None of the architecture is new. The Green Scare prosecutions of Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front defendants between 2005 and 2008 used an earlier version of it. The 1970s federal campaigns against the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the independentistas, and the Weather Underground poured the foundations. What 2024 added was consolidation: the scattered tools of a half-century became a single prosecutorial playbook, run against three different movements in the same calendar year.
The playbook has five moves, and 2024 saw every one of them.
Terrorism enhancements for property crimes. Sentencing Guideline § 3A1.4 was written for terrorism. In 2024, federal courts applied or weighed it against pipeline saboteurs, forest defenders, and antifascist defendants whose conduct destroyed property and harmed no one — Jessica Reznicek is already serving a sentence built on it. Georgia's state-law equivalent, deployed against the Atlanta forest defenders, spent the year serving as model legislation for copycat statutes elsewhere.
Racketeering charges against movements. Georgia's 61-defendant Cop City RICO indictment treated a decentralized protest movement as a criminal "enterprise," with predicate acts that ranged from felony intimidation down to distributing flyers. It was the year's most ambitious version of the move, and though the RICO theory later collapsed on the authorization defects defense lawyers spent 2024 exposing, the smaller companion case — money-laundering and charity-fraud charges against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund's bail organizers — survived it.
Material support stretched toward speech. The Treasury Department's October 2024 designation of Samidoun put the federal material-support statute within reach of U.S. Palestine solidarity organizing at a scale not previously possible. The federal grand juries followed within weeks, and the immigration-detention campaign of 2025 was already visible in outline.
Criminalizing movement support itself. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund prosecution is the leading case: the theory that bailing protesters out of jail, and accounting for the money that does it, is itself chargeable conduct. Every state now has that template available.
Grand juries as intelligence machinery. Even where prosecutions stall, federal grand-jury subpoenas compel testimony, organizational records, and donor lists under threat of contempt. The 2024 subpoena wave against Palestine solidarity networks was the largest such deployment in roughly a decade.
Why the moves travel together
Each tool strengthens the others. Terrorism enhancements produce sentence exposure so severe that plea pressure becomes overwhelming. RICO and material-support theories produce sprawling multi-defendant cases that drain movement resources and fracture coalitions. Charging bail funds dries up the money that makes sustained protest survivable. Grand juries harvest the intelligence that seeds the next round of cases. Run together, they attach a real criminal-legal price to joining a movement, funding one, or organizing alongside one — which is the point.
Civil society spent the year building the counter-record. The ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, the Climate Defense Project, Palestine Legal, the Brennan Center, PEN America, and four separate U.N. Special Rapporteurs documented the pattern in briefs, communications, and reporting that now constitute a substantial public archive.
But the pattern runs on prosecutorial discretion, and only prosecutorial discretion can stop it. In the current political environment, discretion is moving the other way. NPPC documents the 2024 cases — Cop City, climate defense, Palestine solidarity — as one continuous phenomenon, and treats their defendants as a single contemporary cohort of U.S. political prisoners, because the government that charged them treated them as a single problem.
