Attorney General William Barr has urged his prosecutors to bring federal charges on protesters who cause violence and has suggested that rarely used sedition charges could apply.
“It is highly unusual, and without precedent in recent American history,†said Ron Kuby, a longtime attorney who isn’t involved in the cases but has represented scores of clients over the years in protest-related incidents.
In one case in Utah, where a police car was burned, federal prosecutors had to defend why they were bringing arson charges in federal court.
There have been more than 16,000 positive cases in the federal prison system, according to a tracker compiled by the AP and The Marshall Project.
In one arrest in Erie, Pennsylvania, community members raised more than $2,500 to help with bail for a 29-year-old Black man who was arrested after they said white people had come from out of town and spray painted a parking lot.
In thousands of pages of court documents, the only apparent mention of antifa is in a Boston case in which authorities said a FBI Gang Task Force member was investigating “suspected ANTIFA activity associated with the protests†when a man fired at him and other officers.
Several of the defendants are not from the Democratic-led cities that Trump has likened to “war zones" but from the suburbs the Republican president has claimed to have “saved.†Of the 93 people arrested on federal criminal charges in Portland, 18 defendants are from out of state, the Justice Department said.
More than 40% of those facing federal charges are white.
Bartels, who lives at his parents' house, spray painted an “A†on a police cruiser before jumping on top of it and smashing its windshield during a protest in the city, prosecutors said.
One defendant who was arrested during a protest in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester told authorities he was “with the anarchist group.†Vincent Eovacious, 18, who is accused of possessing several Molotov cocktails, told authorities that he had been “waiting for an opportunity,†according to court documents.
John Malcolm Bareswill, angry that a local Black church held a prayer vigil for George Floyd, called the church and threatened to burn it to the ground, using racial slurs in a phone call overheard by children, prosecutors said.
Two Missouri militia members who authorities say traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to see Trump’s visit in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake were arrested at a hotel in September with a cache of guns, according to court documents.
Three of the men arrested are far-right extremists, members of the “Boogaloo†movement plotting to overthrow the government and had been stockpiling military-grade weapons and hunting around for the right public event to unleash violence for weeks before Floyd’s death, according to court documents.
But the handling of the federal protest cases is vastly different from other recent times of unrest
“Look at Travyon (Martin) verdicts, Eric Garner verdicts,†Kuby said, talking about high-profile cases in which Black people were killed but no charges were filed
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