrat and self-described “nationally-recognized leader in criminal justice reform.” Similarly, protesters who took to the subway tracks in New York City following the murder of Jordan Neely were initially charged by the NYPD with terrorism, and Atlanta Democrats have been at the helm of casting Stop Cop City protesters as domestic terrorists. It was police forces acting under Democratic mayors that were deployed to college campuses in blue cities to brutalize anti-genocide student protesters. And of course, both parties have often supported enhanced penalties for protesters. In recent years, for example, a slew of state legislatures have passed or enhanced “critical infrastructure” laws, jacking up sentences against Indigenous and environmental protesters in the wake of Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2019 Texas charged Greenpeace activists under its critical infrastructure laws after a protest at the Houston Ship Channel (a year later, a jury declined to issue the felony indictments being sought by the state, opting instead for misdemeanor charges). In 2018 Louisiana made it a felony to protest near oil, gas, electrical, and other energy infrastructure, and has sought decades of incarceration for environmental activists charged under the enhanced sentencing (so far unsuccessfully). These laws, most often spearheaded by Republicans, have been increasingly passed with Democratic support.
To identify the bipartisan nature of repression is not to flatten the present moment’s escalated repression: the Trump administration has certainly discarded any of the pretenses of due process or decorum that occasionally temper the extent of Democratic targeting of protesters. Instead, it is to say that the state has long made abundantly clear its willingness to use extreme measures to crush resistance. We must prepare accordingly by proactively building strong systems of support that can respond swiftly to each new crashing wave of repression. This includes legal defense strategies, jail support, bail funds, and rapid response networks to help care for those arrested or facing charges. It also means planning for long-term mutual aid structures that provide housing, monetary support, and care for those targeted by the state.
Critically, keeping each other safe amidst repression means refusing to throw anyone under the bus. Atlanta organizers across the spectrum, whether from established nonprofits or underground circles, have refused to denounce each other or submit to good protester/bad protester narrative traps. The repression of the Stop Cop City movement has demonstrated that what makes a “bad” protester in the state’s eyes is not the protester’s tactics, but rather their threat to power—a threat that, as mentioned, is posed by simple practices of solidarity and collectivity. If you disrupt the status quo, you are a bad protester; denouncing others in the movement won’t save you from that designation. And finally, security culture must be a mainstay of our movements. As much as possible, we must deal with internal conflict where the state is not watching. Our movements’ ability to survive—and ultimately win—will depend on how well we protect each other.
We must also continue the work of dismantling the infrastructure of punishment, regardless of who is building or deploying it. There may well be another Trump in the White House after the next election. Or there may be another Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris—each of whom conducted (or pledged to carry out) mass deportations, expanded funding of local police forces, backed new carceral construction projects, and advanced global wars.
Each new law broadening police powers, each additional dollar funneled into militarized policing, and each new jail bed or detention center built normalizes mass punishment as a necessary and inevitable function of the state. By the time the machinery of repression is fully operational, its expansion can seem like an unremarkable continuation of the status quo—making it all the more difficult to resist. If and when a Democrat becomes president again, we must be ready to take action, demanding the repeal of repressive laws, the defunding of punishment systems, and the dismantling of surveillance and criminalization infrastructure. This work must escalate now as well, at the local and state level, where elected officials and their corporate backers are designing, testing, and building the foundations of repression we see on a federal level. Without sustained pressure, even so-called reformist presidential administrations will allow these systems to remain in place, reinforcing the very mechanisms of repression we are fighting to undo.
The coming years will be full of defense: stopping deportations, preventing political kidnappings, preserving what remains of various supportive state capacities, supporting our neighbors, and otherwise weathering the storm. But we can’t just play defense. We must not only work to dismantle criminalization infrastructure, but also articulate a positive vision of the world we want and build genuinely supportive systems of care—even amidst growing fascism. Whatever you think of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy rallies, the fact that tens of thousands of people are turning up for these events shows that people are hungry for something different. It’s up to organizers to channel and build on that energy across the country. Just as elites are growing punishment infrastructure while dismantling the social safety net—this is certainly true of the DOGE/Project 2025 assault on federal infrastructure, but also of the decades-long bipartisan embrace of austerity—we must work to dismantle punishment infrastructure while building the systems, services, networks, and relationships that communities need to survive and thrive.
The state’s increasing reliance on repression and criminalization to maintain power is not a sign of its strength. Rather, it is a desperate response to the growing effectiveness of movements challenging its authority. We will need to be nimble, thinking in the immediate and the long term, defending those directly targeted, and all the while continuing the work of dismantling the structures that enable this repression. The coming years will test our resilience, but they will also offer opportunities to sharpen our strategies, deepen our solidarity, and expand our collective power. If we remain vigilant, adaptive, and committed to care and resistance, we will not only withstand repression—we will lay the groundwork for a future beyond it, where real liberation is not just imagined, but built.
Image: Flickr / rescuedbyrover
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