[[link removed]]

THE CRIMINALIZING OF PROTEST AND DISSENT HAS A LONG HISTORY IN
AMERICA  
[[link removed]]


 

Whitney Bauck
February 3, 2026
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Trump administration is accusing protesters of ‘domestic
terrorism’ but this brazen tactic is as old as the country itself _

Anti-ICE protest in Los Angeles.,

 

When federal immigration agents shot and killed
[[link removed]] ICU nurse
Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on 23 January, the homeland security
secretary, Kristi Noem, wasted no time claiming
[[link removed]]
to the press, without credible evidence, that Pretti had been engaged
in “domestic terrorism”. Though the administration seems to be
trying to soften
[[link removed]]
that initial response after fierce backlash, it’s an accusation that
members of the Trump administration have been leveling
[[link removed]]
at wide swaths of people beyond Pretti – including Renee Nicole
Good, another Minnesotan killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) agents two and a half weeks prior, and Marimar Martinez
[[link removed]],
who survived being shot by ICE agents in Chicago in October – as
part of an ongoing strategy to criminalize dissent.

It’s a claim ICE agents themselves have started to make directly in
confrontations with citizens, seemingly to try and intimidate legal
observers, sometimes known as ICE watchers. In one recent video
[[link removed]] from
Portland, Maine, an ICE officer told an observer to stop recording him
on her phone, and when she wouldn’t, he took her information down
and said: “We have a nice little database … and now you’re
considered a domestic terrorist.”

A common pattern has also emerged in courts: ICE or other federal
agents will initiate a violent confrontation with a protester –
pushing [[link removed]] a 70-year-old
veteran to the ground in Chicago outside the Broadway ICE facility, or
shoving
[[link removed]]
a US citizen at a protest in LA – then the Department of Justice
will press charges against the victim of that violence, rather than
against the perpetrator. By one count
[[link removed]],
more than a hundred prosecutions relying on Section 111 of Title 18 of
the US code, which deals with resisting federal employees, were filed
in the second half of 2025.

[a man holding a pole ]
Demonstrators clash with police during a protest against ICE in Los
Angeles on 30 January 2026. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty
Images

“It absolutely seems to be the case that federal agents have ramped
up their repression of legal observers,” said Michelle Phelps, a
sociology professor at the University of Minnesota and author of The
Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in
America.

Though the hasty labeling of anyone who records or protests ICE a
“domestic terrorist” has become particularly brazen under the
second Trump administration
[[link removed]], the
criminalization of protest and dissent in the US is nothing new – in
fact, it’s as old as the country itself.

THE HISTORY OF CRIMINALIZING PROTEST

Anti-protest bills proliferated
[[link removed]]
around the country under both the Trump and Biden administrations,
aimed at everything from expanding the definition of what counts as a
“riot” to penalizing anyone who obstructs the flow of car traffic.
Twenty-nine state and federal anti-protest bills passed during
Trump’s first term and 25 passed under Biden.

According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL),
which has been operating a protest law tracker
[[link removed]] since January 2017, when
Trump first took office, “these anti-protest bills are often
introduced in response to prominent protest movements”. That’s
likely why the number of proposed anti-protest bills jumped so high in
2021 (90 total bills proposed, though only 12 passed), the year after
protests sprung up across the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s
murder by a Minneapolis cop.

Other protest bills have emerged in response to other movements. In
2019, in the wake of the Dakota Access pipeline protests and the
ramping up of climate protests, US states began to introduce extreme
penalties (like five years in prison, in the case of one Louisiana
law) for interfering with pipeline construction or trespassing nearby.
In 2025, a host of bills targeting student protesters
[[link removed]]
and universities cropped up as a response to pro-Palestinian student
encampments.

Other bills have seemed intent on making protest of any kind more
dangerous to participants: an Iowa law passed in 2021 protects drivers
who hit or kill protesters from liability, while a Florida law passed
the same year protects people who injure or kill protesters from being
sued, so long as the protester was participating in a “riot”.
(What constitutes a “riot”, though, varies by state and in some
places is defined in such a way that it can include “peaceful
protesters who are simply part of a larger crowd where a few
individuals engage in property destruction – even something as minor
as kicking over a trash can”, said
[[link removed]]
the ICNL.)

[people holding flags ]
Demonstrators attend a protest after the fatal shootings of Renee
Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by US federal agents, in Minneapolis, on
30 January. Photograph: Tim Evans/Reuters

According to Gloria J Browne-Marshall, a professor of constitutional
law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (Cuny) and author of A
Protest [[link removed]] History of the
United States, criminalization and violence against protestors have
been “part and parcel” of this country for a long time. During the
civil rights movement, for example, leaders were surveilled by the
government and frequently jailed. If people see this moment as totally
unprecedented, it might be because of the demographic being visibly
affected.

“What had been happening to immigrants and to African Americans …
is now happening across the board to middle-class white people,” she
said.

‘A WAR ON SOLIDARITY’

According to Nick Estes, a historian at the University of Minnesota
and enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe who has written and
co-edited multiple books on the Standing Rock protests against the
Dakota Access pipeline, the shooting and killing of white people on
the streets of Minneapolis is “a war on solidarity”. “White
supremacy is meant to control white people first and foremost,” he
said. “So if they’re not complying with the status quo, and
they’re trying to defend immigrant neighbors, I see this as
retaliation [against them for that].”

He pointed to Jessica Reznicek, a Catholic Worker and climate activist
who was sentenced
[[link removed]]
to eight years in prison, fined $3m and labeled a domestic terrorist
in 2021 for damaging the Dakota Access pipeline using a pipe welder
(no people were harmed). Meanwhile, “no January 6 protester got
terrorism enhancement charges or sentencing”, Estes said, despite
multiple fatalities
[[link removed]]
resulting from the attack on the US Capitol. “I think that largely
has to do with the fact that [Reznicek] was in alliance with
Indigenous water protectors.”

Regardless of who is being targeted, the criminalization of protest
– and a belief in the importance of protest – have been present
since the country’s founding, according to Browne-Marshall.

On the one hand, the Insurrection Act was “created to prevent people
from protesting”; on the other, “the framers of the US
constitution were very much afraid of the power of the government they
had created”, she said. “There was always this fear of a
charismatic leader who would somehow meld together these three
branches of government that were supposed to be counters to one
another – and that’s what we have right now.”

The goal of all this criminalization seems to be to further
consolidate power and protect the Trump administration against
dissent, she added.

The White House did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about
what criteria is being used to designate someone a “domestic
terrorist”, nor why that label is being applied by the White House
before evidence has been presented or considered in a court of law.
Instead, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, fully defended
ICE agents, saying: “ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law
and protect American communities and local officials should work with
them, not against them. Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement
officers instead of the criminals is simply doing the bidding of
criminal illegal aliens.” Neither ICE nor the Department of Justice
responded to the Guardian’s questions or requests for comment.

Insofar as criminalization is meant to scare people, it’s working to
a degree, according to ACLU Minnesota organizer Paul Sullivan.
Immigrants in the Twin Cities are increasingly staying indoors,
relying on mutual aid
[[link removed]]
efforts for food and other necessities, and many people of color, even
if they’re citizens, are shrinking from public life as they look to
avoid being racially profiled by ICE officers.

“But it’s also, frankly, had the opposite effect that I imagine
that ICE and the Trump administration intended, which is that it has
really, really activated and enraged a lot of our community,”
Sullivan said. They described stories of ICE officers pulling up
across from a cafe and 90% of the people inside coming out to shout at
them and blow whistles. “It’s really become something that the
community has coalesced around, and that is that determination to
oppose the regime for what they’re doing,” Sullivan said.

It’s not just Minnesota – in Chicago, posters declaring that ICE
isn’t welcome have become nearly ubiquitous in many neighborhoods.
In Oregon, protesters are doubling down on their right to protest and
bringing gas masks to help them weather pepper spray and other attacks
from federal agents.

Though the risks are high, continuing to show up is important, said
Sullivan.

That can and is taking many different forms in cities that are being
targeted, including delivering meals and covering rent for immigrants
who are sheltering in place to avoid ICE, continuing to blow whistles
and alert neighbors when ICE is spotted nearby, filming their
activities, and pressuring local elected officials to push back
against this federal overreach.

Browne-Marshall suggests that today’s organizers study the
strategies of their forebears in the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights
movements to learn what works, including tactics like pressuring
corporations to stop cooperating with federal agents. In the longer
term, Sullivan notes that it will be important to fight the
securitization that the US government has been ramping up since 9/11
under the banner of anti-terrorism that allows for such easy and
widespread surveillance of US citizens and everyone who sets foot in
the country. Many others are calling for the US to abolish ICE
[[link removed]].

Whatever the solution, one thing should be clear, said Estes: the law
may be twisted such that the government can deem anyone it wants to
punish – or even kill with impunity – a “domestic terrorist”.

But law and order are “actually supposed to be a reflection of the
values of society”, he said. “What we’re seeing on the ground is
people who are saying: ‘This is not what we want; this is not
something we agreed to; this is not something we asked for.’ To me,
that shows that human solidarity is triumphing in the face of this
really violent moment we’re living through.”

_Whitney Bauck is a reporter focused on climate and the environment
based in Brooklyn, New York_

 

* Protest
[[link removed]]
* Criminalization
[[link removed]]
* Trump Administration
[[link removed]]
* historical analysis
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]