Sylvie sat handcuffed on a curb outside the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, watching police let others go. “Yeah, yeah, get out of here, get the fuck out of here,” cops called to a receding crowd of people, who scattered by foot or into their cars. “What’s the difference?” Sylvie thought. “Why? Why did I get arrested?”
It was March 5, 2023. Sylvie had been standing not far from the stage at a music festival organized to protest the construction of the militarized police complex known to its detractors as Cop City when, suddenly, she turned to see police running toward her small group, shouting at them to get down. Sylvie and the others ran. The police fired their tasers. Someone fell. Sylvie paused, and a cop grabbed her. Now, as she waited on the curb, she could still hear Faye Webster playing on the festival stage. Seeing others leave freely was strange, but it also made her think, “There might be a way out of this.”
Sylvie and about 50 others were brought to nearby Gresham Park, where they were met by several law enforcement agencies and a SWAT team. They were questioned one by one. A mile away from where Sylvie was arrested, a rowdy crew had entered the Cop City construction site and sabotaged equipment, and the cops who responded to the incident seemed to have grabbed people at random. When Sylvie had to pee during the interrogations, a female officer took her into a field. Being zip-tied, she had to ask the officer to help her pull up her pants. “I have no control over even my body at this point,” she thought.
At DeKalb County Jail, the morning after Sylvie’s arrest, the desk attendant completing her booking paperwork unceremoniously confirmed that Sylvie — along with 22 others — had been charged with domestic terrorism. Denied bond, and with no court date on the horizon, Sylvie spent the next four weeks in a plexiglass panopticon, an octagonal cell block in constant view of the guards. Meanwhile, Cop City activists sprang into action. Solidarity committees broadcasted news of the arrests; a jail support network helped find lawyers, supplied bond payments, and sent medication and eyeglasses, as well as letters and books. Someone mailed Sylvie the first two novels of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which she read in a state of absorption.
Someone also sent her a copy of A Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant. The guide, compiled from the advice of around 100 activists and political prisoners and authored by “a small collective of dedicated legal support organizers” in 2017, has a talismanic quality. “If this book found its way into your hands, chances are you are in dire need of it right now,” it opens. Sylvie — who, like most of the activists interviewed for this piece, asked not to be identified by her real name due to concerns about ongoing surveillance — read studiously, taking notes in the margins.
“Cases get dismissed when people push back on them…because the whole system is built on doing this fast and cheap.”
Frustrated with the state’s success in using “criminal charges to dismantle, destroy, and neutralize radical movements,” the authors of A Tilted Guide set out to help political defendants use their “rotten situation” to advance their struggle. The authors urge arrestees not to let themselves be divided and conquered, coerced into cooperating with prosecution or accepting plea deals that endanger themselves or their codefendants. “We will attempt to give you the knowledge you need to make decisions that are best for you, your comrades and loved ones, and your movement, without sacrificing one for the other,” they write.
A Tilted Guide reflects the ethos of a political project known as “collective defense.” Embraced on the left during the First Red Scare, when the Russian Revolution triggered an anti-communist crackdown in the U.S., collective defense encourages people facing prosecution for political activity to view their individual legal ordeal as a political struggle. Collective defense involves developing solidarity and legal coordination between defendants, while allies on the outside establish mutual aid networks, media strategies, and other support people need to fight their cases.
The legal cost of dissent in the U.S. has escalated drastically in recent years. Showing up at a protest — never mind engaging in more confrontational tactics — can result in conspiracy or terror charges. Even mutual aid and solidarity fundraising are, increasingly, treated as financial crimes or taken as evidence of criminal collusion. In the NSPM-7 national security directive, issued on September 25, 2025, the Trump administration directed that “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” should be considered indicators of terrorist intent.
Yet in other ways, this is an ideal moment for legal resistance. The court system is backlogged and broken, and the Trump administration has flooded it with shoddy cases. From Atlanta to Portland, Los Angeles to Minneapolis, lawyers, defendants, and activists are reviving and championing collective defense as a way to exploit the disarray and extend the energy of protest into the courtroom and beyond.
Sylvie was released later in the spring of 2023 on bond conditions that banned her from communicating with other arrestees or returning to Georgia. She went, instead, back to the Midwest to work on a farm; she’s a third-generation farmer who was drawn to protest Cop City because it marked, for her, a convergence of environmentalism and the fight against racism and police violence.
Some months later, on September 5, she was harvesting apples when a message popped up in a Signal thread of friends and movement supporters. Georgia’s attorney general had indicted 61 Cop City protesters under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO. Sylvie searched anxiously for the indictment and found her name on it. Also named were the organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which had supported her in jail; earlier in the year, the state had hit them with money-laundering and fraud charges. Sylvie knew that the fund organizers’ homes had been raided, and she suddenly worried she might be searched too. A friend drove Sylvie home, as she thought anxiously of “perfectly legal political literature” the state might collect as evidence against her.
The RICO charges represented a major escalation against the Cop City protesters, including the threat of up to 20 years in prison. A statute designed to combat the Mafia is now wielded in a bewildering array of contexts and increasingly used to criminalize activists based on mere association. For the Cop City defendants, the new charges solidified their feeling that collective punishment required a collective legal strategy. Working carefully to navigate the communication restrictions the state had imposed upon them, they had to get organized, and get their lawyers and supporters on board.
In doing so, they took a cue from the J20 defendants, who were among the hundreds arrested at DisruptJ20, a militant protest of Trump’s 2017 inauguration. One hundred and thirty people facing conspiracy to riot charges organized themselves around a “points of unity” agreement, in which they asserted that they were being subjected to political prosecution, vowed to refuse plea deals with cooperation agreements that would jeopardize their fellow defendants, and agreed to work together to fight their cases to the bitter end.
But, in fact, the end was not so bitter. As the 130 cases made their way to trial, the J20 prosecution was found to have committed what’s called a Brady violation — to have withheld exonerating evidence from the defense. The case fell apart: The prosecution dropped some of the most tenuous charges, and the remaining protesters were later acquitted. Andrew Manuel Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law, sees the revelation of the Brady violation as intimately connected to the fact that protesters had chosen collective defense. An overburdened court is rife with procedural flaws that are papered over in a system designed to produce plea deals — but publicity and a pending trial bring enhanced scrutiny. “Cases get dismissed when people push back on them,” Crespo said, “because the whole system is built on doing this fast and cheap…. It all operates on the idea that no one’s going to pay attention.”
Early in his career as a public defender, Crespo felt a “nagging awareness” that although he was standing up for people in times of need, he was not empowering them to challenge structural imbalances. One task of defense lawyers, he noted by way of example, is to help clients understand plea offers. “But understanding is not the issue. You could explain the plea offer till you’re out of breath. It’s not going to change the fundamental reality, which is, there are no good options for this client. The prosecutor holds all the cards,” Crespo said. “The way you get out of a no-win situation is by making sure that the clients have power, and that’s an organizer’s job.”
Related ideas about organized resistance within the legal system have long circulated among lawyers, defendants, and organizers. Crespo cites J20 as well as mass arrests of protesters at the World Trade Organization in 1999, the Republican National Convention in 2000, and the Dakota Access Pipeline in the 2010s as relevant precursors to today’s movement, but activists point to precedents as far back as the turn of the twentieth century, when the Industrial Workers of the World pioneered defense funds and committees to support incarcerated Wobblies. In 1927, the Communist Party USA’s International Labor Defense (ILD) formulated its own notion of collective defense, intended to “destroy the illusions of a democracy and justice above classes.” The ILD sourced sympathetic attorneys for political prisoners and sought to foment public outrage about the cases to influence their outcomes.
In the 1960s and 1970s, student protesters and radical lawyers identified an opportunity for resistance in the sheer scale of arrests regularly visited on protest movements. In 1964, for example, 773 student protesters were arrested at the University of California, Berkeley after occupying Sproul Hall in the largest single demonstration of the Free Speech Movement. As recounted by the historian Luca Falciola, many of the arrested students wanted a “unified defense … to honor the unified principles that had led to the sit-in.” They requested 70 jury trials, which would have taken five years to complete. But lacking sufficient legal support for the long haul, the students eventually took a deal that resulted in 99 percent of them being found guilty of trespass.
Following that defeat, a new legal infrastructure began to form around the notion of mass defense for protesters. When 711 students were arrested for a building occupation at Columbia University in 1968, the protesters refused to accept plea deals. Nearly all demanded jury trials, severely testing the capacity of the district attorney’s office, while support funds flowed into a newly formed Mass Defense Committee. Ultimately, every single trespass case was dismissed.
Courts have only grown more overburdened in the decades since, with empty judgeships, shortages of both public defenders and prosecutors, Covid backlogs, and arduous discovery periods that now involve looking through terabytes’ worth of digital data. The chaos creates opportunity, but it’s a challenge to find lawyers that are willing to work collectively and creatively within the broken system.
The first step in doing so is often creating a joint defense agreement, a document that formally permits lawyers to share privileged information across their clients’ cases. “The majority of traditional lawyers, even though they might be politically radical or well-intentioned, don’t even know that it’s possible or know that it could be done,” said Xavier de Janon, who is director of mass defense for the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and has represented several Cop City defendants. Had Crespo learned a client was texting with dozens of other defendants about trial strategies, it would have set off “alarm bells” in his head, he notes in a 2022 article. That kind of collaboration jeopardizes the basic creed of public defense, which is “client-centered” and thus individualistic.
A collective defense requires that lawyers have some familiarity with all the cases, but the discovery in the Cop City case was so large and disorganized that most lawyers, apart from a small radical contingent, focused only on evidence that directly concerned their clients. At last, a well-connected, fairly conservative Atlanta lawyer, who was better versed than most in the overall details of the case, agreed to support collective defense efforts. Only then did the others feel sufficiently reassured to follow suit. The defendants also adopted their own points of unity modeled on J20’s.
Their efforts got results: On December 30, 2025, a judge dropped the RICO charges against Sylvie and 60 others. His order accused the attorney general of jurisdictional overreach and procedural error. Given the prosecution’s promise to appeal, and the fact that Cop City was by then operational, the result was “anticlimactic,” said Sylvie, but it still showed the positive impact of defendant solidarity. The prosecution, she said, “clearly didn’t have the effect it intended” — to create a “huge scandal” around the protesters. Instead, the defense’s narrative has dominated: that the true scandal is state repression.
If the Cop City RICO defense is a tentative success story, Prairieland is a cautionary tale about what happens absent mass solidarity. This March, nine people were convicted of charges including conspiracy and support for terrorism after a noise demonstration went awry last Fourth of July in Prairieland, Texas. In June, federal judges handed down staggering sentences, ranging from 30 to 100 years. In North Texas — where bail funds are difficult to establish and easily criminalized under a spate of laws passed by GOP legislators since 2020 — no structure like the Atlanta Solidarity Fund existed to safeguard defendant cooperation in the early, fragile period immediately after arrest.
“For years, in the Stop Cop City movement, you had a guaranteed bond, you had a guaranteed support system,” said de Janon of the NLG, who also represents one of the Prairieland defendants in her state case. “There was already a foundation for people to plug in and be oriented.” Elsewhere, the first offer of support a defendant receives “is from an FBI agent, is from a prosecutor, who walks in and says, ‘I’m here to help you,’ instead of a friendly lawyer, or your mom, or your sister … telling you, ‘I’m helping you. I got it. Don’t worry. Don’t talk to the cops.’” In the Prairieland case, several defendants did become informants and testify in court against their comrades — often in tears.
Mutual aid is essential to the project of collective defense. “You are working to undermine the process of isolation that comes with repression,” said an organizer in Minnesota. “In the criminal punishment system, the process is the punishment,” added a fellow Twin Cities organizer. A trial is long and expensive: Political defendants routinely have to hire a lawyer, travel across state lines for court dates, and figure out a way to hold down a job despite lengthy jail stints and extreme charges. A, an organizer from the now-defunct Portland General Defense Committee, which supported countless defendants during the George Floyd uprising of 2020, described committee members standing day and night outside the jail with food, water, cigarettes, and clothing for defendants. They also issued “microgrants” covering everything from transportation to temporary housing. “We would bail people out, but the police would keep their cell phones, keep their bikes, keep their cars … [as] evidence,” said A. “So, we were giving people microgrants in order for them to get the things that they needed to be able to fight their cases.”
“You are working to undermine the process of isolation that comes with repression.”
Like the J20 defendants, the Portland defendants did not know one another, and they came from a wide range of backgrounds and levels of political experience. The Defense Committee offered legal seminars from the NLG and tried to provide everyone with a copy of A Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant. They worked with the NLG to train “legal doulas,” who also had experience with trauma-informed care; each doula was paired with a small group of defendants to help them navigate their legal ordeals as well as the emotional dimensions of arrest. “For some people, this is an extremely traumatizing experience,” explained A.
It can also be radicalizing. Sylvie said that her experience fighting her case didn’t change her politics in the sense of changing her analysis of a given issue — it materially changed her position in the world: how she can act, how she can feel, what she must do. At a certain point, she said, she felt she was almost forced to change in ways that were outside her control. “This is happening to me,” she thought, “therefore I must act in this way and do X, Y, and Z for everyone’s freedom.” She described a change in consciousness that has come from being antagonized by the state. “I have generally been more scared, and also more alive, in the way that when your freedom is threatened like that, you do just feel the immediacy of everything being taken from you, and then it makes everything more vivid,” she said. “Just feeling more beauty, feeling more content, and closer to more people, based on a shared commitment that we have to each other for liberation, not just for ourselves, but for everyone and the earth.”
Along with this new vividness, which has at times roused her from a depressive state into action, have come new political constraints. Sylvie closely followed the Prairieland case this February, struggling with her desire to offer support leading up to the trial. She worried any contact with her would be a stain on the case, given her own looming terrorism charges.
In the Prairieland case, a large group of demonstrators was charged with support for terrorism and attempted murder after one person fired a gun and injured a police officer. DHS attorneys successfully framed the incident as an “ambush” and act of “domestic terrorism,” using language they have frequently deployed against anti-ICE protesters elsewhere — including Renée Good and Alex Pretti, after they were shot by immigration agents last winter. Although defendant organizers tried to rally attention for the case, the support group on the ground was small, and media outlets largely took the state’s narrative for granted until the trial was well underway.
In her own case, Sylvie had occasionally watched support groups collapse when their members were all personally close to the defendants. She suspected similar dynamics were at work in Prairieland. “Most of the crew is just involved deeply in the case, in unimaginable heartbreaking ways, where you don’t actually have time to think about this strategically, or do any of the political work that needs to be done beyond direct support for your friends, family, and yourself,” she said. “Those people should have had everyone who hates ICE in the U.S. behind them,” she added. “There should have been a movement behind them.”
Such a movement is forming in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where, according to the Minnesota NLG, at least 400 people were arrested in anti-ICE protests this winter. The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has brought the courts there to a breaking point, partly due to habeas petitions filed on behalf of people detained by ICE. A DHS attorney recently told a judge in Minneapolis that “the system sucks. This job sucks. I wish you could hold me in contempt so that I could get 24 hours of sleep.” Six prosecutors quit after the government began gunning for a federal investigation into Good’s widow — the mass resignation led a local alt-weekly to declare, “There’s Never Been a Better Time to Commit a Federal Crime in Minnesota.”
The sharpest tool of a hypothetical defendant union would be the “plea strike,” in which people collectively refuse to plead guilty.
The mass solidarity that has sustained anti-ICE activism in the Twin Cities is a natural launchpad for defendant solidarity. Activists have even explored the idea of a defendant union, in which a standing body would represent the interests of defendants. While the situation in Minneapolis has progressed too quickly for the idea to come to fruition — in as many as a third of the cases so far, prosecutors have failed to file charges, had cases dismissed due to flimsy evidence, or lost at trial — the defendant union represents the potential high-water mark of defendant organizing.
“There’s incredible, almost mind-bogglingly incredible, latent power among people facing prosecution to organize themselves into durable structures like defendant unions,” said Crespo, who describes defendant unions — which could benefit anyone, not just people facing political charges — as the “political and academic obsession” of his life. While the idea is still largely theoretical, Crespo believes defendant unions could be most effective as community-based organizations in neighborhoods across the country where the harms of mass incarceration are most concentrated.
The sharpest tool of a hypothetical defendant union would be the “plea strike,” in which people collectively refuse to plead guilty. Because plea bargains, which account for roughly 95 percent of convictions, are vastly cheaper and more efficient for the state than trials, criminal courts would buckle if forced to bring every case — or even a small increase in cases — to the “speedy and public trial” to which people accused of crimes are supposedly entitled. Like a work-to-rule strike, this tactic could halt the system by adhering to the very letter of the law.
The fundamental insight of a defendant union, one Minnesota organizer said, is the same as that of a labor union: “Individually I have no power against the boss, against the prosecutor. But if we can move together, we can throw our weight around.”
LG Fadiman is an assistant editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in history at Yale University.
Eva Rosenfeld is a writer and painter from Michigan, and currently a writer-in-residence at New York University.
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