Toplines from the from the Movement for Black Lives’ report titled “Struggle for Power: The Ongoing Persecution of Black Movement By The US Government“, published Wednesday:

“Much of the drive to use federal charges against protesters stemmed from top-down directives from former President Donald J. Trump and Attorney General William Barr. These directives, meant to disrupt the movement, were the primary reason for the unprecedented federalization of protest-related prosecutions seen in 2020. The government rhetoric in these directives and U.S. Department of Justice press releases regarding the protests in support of the movement to defend Black lives painted an image of protesters as ‘violent radicals.’ Additionally, the government justified the expanded use of its authority and deployment of federal enforcement due to what it claimed was local and state leaders’ ‘abdication of their law enforcement responsibilities in deference to this violent assault.’… The government most frequently claimed federal jurisdiction based on alleged conduct either occurring on federal property or affecting property which receives federal funding, including state and local government property. This is followed closely by cases where the government bent over backwards to assert federal jurisdiction through an extremely attenuated nexus with interstate commerce.”

“Highlighting the government’s aggressive assertion of federal jurisdiction and its naked attempts at disrupting the movement to defend Black lives, in 92.6% of the cases there were equivalent state level charges that could have been brought against defendants. Among those cases where comparable state level charges could have been brought, 88% of the federal criminal charges carried more severe potential sentences than the equivalent state criminal charges for the same or similar conduct. The possibility of harsher outcomes in the federal criminal punishment system – and the anticipated disruptive effect of that possibility on the movement – seems to have driven the government’s aggressive assertion of federal jurisdiction over conduct that typically would have been prosecuted by state authorities, if at all.”