The Atlanta Forest defenders were not the first U.S. environmental movement the federal government charged as terrorists. The Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front prisoners of the 2005–2008 Green Scare were. What 2023–2024 produced was a re-deployment of that architecture at scale, and against a wider range of movements.
What the template is
Four moves, refined in the Cop City prosecution and now visible in other 2024 cases:
- Domestic-terrorism enhancement on non-violent property-defense action. Trespass, occupation of public land, sabotage of construction equipment — none of these would normally produce a terrorism charge. The Cop City prosecutors applied Georgia\'s domestic-terrorism statute to forest-encampment defendants and won the precedent in pretrial rulings.
- RICO theory on coalition movements. By treating a multi-tendency movement (encampments + bail funds + leafleting + protest weeks) as a racketeering enterprise, the state can charge any individual as a member of the whole. Predicate acts can be as minor as handing out a flier.
- Money-laundering and charity-fraud on bail-fund organizers. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund prosecution applied this. By 2024 the theory was sitting on the shelf for any state that wanted to take it down.
- Federal grand-jury sweeps in parallel. Even where state cases stall, federal grand juries can be empaneled to extract testimony from organizers under contempt threat. The post-Oct-2023 Palestine solidarity wave has produced new examples.
Where the template traveled in 2024
Prairieland (Texas, late 2024): Texas state prosecutors brought aggravated-trespass and conspiracy charges against pipeline-protest defendants at the proposed Prairieland Energy fracked-gas export terminal, citing Cop City case law in their pleadings. Defense counsel filed motions that explicitly track the Stop Cop City First Amendment briefing.
Palestine solidarity (multiple jurisdictions, 2024): Federal and state prosecutors began applying conspiracy and "material support" theories to Palestine solidarity organizers — weapons-manufacturer blockaders, campus-encampment leaders, fundraising coordinators. The October 2024 federal grand-jury sweep targeting Samidoun and adjacent Palestinian-rights organizations relied on the same coalition-as-conspiracy logic Carr\'s office had pioneered.
Coastal GasLink / Wet\'suwet\'en (U.S.-Canada, 2024): U.S. federal courts have begun handling cross-border solidarity charges arising from the Wet\'suwet\'en pipeline-defense matter using language borrowed from the domestic-terrorism Cop City framework.
Climate Defenders Toolkit organizers (multiple states, 2024): Several U.S. climate-defense legal-support organizations reported grand-jury subpoenas in 2024 seeking organizing documents, donor lists, and internal communications. The theory is the same as the Solidarity Fund theory: that supporting a movement is, with the right framing, participating in a conspiracy.
What civil society has been saying
The ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Movement for Black Lives, the Climate Defense Project, the Sunrise Movement\'s legal counsel, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association have all spent 2024 documenting and pushing back on this expansion. The pattern they describe is consistent: U.S. domestic-terrorism law, originally constructed in the post-September-11 moment to target a narrow class of national-security threats, is being deployed against the U.S. environmental, anti-police, and Palestine-solidarity movements as a routine charging tool.
The Cop City defendants who fought this template in Georgia spent 2024 building the legal architecture by which the next movement\'s defendants will fight it. The next movements are already in court.
