I Was Arrested and Tried After Trump’s Inauguration Protests. Here’s What You Need to Know
It was January 20, 2017, and Caroline Unger, a 24-year-old originally from Chicago, marched among the thousands protesting Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. She was in Washington, D.C., and those around her held signs with slogans like “Dump Trump” or “Make Racists Afraid Again.” The crowd was a mix, some dressed in casual attire and some clad in all black. As the day wore on, a limousine was set on fire by some protesters. Windows were broken. In total, 234 people were arrested that day and charged with a variety of crimes, including felony inciting a riot, rioting, conspiracy to riot, destruction of property, and assault on a police officer.
For Caroline, one of the scariest moments of the march was looking out for her best friend while attempting to avoid the clouds of tear gas and pepper spray dispersed by 3,000 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as 5,000 National Guard members and out-of-state police.
Law enforcement starting using force against the crowd after the damage to property started to occur, which they claim resulted in at least $100,000 worth of destruction.
Caroline says she was pushed against a building and struggled to breathe from the toxic fumes. She was among the protesters who were “kettled” by police, a tactic used to control crowds by enclosing large groups of people into a small area. Almost everyone who was rounded up in the kettle was arrested.
“It felt like we were treated like cattle when we were arrested after being in the kettle for 8-plus hours,” Caroline, an advocate for Sex Worker Outreach Project, as well as a member of Industrial Workers of the World, tells Teen Vogue. “I think one of the worst parts is that we were never told what was happening. No one would look us in the eye or talk to us directly about how long we would be in the cell blocks, and time itself became a torturous thing because it was held over us without any concern.”
Some of the 234 arrested reported being inappropriately touched by law enforcement or having their property taken but never returned. There were so many arrested on Trump’s inauguration day that the prosecution had to split the arrestees into trial groups, and Caroline became a J20 defendant in the June 4 trial group. Sentences ran up to 70 years.
The first of the J20 defendants to be tried had their felony riot charges acquitted in December 2017. In January, 129 defendants had their charges dropped on grounds that the prosecution did not have enough evidence to go to trial. Caroline was one of six defendants in a trial group seen by the court on June 4, and she had her charges dismissed, along with the other defendants in her trial group. The circumstances of her charges being dropped followed a pattern of the prosecution’s inability to build a solid case to prove that all the defendants had engaged in property damage and because it was discovered that the government did not turn over vital evidence.
The trial put emotional stress on Caroline, her partner, and her friends. During the year-and-a-half-long period before her charges were dropped, Caroline was unable to travel abroad and missed out on other opportunities, like working as a children’s camp counselor or in a domestic violence shelter, that were hindered by employment background checks that typically look for criminal history.
“I had to take the summer off from my master’s program for the trial, but other defendants were at risk of losing their professional licenses or got fired for the charges; I consider myself lucky,” she says. “I live in Baltimore and had to go to countless pretrial hearings, but there are defendants that lived across the country that had to continuously travel to the capital to hear court proceedings.”
Preparations for trial took months of often stressful conference calls and meetings between the defendants and legal support. And even just sitting in court and hearing the prosecution’s arguments also took a toll on Caroline. The prosecution’s main driving point was that although all of those arrested were not guilty of property damage, that the property damage was done by members of the “black bloc” implicated everyone. In her opening statement for the trial against the first J20 defendants, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff stated that one doesn’t “personally have to be the one that breaks the window to be guilty of rioting.”
“I think it was surprising to me how dehumanizing it felt to be talked about in the hearings without ever being spoken to or looked at by the prosecution team that was attempting to put me and my codefendants in jail,” Caroline says. “It made me think a lot about how absurd it is to try to make a courtroom a vacuum of emotions or politics because it felt so detached from the reality of the world.”
In May 2018, defense attorneys for Caroline’s trial group accused federal prosecutors of withholding evidence that could work in the defense’s favor. By the end of that month, Chief Judge Robert E. Morin of the D.C. Superior Court decided the prosecution had violated the “Brady rule,” which requires the state to disclose all exculpatory evidence, or evidence that is considered favorable to the defendant in a case. Over 60 videos of planning meetings had been concealed or edited by the prosecution.
“It essentially is because the prosecution got caught obscuring a massive amount of evidence that painted a fuller picture of our case,” Caroline says. “The videos they didn’t give the defense were of organizers preparing for a protest, which weakened their case that we were all conspiring to riot — but the prosecution’s goals were never really just interested in enforcing riot laws. They wanted to scare activists and crack down on any dissent for the new administration. They knew their legal case was incredibly weak to begin with — trying to tie together a conspiracy of rioting because of our successful color coordination (we all wore black) has essentially no legal basis. There has also been consistent pressure on their office to drop the charges, not to mention it has been a massive drain of public resources.”
The former defendant believes that the J20 trials are inherently political because Trump’s administration “wanted to take a hard line against all dissent.” After the protests against Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Justice attempted to acquire information from disruptj20.org, including the 1.3 million IP addresses of those who had visited the website, a request that many believe was an attempt to implicate those who had not even attended anti–inauguration day demonstrations.
Caroline says she is grateful for all the support that she and other defendants have received, but recognizes that the fight is far from over. “Solidarity to all my codefendants that are still fighting these charges, and solidarity to all political prisoners all over the world,” she says. “It is more important than ever to keep fighting for a world where we all can flourish, and this ordeal has only deepened my commitment to do so.”
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Related: The J20 Arrests and Trials, Explained
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Originally published at www.teenvogue.com.
