Prominent civil rights and civil liberties organizations have called on the US homeland security department to investigate the agency’s intelligence-gathering on protesters against “Cop City”, the police and fire department training center planned for a forest south-east of Atlanta.
The organizations draw attention to the dozens of environmental protesters arrested and charged with domestic terrorism in a letter to the department director, Alejandro Mayorkas. The charges have caused outrage among many observers who accuse Georgia law enforcement of a heavy-handed crackdown on the protest movement.
The letter stated that “[r]ecent events in Atlanta make clear that lax DHS standards and intelligence practices have contributed to concerning arrests and prosecution of individuals associated with …[the] movement” against Cop City.
The movement came to global attention after police shot dead Manuel Paez Terán, an environmental protester, in a January raid on the forest – the first incident of its kind in US history. The state says Paez Terán shot first, but video footage from police nearby raises the possibility that one officer wounded another in the raid. A special prosecutor is evaluating the case.
Paez Terán was one of dozens of “forest defenders” who had been camping on public park land near where the training center is planned in protest against the project. Police raids on the forest began last year, resulting in arrests of 42 people on state domestic terrorism charges – another first. Others have been arrested on separate charges.
The ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Brennan Center for Justice and Center for Constitutional Rights signed the letter to the DHS, which underlines the “dangers of … vague, overbroad, and stigmatizing terms like ‘domestic violent extremist’ and ‘militant’ to describe individuals who may be engaged in protected First Amendment activity”.
The problem, the letter states, is that such language “contribut[es] to a false narrative that individuals engaged in lawful protest are a national security threat, thus risking heightened aggressive policing of protesters”.
The DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
The letter comes as the “civil rights community is increasingly concerned about Cop City arrests”, said Aamra Ahmad, staff attorney at the ACLU National Security Project.
The attorney cited the 31 May arrests of three people working with a non-profit bail fund and the recent recusal of the DeKalb county district attorney, Sherry Boston, over differences with the state in prosecutorial approaches to the arrests as events that heightened a sense of urgency.
Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, used social media after the bail fund arrests to call the three – charged with financial fraud – “criminals who facilitated and encouraged domestic terrorism”.
The federal agency has used “domestic violent extremist” and similar terms in multiple bulletins to refer broadly to Cop City protesters, most recently in May. This appears to have led Atlanta police to state that DHS classifies the protesters as such in dozens of arrest warrants based on sworn affidavits seen by the Guardian – even though the agency told the Guardian in January it “does not classify or designate any groups”.
The agency’s use of such language and related aggressive policing and prosecution aimed at protesters was nothing new, said Ryan Shapiro, co-founder of Property of the People, a non-profit organization that has released thousands of FBI and CIA documents.
“Federal agencies have long deployed the rhetoric and apparatus of national security to marginalize progressive movements as threats to the state,” Shapiro said. “Post-9/11, local law enforcement has seized upon these same tools to cast peaceful dissent as terrorism. ‘Domestic violent extremism’ is just classic American red-baiting rebranded.”
The letter asks the federal agency to disclose all intelligence it has gathered on Cop City opponents and shared with state and local law enforcement, as well as with congressional homeland security committees; to withdraw all bulletins and other communications referring to the protesters; and to have the agency’s inspector general investigate the use of the term “domestic violent extremists” in reports on Cop City.
The organizations urge the DHS to meet with the justice department’s civil rights division and civil liberties and community organizations – including the ones signing the letter – to ensure policies and procedures protect the constitutional rights of protesters, including the legal definition and use of terminology and intelligence-gathering that comes from this usage.
The letter also asks the agency to “ceas[e] all suspicionless monitoring of social media activity given its broad intrusion on First Amendment protected speech and association, and [to] establish a credible, independent mechanism to oversee DHS intelligence programs”.
“The information we have about DHS products and communications is troubling,” said Charlie Hogle, staff attorney at the ACLU national security project. “The most appropriate thing to do would be to withdraw them, and we would not be OK with business as usual moving forward.”
