The US Justice Department and federal law enforcement “deliberately targeted” Black Lives Matter demonstrators under the “express direction” of Donald Trump and former US Attorney General William Barr, according to a sweeping analysis from advocacy group Movement for Black Lives.
In nearly every prosecution, cases related to protests from 31 May through 25 October “resulted in hundreds of organisers and activists facing years in federal prison with no chance of parole” after federal law enforcement “exploited the expansive federal criminal code” to assert jurisdiction over protest-related cases that “bore no federal interest,” according to the report.
The report – which examines 326 criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors in the wake of 2020 protests amid an uprising against police violence and racial injustice after the police murder of George Floyd – appears to “largely corroborate what Black organisers have long known intellectually, intuitively, and from lived experience about the federal government’s disparate policing and prosecution of racial justice protests and related activity,” the report says.
Movement for Black Lives has pointed to the findings […]
Black Lives do matter! I am fearful for my daughter-in-law and her husband who happens to be black, as well as my grandchildren who are black. I am white, but do not see how anyone would consider them any different as I do not. We are all one no matter what the color of our skin is!