The model is straightforward and old: activists chain themselves or lock their bodies to the gates of a weapons-manufacturing facility, halting operations for hours, and accept arrest as part of the action. The model goes back to the 1980s Plowshares actions and to the 1960s direct-action tradition before that. What is new in 2024 is the consistency of felony-level charging.
The 2024 actions
A non-exhaustive list of major U.S. weapons-plant blockades through 2024 that produced felony charges or substantial misdemeanor cases:
- Boeing Pittsburgh (multiple actions across 2024): U.S. Palestinian Community Network and Pittsburgh Palestine Coalition activists shut down access to Boeing\'s Allegheny County campus. Felony obstruction and conspiracy charges filed against named organizers.
- Holtec International (Camden, NJ, multiple actions): Defenders blockading the parking-lot entrance for the nuclear-components and energy contractor faced state criminal-mischief and conspiracy charges.
- Lockheed Martin (multiple cities — Bethesda, Fort Worth, Marietta, Syracuse): 2024 saw arrests at Lockheed facilities ranging from misdemeanor trespass dispositions to (in some Texas cases) state felony charging.
- General Atomics (San Diego): Drone-manufacturer plant blockaded by Veterans for Peace and CodePink coalition activists. Misdemeanor and infraction dispositions.
- Northrop Grumman (Linthicum, MD): Maryland blockades produced state misdemeanor charges with negotiated dispositions.
- RTX/Raytheon (Tucson, multiple actions): Catholic Worker–aligned Plowshares-tradition activists faced Arizona state felony charging.
The legal pattern
Local U.S. prosecutors in 2024 — particularly in states with hostile political climates for pro-Palestine organizing — have favored stacking charges: felony rioting, felony criminal mischief over a damage-valuation threshold, felony conspiracy, and the residual misdemeanors. The Merrimack 4 (New Hampshire) and several Pittsburgh and Camden cases have been the most visible felony stacks. The point appears to be deterrence by pretrial exposure: even where prosecutors do not expect to win on the high-end charges, the threat of multi-year sentences keeps defendants in plea-bargain pressure for months.
Defense counsel from the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Mass Defense Committee have been coordinating across jurisdictions to share necessity-defense briefs, damage-valuation challenges, and First Amendment / public-forum motions.
The lineage
The current wave of U.S. weapons-plant blockades belongs to a long lineage that prosecutors have prosecuted just as aggressively in earlier decades. The 1980 Plowshares Eight; the 2002 Riverside Plowshares; the 2012 Y-12 Plowshares action by Sister Megan Rice, Greg Boertje-Obed, and Michael Walli (89-year-old Rice was sentenced to nearly three years on federal sabotage charges later vacated on appeal); the 2018 Kings Bay Plowshares 7. Every generation of weapons-plant defenders has faced this prosecutorial pattern. What 2024 brought was the application of that pattern to a notably younger, broader, and more racially-mixed cohort of Palestine-solidarity defendants. The historical lineage is theirs to claim.
NPPC tracks weapons-plant blockade prosecutions and publishes updates as the 2024 cases move toward trial.
