Comrade B, General Secretary of Lal Morich: Political Prisoners, Lawfare, and the Revolutionary Response in the US

The mass-scale production of political prisoners in the US can only partially be explained by the need to satisfy the population requirements of an USD 80 billion Prison Industrial Complex. The disproportionate size of its domestic prison population relative to the rest of the world is no secret, with estimates that somewhere between 20% to 25% of the world’s prison population is housed in the US.¹ We cannot understand such magnitude in strictly economic terms nor through the profit motives of a single industry. Rather, we must understand the mass-scale production of prisoners first and foremost as counterinsurgency: a political effort to contain and atomize a revolutionary class. The United States relies on inherently politicized forms of criminalization which fracture the social forces most likely to produce sustained resistance. Across schools, clinics, welfare offices, workplaces, housing systems, and courts, oppressed nations and racialized surplus labor are monitored by the state long before any crime occurs. Prison is merely a visible endpoint of this process. The broader carceral apparatus normalizes surveillance, restricts collective capacity, and makes resistance costly. Everyday encounters with state institutions generate records, classifications, and assessments that follow people across their lives. These records accumulate into durable profiles that justify escalating intervention while presenting repression as neutral administration.
To avoid a class reductionist approach, we must address the US both in its advanced capitalist stage and equally as a settler-colonial project. Capitalist development in the imperial core depends on the uneven management of labor, including the production of surplus populations who are excluded, hyper-exploited, or disposed of amidst crisis. Settler-colonialism adds a deeper structural layer, one rooted in displacement, genocide, and the long-term stabilization of settler sovereignty. Together, these forces shape how criminalization is politically organized and justified across generations.
While oppressed nations share in the subordination of their collective sovereignty, economic development, and cultural reproduction to imperial or colonial powers, they carry pre-existing class relations formed under imperialist domination. Oppressed nations are racialized in ways that manage their incorporation into a settler-colonial order. This racialization reduces politically formed peoples into fixed social categories and uses those categories to sort, discipline, and exploit them through labor markets, policing, and social institutions. In this context, citizenship and legal status do not function as stable guarantees of protection. They operate instead as administrative tools within a broader system that targets racialized surplus labor and governs whole communities through surveillance, exclusion, detention, and removal.
The nature of the settler-colonial project is not simply to stratify classes within the US along racialized lines, but to use politicized criminalization as a mechanism for maintaining the underdevelopment and exploitation of oppressed nations. This process serves a dual political function: it stabilizes capitalist accumulation by managing surplus populations, and it constrains the political agency of those sectors most structurally positioned to contest the existing capitalist-imperialist order. The revolutionary potential in the US lies primarily in its racialized surplus labor population which is composed of many oppressed nations that are bound to one another through shared military domination, economic exploitation, and institutional repression. The state identifies an emergent revolutionary class because their social position (colonized, surplus, racialized) places them in structural antagonism with capital.
This effort to atomize the racialized surplus population is not possible through a single institution, nor through the actions of several institutions working in isolation. The mass-scale production of prisoners in the US requires collaboration across institutions that uniquely leverages the function of each. The character of criminalization may be quite simple: in the US, it is criminal to be poor and to be poor is to be a criminal. This reduction, as stated above, must account for the dichotomizing of settler and oppressed nations domestically, not merely an ideological division, but one fixed in space and wedded to how different racialized sections of the proletariat in America connect to, collaborate with, or are targeted by its carceral institutions. We will begin with a brief overview of how major institutions have criminalized poverty along racialized lines in a manner that has defined a surplus labor population composed of oppressed nations, containing and fragmenting those oppressed nations as a process of assimilation into the settler-colonial order.

Part 1: Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class

Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class Through Education

US schools containing the racialized surplus population serve as feeder systems into the criminal legal system through policing, suspension, and punitive discipline. The process begins in early childhood programs with behavioral surveillance and labelling.² Early childhood programs increasingly rely on continuous observation frameworks where children’s behavior is constantly recorded, coded, and stored as assessment data. This includes social-emotional “readiness,” self-regulation, and compliance indicators. Behavior interpreted as developmental delay, intellectual disability, or emotional disturbance is disproportionately assigned to Black children, beginning at or near school entry, including kindergarten and early elementary years. Here, the foundational values of capital are laid in contrast to the economic, social, and cultural deviance of racialized, surplus labor. Contrasting values reduce the national character of oppressed nations into a racial hierarchy compatible with the settler-colonial project. Misclassification of disability, special education segregation,³ and routine involvement from “School Resource Officers” deepen this sorting function.⁴ School Resource Officers are police officers stationed in schools. Under the guise of security and crime prevention, these officers serve as a liaison between policing and education by extending police powers of surveillance, search, and arrest directly into the schools.
Once the state has marked children as “high-risk,” the school ceases to function as a site of education and becomes a pre-carceral administrative hub. Everyday adolescent behaviors (arguments, defiance, emotional breakdowns) are reframed as threats. These behaviors are tracked by teachers who are deskilled into front line security guards.⁵ Disciplinary referrals, psychological assessments, special education placements, and attendance reports form a data trail that follows students across grade levels and institutional boundaries.⁶ Data-sharing between schools, police, and child welfare agencies integrates racialized children into a unified intelligence system.⁷ Juvenile court involvement and probation become mechanisms of soft incarceration, instruments which fracture racialized youth from their communities and consolidate them into alienated, lumpenized sections. Schools routinely transmit information to child welfare agencies, courts, and police departments.⁸ Behavioral reports and disciplinary histories become part of broader surveillance systems that shape how children and their families are treated by other institutions. Police presence in schools further collapses the boundary between schooling and law enforcement, turning routine discipline into early exposure to carceral authority. Suspensions, expulsions, or “alternative placements” force children into environments designed to normalize surveillance and prepare them for incarceration in adulthood. These methods of pushing children out of school accelerates entry into precarious, informal, or criminalized labor, placing young people directly into the economic positions that capital reserves for the racialized surplus population.⁹ This neutralizes the ability of oppressed nations to consolidate politically by destabilizing youth, fragmenting families, and suppressing the early formation of collective identity. By the time many students reach adulthood, state control is normalized, resistance is criminal, and the foundation for mass political imprisonment has been laid.

Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class Through Healthcare

Healthcare inequality materializes through disinvestment and environmental hazard engineered by the state. Polluted water, toxic industrial zoning, food deserts, high maternal mortality, and untreated chronic illness are all disproportionately located in territories defined by racialized, surplus labor.¹⁰ Healthcare encounters serve as the earliest points in life where poor and racialized communities are catalogued into risk systems. Hospitals, pediatric clinics, school-based health centers, and emergency rooms collect data that identifies families for child welfare scrutiny, immigration enforcement, and police follow-up.¹¹ The carceral features of healthcare are most pronounced where the settler-colonial project historically concentrates surplus populations and restricts the capacity of oppressed nations to accumulate collective strength. Rather than merely denying medical services, the healthcare system produces a structured environment where illness, surveillance, and punitive intervention become tools of political containment.
Lack of access to care for uninsured, migrant, or low-income people pushes individuals into informal survival economies that are then criminalized by the state. Mandatory reporting laws, presented as “child protection,” “public health,” or “safety interventions,” function as tools of preemptive criminalization.¹² Substance use during pregnancy,¹³ missed medical appointments, non-compliance with treatment plans,¹⁴ and visible signs of poverty (e.g., inadequate clothing, food insecurity, crowded housing) generate referrals within the healthcare system to “Child Protective Services” or law enforcement. Mandatory reporting requirements, law-enforcement access to medical records, and the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes serve as mechanisms through which healthcare encounters reveal themselves as state monitoring events. Clinicians are deputized to act as an extension of the state’s criminal legal system, reporting suspected drug use, undocumented status, “noncompliant” parents, or psychiatric “risk” to police and child protective systems.¹⁵ Psychiatric emergencies, overdoses, and medical welfare checks often trigger police responses rather than clinical care. Indigenous communities disproportionately experience forced psychiatric hospitalization¹⁶; Black patients are more likely to encounter armed officers during emergency calls¹⁷; migrant families face immigration enforcement within hospitals themselves.¹⁸
Hospitals generate profit from the racialized, surplus population through emergency interventions, chronic disease management, and billing structures engineered around instability. Meanwhile, preventive services, reproductive care, community clinics, and culturally grounded healing practices remain underfunded or absent. The commodification of bodily survival functions as a soft form of counterinsurgency: people cannot fully engage in revolutionary activity when managing untreated illness, caregiving burdens, medical debt, and prolonged exposure to preventable conditions. The system disciplines racialized, surplus populations not merely through force but through the structural exhaustion of everyday life.

Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class Through Social Services

The entry point into social services, whether through welfare offices, child protective services, housing authorities, disability benefits, or unemployment systems, begins with an administrative encounter intended to collapse the defining qualities of various oppressed nations into common institutional frameworks.¹⁹ This is a critical process in racialization which dissolves national character.²⁰ Intake protocols translate poverty into risk categories, interpret survival strategies as indicators of instability,²¹ and make households of the racialized, surplus population visible to the state as potential sites of neglect, noncompliance, or criminality.²² The state identifies a strata most likely to generate unrest by reading their basic needs as indicators of deviance.
The racialized, surplus population is subjected to ongoing monitoring that connects their eligibility for welfare with their compliance to institutionally framed norms. Mandatory check-ins, home inspections, drug testing, employment verification, attendance at state-approved programs, and the constant threat of case closure function as coercive measures to maintain this compliance.²³ These practices reorganize time, labor, and domestic life around state scrutiny. The racialized, surplus population is managed not only through police or prisons but through networks of caseworkers, inspectors, and eligibility officers whose decisions can destabilize entire families. Compliance structures maintain underdevelopment of the oppressed nations by making survival contingent on obedience. The constant threat of the state taking away essential “benefits” for survival dissuades participation in protests, tenant unions, workplace organizing, or mutual aid networks that the state deems subversive.
The antagonistic role of social services is most visible in child protective services, eviction proceedings linked to housing authorities, and “fraud” investigations which target welfare benefits. These systems use punitive interventions that resemble police operations: warrantless home searches, rapid removals of children, coordination with law enforcement, and participation with courts in the case of prosecution.²⁴ Family separation functions as a mechanism that maintains settler power by destabilizing the social reproduction of oppressed nations.
Social services do not operate in isolation. They form an administrative nexus linking healthcare, education, policing, housing, labor departments, immigration enforcement, and courts. This integration produces a multi-sectoral order of politicized criminalization in which a single welfare infraction can trigger cascading consequences: loss of housing, CPS intervention, police surveillance, and legal proceedings. Welfare administration becomes a quiet but effective mechanism of counterinsurgency, maintaining underdevelopment while presenting control as care.

Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class Through Labor Markets

Labor markets accessible to the oppressed nations operate as a screening and disciplining apparatus that decides who is allowed into relatively stable waged work, on what terms, and who is relegated to permanent precarity. Employment is both a site of exploitation and a screening process that converts prior institutional contact into barriers to work. Criminal records, credit scores, drug testing, and culturally biased professionalism standards convert prior encounters with police, schools, and welfare agencies into barriers to work.²⁵ This hardens the line between a formally employed stratum and a structurally unemployed, semi-legalized stratum concentrated within the oppressed nation.
Temp agencies, gig platforms, day labor sites, and “second chance” employers extract labor from criminalized workers while keeping them permanently vulnerable to firing, re-arrest, and deportation. Surveillance at work (cameras, GPS, productivity software) fuses economic exploitation with quasi-carceral control. Employers increasingly collaborate with police, immigration authorities, and private security to manage “risk.”²⁶ Workplace raids, information sharing, and on-site policing make the job itself a site of potential arrest and deportation, especially for migrants and formerly incarcerated people. Precarity ensures continued exposure to policing, courts, and administrative enforcement. The labor market is not only the field of exploitation; it functions as a sorting mechanism that concentrates the most dangerous potential revolutionary base (young, racialized, surplus labor) into zones of chronic unemployment, informal hustles, and carceral supervision.

Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class Through Immigration

Immigration law merges civil and criminal power²⁷ to treat migrant workers from the oppressed nations as a super-exploited, deportable workforce whose political activity can be quickly neutralized.²⁸ Visa overstays, unauthorized entry, and work without authorization are framed as criminal threats.²⁹ This produces a large, racialized population whose everyday survival is formally illegal. Migrant workers are hyper-exploited in agriculture, logistics, domestic work, and service sectors. Simultaneously, the criminalization of migration status also makes any attempts at unionizing, striking, or joining overtly revolutionary organizations easily undermined. Oppressed nations migrating from Central American, Caribbean, African, Asian, and Arab countries are managed through bilateral agreements, foreign aid conditioned on enforcement, and cross-border intelligence sharing. This is how sending countries are conditioned to police their own citizens on behalf of the US. The US projects its internal carceral logic outward, turning sending countries into extensions of its detention and policing regime.
As crisis deepens, national security is foregrounded in the criminalization of migrant labor. This is the political basis by which the threat of detention and deportation extends into the entire racialized, surplus population. Recent escalations spearheaded by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have targeted a wide variety of oppressed nationalities including legal citizens. Enforcement actions routinely terrorize whole neighborhoods, ensnaring citizens and noncitizens alike through raids, surveillance, and data-driven targeting.³⁰ A surge of over 2,000 federal agents were deployed to Minneapolis in January,³¹ and tensions intensified with the murder of legal observer Renee Good on January 7, 2026. The murder of Good demonstrates not just escalatory tactics against oppressed nationalities, but the extension of state violence to target allies of oppressed groups.³²
What determines exposure is not simply nationality, but the racialized position within surplus labor markets and heavily policed spaces, as well as proximity to these spaces. Surplus workers are policed, detained, or expelled to discipline labor, suppress organizing, and manage populations made redundant by capitalist crisis, regardless of formal nationality. As capitalist crisis intensifies, it is this section of racialized, surplus labor that become the criminalized class. Immigration enforcement thus operates as a class and racial control mechanism rather than a narrow tool of border regulation. Immigration control is a frontline counterinsurgency mechanism against a potentially explosive alliance: oppressed domestic colonies and the migrant proletariat. It fractures internationalist solidarity and makes the most radicalized segments of the working class the most “deportable,” isolating them from long-term organizing.

Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class Through Nonprofits

The nonprofit sector (NGOs, foundations, service organizations) operates as a soft carceral apparatus that absorbs discontentment, manages crisis, and channels oppositional energy into depoliticized, state-compatible forms. The nonprofit’s role is not primarily coercive, but rather they serve a regulatory function shaping how harm is defined, measured, and responded to within limits acceptable to the state and capital. Many nonprofits run programs funded by state or foundation contracts that require detailed data collection, “risk assessments,” and proof of “behavioral change.” Participation in “reentry,” youth mentorship, violence interruption, or homeless services becomes a method for monitoring and norm enforcement. Compliance is tracked, progress is quantified, and deviation is flagged. Surveillance is embedded in service delivery, and refusal or nonparticipation can result in exclusion from essential resources.
Political activity is narrowed through this process. Radical demands are translated into depoliticized language (i.e., framed as issues of resilience, equity, or inclusion rather than power, exploitation, or domination). Notably, the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2014 with a clear framework on policing as a structural tool of racial domination, not a technical failure.³³ As nonprofits and private foundations attached themselves to the movement between 2015 and 2018, the call for an end of racial capitalism transformed into appeals to racial equality under capitalism, and police abolition was reframed into calls for public safety.³⁴ By 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement had fully transitioned to reform policies of “trauma-informed policing” and inclusivity.³⁵ Organizers from oppressed nations are often recruited into professional roles where their labor is redirected toward program management and grant compliance. In the case of Standing Rock, protests which began in 2014 with clear political aims connected to Indigenous sovereignty and critiques of settler-colonialism,³⁶ the clearing of camps and mass arrests were followed by heavy recruitment of Indigenous organizers into nonprofits. These organizers served as program coordinators, policy fellows, outreach directors, and environmental justice managers who were then positioned to appeal to large foundations.³⁷ These appeals required avoidance of anti-state or anti-development language, as well as alignment with foundation donors, driven by budget restraints and timelines. Community anger is absorbed into service provision, while collective confrontation is discouraged as risky or counterproductive. Nonprofits often play the role of mediator in moments of crisis, discouraging militant tactics and steering communities toward reformist channels. In practice, this neutralizes mass anger that might otherwise flow into independent organizations with revolutionary politics.
By channeling struggle into individualized services and measurable outcomes, nonprofits fragment collective capacity and delay the development of independent organization. Crisis is managed rather than resolved, and dependence on external funding enforces caution and moderation. Within the broader system of politicized criminalization, nonprofits help stabilize control by softening its appearance, ensuring that racialized surplus labor remains governed, monitored, and disorganized even in spaces nominally dedicated to support.

Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class Through Housing

Housing policy structures who has stable shelter, who lives under permanent threat of eviction, and who is forced into homelessness or carceral environments (shelters, encampments). Racially exclusive housing has deep historical roots in the US. Dispossession, segregation, and surveillance are built directly into housing systems, ensuring that instability remains a permanent condition for racialized, surplus labor.³⁸ Redlining and gentrification concentrate Black, Indigenous, and migrant communities in over-policed neighborhoods. Gentrification in particular removes long-standing residents under the language of development while intensifying surveillance and enforcement. These processes fracture community networks and disrupt the continuity necessary for collective organization.³⁹
Public housing is saturated with police, surveillance cameras, and “behavioral” rules that function like parole conditions. Residents are subjected to extensive rules governing behavior, visitors, occupancy, and use of space. Surveillance cameras, police patrols, and information sharing between housing authorities and law enforcement normalize constant monitoring. Minor infractions become grounds for eviction, fines, or criminal charges, transforming housing insecurity into a mechanism of discipline. Landlords, backed by courts and sheriffs, wield eviction as a routine tool.
Constant displacement undermines long-term organizing, breaks up tenant networks, and keeps families in survival mode. “Nonpayment,” overcrowding, informal subletting, and domestic conflict produced by capitalism become grounds for legal expulsion.⁴⁰ Sweeps of encampments, bans on camping and public sleeping, and policing of shelters turn homelessness into a quasi-criminal status. “Anti-camping” rulings such as City of Grants Pass v. Johnson have been upheld by the US Supreme Court, empowering cities nationwide to levy fines or jail time against unhoused people for the act of sleeping or camping in public.⁴¹ Being unhoused brings constant police contact, fines, and warrants, another channel into jails and prisons. As a result, approximately 15% of the people incarcerated in US prisons or jails were homeless in the year prior to incarceration⁴² and those released from incarceration are ten times more likely to experience homelessness.⁴³ Shelters themselves often impose surveillance, curfews, and compliance requirements that mirror probationary control,⁴⁴ further reinforcing a revolving door between homelessness and incarceration.
Displacement keeps communities fragmented and politically weak, while repeated police contact reinforces criminal profiles constructed elsewhere. Housing policy functions as a central pillar of counterinsurgency, managing racialized surplus labor by making survival precarious and collective life permanently unsettled.

Criminalizing the Revolutionary Class Across Sectors

The United States maintains a layered, mutually reinforcing system of politicized criminalization that targets oppressed nations as racialized, surplus labor populations. Rather than operating in isolation, institutions apply distinct but coordinated methods of classification that sort people according to perceived risk, noncompliance, or instability. These classifications do not emerge from criminal behavior; they are produced through routine institutional contact and used to justify escalating state intervention.
Healthcare, education, and social services form the earliest layers of this system. Schools translate poverty, trauma, disability, and behavioral difference into disciplinary records, attendance data, and psychological assessments. Healthcare systems apply psychiatric labels, triage algorithms, mandatory reporting, and substance-use monitoring that convert illness or crisis into administrative risk. Social services formalize these judgments through case files, risk assessments, and reporting requirements that document family structure, income, medical history, and perceived parental failure.
Each institution claims a distinct mandate, but together they construct a profile that follows individuals across sectors. Information circulates across institutional boundaries, producing a unified apparatus of surveillance. Educators and healthcare workers are mandated reporters whose employment depends on forwarding families into welfare, child protective services, or police systems. Caseworkers regularly coordinate with courts and law enforcement, turning social services into an early pipeline for incarceration. Institutional assessments reinforce one another, transforming poverty-produced behaviors into evidence of criminal disposition rather than signs of structural decay.
Once established, this profile becomes actionable in labor markets and housing systems. Employers use background checks, attendance histories, drug tests, and workplace surveillance to exclude racialized workers from stable employment and funnel them into precarious, heavily policed jobs. The behavioral judgments first produced in schools later justify workplace discipline and “risk management” policing. Housing systems compound this process through redlining, discriminatory zoning, eviction courts, shelter policies, and surveillance systems that destabilize communities and force repeated police contact. Being unhoused becomes a criminal condition, guaranteeing further institutional encounters that deepen the carceral profile already in place.
Immigration enforcement provides an additional layer of discipline. Legal status is converted into a permanent risk category that renders entire communities deportable and therefore criminally suspect. Employers weaponize this vulnerability to hyper-exploit migrant labor while threatening arrest or deportation if workers organize or resist. In 2024, Mexican migrant workers sued a Connecticut farm/contractor alleging systematic exploitation under the H-2A program, including threats of deportation and restrictions that kept workers vulnerable because the visa structure ties authorization to the employer.⁴⁵ This is a rare case of migrant workers collectivizing and taking action. In most cases, fear of state capture drives avoidance of healthcare, schools, and public services, reinforcing isolation and precarity while feeding back into housing instability and workplace abuse.⁴⁶
The nonprofit sector operates as a soft buffer within this system, absorbing social harm without disrupting its causes. Through contracts tied to state and foundation funding, nonprofits translate community need into metrics of vulnerability, behavioral deficiency, and program compliance. Data collection, risk scoring, “violence interruption,” and reentry programs perform the surveillance and behavioral regulation that police and immigration authorities rely on but cannot openly administer. While framed as care or reform, these functions help stabilize the broader apparatus of control.
The strategic outcome is coordinated underdevelopment. Healthcare withholds treatment while expanding surveillance. Schools restrict access to education while maximizing exclusion. Social services impose punitive oversight instead of material support. Housing policies displace communities rather than secure stability. These criminalizing logics feed directly into policing, courts, immigration enforcement, and carceral databases. Each institutional response creates the conditions for noncompliance, interprets noncompliance as a threat, and mobilizes punitive response. In doing so, the state shapes the criminalized subject long before any “offense” occurs. The intertwined sectors: (1) displace community self-organization with bureaucratic gatekeeping; (2) individualize structural harm as pathology, misconduct, or parental failure; (3) fragment kinship and neighborhood networks that traditionally serve as bases of resistance; (4) direct large portions of racialized youth into juvenile and adult carceral pipelines; and (5) ensure that the experience of state intervention is normalized before political consciousness can develop.
This is counterinsurgency. Criminalization is not episodic but environmental, a constant low-grade pressure that narrows political horizons and normalizes state intrusion. Institutional language attempts to simultaneously dissolve national character of racialized, surplus populations while keeping them crisis-prone: “low-income” or “underserved communities” become “at-risk populations,” then “crime-prone areas,” and finally real-estate “opportunity zones” as repression intensifies. Across sectors, the shared orientation is to manage, contain, and fragment racialized, surplus populations which serve as the most potent subjects of resistance to a capitalist-imperialist system. Production of political prisoners in this environment is not an exception but a structural outcome.

Part II: Lawfare and the Role of Courts

While police and administrative agencies initiate surveillance and enforcement, lawfare provides the legitimacy that transforms repression into governance. The state maintains a wide array of legal statutes and procedural tools at its disposal. Legal charges are at the discretion of prosecutors, who may also strategically choose which laws to use and how to stack charges as a means of creating maximal pressure rather than reflecting the level of harm. This often provides a means by which courts enable the state to criminalize association, coordination, and political commitment rather than direct acts of violence.
One of the most consequential instruments in this process is the use of racketeering and conspiracy statutes. Laws originally designed to prosecute organized crime allow prosecutors to treat loosely connected individuals as members of a single criminal enterprise. Under this logic, the state does not need to prove that each defendant committed a specific illegal act. It only needs to assert that individuals shared an affiliation, message, or objective with someone who did commit an illegal act. Relationships themselves become evidence, and political organizing is reframed as criminal coordination. The Atlanta “Stop Cop City” case provides a clear model. City and state authorities used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act charges to frame a decentralized protest movement against police militarization as a criminal conspiracy. Individuals were charged not primarily for specific acts, but for their alleged association with a shared political objective.⁴⁷ Conspiracy charges function similarly by lowering evidentiary thresholds and shifting the burden onto defendants to disprove intent. Attendance at meetings, shared fundraising or housing, mutual aid, protest coordination, or expressions of solidarity can be framed as participation in a criminal plot. These statutes are intentionally broad, enabling prosecutors to speculate about plans rather than demonstrate completed actions. Political activity is criminalized preemptively before it can materialize into formal organization.
Racketeering statutes and conspiracy laws allow the state to use any loose practical or even ideological ties as a means of criminalizing above-ground organizations. The clearest example of this is the designation of Samidoun, an international Palestinian Prisoner support network, as a “terrorist organization” based on erroneous claims that the organization is a formal fundraising wing for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.⁴⁸ These tools are disproportionately used against movements rooted in the oppressed nations, whether that is Palestinian solidarity work, Black liberation struggles, Indigenous-led environmental movements threatening corporate or state interests, immigration justice movements that confront state violence directly, etc. In such circumstances, even political speech collapses into criminal association, and anti-imperialist solidarity itself can be framed as a criminal security threat. In the case of Palestinian solidarity work, the 2001 Holy Land Foundation Case,⁴⁹ 2009 KindHearts Foundation Case,⁵⁰ and post-October 7 surveillance of University organizations such as the Students for Justice in Palestine⁵¹ provide examples across multiple decades where groups were investigated, surveilled, or referred to law enforcement under terrorism and material-support-adjacent rationales, despite engaging in protected political speech. Disruption to infrastructure and commerce have long been heavily criminalized, particularly acute within movements opposing environmental devastation caused by pipelines, extractive industries, and militarized land use. Property damage is seen as equal to, or in some cases more criminal than, harm to human beings, creating a legal framework for equating destruction of property as extremist violence. Simple acts of vandalism such as spray-painting are elevated to federal crimes,⁵² and recent legislative proposals deem property damage as a “terrorist violent mass action.”⁵³ The expansion of domestic terrorism designations intensifies this pattern. “Domestic Violent Extremism” is defined as individuals or movements based in the US that are motivated by ideological goals and may commit or support violence to achieve political or social objectives.⁵⁴ The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI both use the term “Domestic Violent Extremist” as an intelligence gathering category rather than a criminal charge. The absence of any legal definition allows the label to be applied selectively based on ideology rather than conduct. Once attached, it justifies heightened surveillance, pretrial detention, severe sentencing exposure, and public vilification. Political dissent is reframed as a national security threat, and supporters or peripheral participants are swept into the same prosecutorial net. Beyond militant direct action, the broader impact of racketeering statutes and conspiracy laws can criminalize efforts of building dual-power and undermining repressive institutions. Mutual-aid networks such as food distribution, bail funds, and disaster response are scrutinized as potential fronts for illicit activity such as money laundering, despite addressing needs the state itself refuses to meet. These legal strategies of politicized criminalization redefine solidarity, coordination, and care as threats, while insulating the structures of capital, empire, and racial control from being meaningfully challenged.
Lawfare is cheaper than mass deployments of police or troops. In Los Angeles, the Pentagon said the June 2025 deployment to Los Angeles of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines would cost USD 134 million,⁵⁵ while prosecutorial budgets total approximately USD 40 million over the same time period. Lawfare is also easier to present as neutral, a fact of its function that has been noted as far back as 1924 by Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis.⁵⁶ Pashukanis’s theory is upheld by modern polling data in the US. Recent data shows 51% of Americans oppose military deployment in Minneapolis amidst mass deportation campaigns,⁵⁷ while over the last five years Americans have maintained a strong majority support for increased immigration enforcement through courts and legal proceedings.⁵⁸ Organizers are buried under charges, court dates, fines, probation conditions, asset seizures, and travel restrictions. Significant organizer capacity is then forcibly redirected from movement building and towards legal survival. Lawfare does not operate through courts alone; it is reinforced by a coordinated escalation across federal, state, and municipal levels that normalizes repression while diffusing responsibility. Each level contributes distinct tools, yet all are aligned toward the same outcome: raising the cost of political participation while preserving the appearance of legality.
At the state level, a wave of anti-protest laws such as Missouri HB 355, Kansas SB 172, and South Dakota SB 151 have redefined acts like property damage, trespassing near infrastructure, or blocking transportation routes as forms of terrorism or “critical infrastructure sabotage.”⁵⁹ These laws conflate protest activity with violent extremism by elevating damage to property (pipelines, construction sites, highways, police facilities) above harm to people. This allows states to impose severe felony charges, enhanced sentences, and expansive surveillance on protesters whose actions are disruptive but political in nature. Participation in protest becomes so legally risky that only isolated or desperate individuals remain.
At the federal level, agencies expand the category of “domestic violent extremism” in ways that are intentionally broad. Legal frameworks targeting “anarchism” or “anti-fascist” movements intentionally avoid defining the particulars of political expression. The state develops these frameworks to reinforce broad and ideologically flexible criminalization by refusing to name coherent political programs. Through immigration enforcement, collaboration between the DHS, local police departments, and federal databases allows immigration status to function as an ever-present threat. Digital tracking (license plate readers, social media monitoring, data brokers, and biometric systems) makes it easier to identify, locate, and pressure individuals involved in organizing. Deportation becomes not just an immigration tool, but a political weapon that can be used to dismantle movements.
At the municipal level, local governments provide testing grounds for these strategies. This approach transforms a city-level political conflict into a high-stakes criminal prosecution, such as the previously stated case of Atlanta’s Stop Cop City. Broad frameworks for criminalization allow legal prosecution to exit formally organized bodies into their wide bases of support. These frameworks are linked by strategic alignment: state laws escalate penalties, federal categories legitimize surveillance, immigration enforcement adds coercive leverage, and municipal prosecutions provide test cases that normalize repression. Together, they allow the state to manage political resistance without openly banning protest or admitting political motive. The effect is that organizers are forced to operate under constant threat, movements are fragmented by fear and legal pressure, and the revolutionary class is disciplined into isolation.
In moments of crisis (mass uprisings, anti-war mobilizations, threats to state legitimacy) police and military-style force is deployed openly. Dylan Rodríguez’s Forced Passages correctly argues that the US does not “fall” into repression during crises, but rather that crises reveal its ongoing domestic war waged against targeted populations. In the wake of the George Floyd uprisings, nearly 62,000 National Guard were deployed across at least 24 states.⁶⁰ The deployment of riot gear, mass arrests, curfews, and National Guard units during the George Floyd uprisings is not a breakdown of civil governance; it is the overt phase of a war that is usually administered quietly through schools, welfare, policing, courts, and surveillance. In the present moment, federal agents from ICE and DHS bypass state law in nationwide deportation and incarceration campaigns, and threats by the Trump administration to invoke the Insurrection Act have become increasingly likely. Riot gear, mass arrests, curfews, National Guard deployments, and aggressive crowd control reveal themselves as tactics perfected in external colonies for use within against oppressed nations internally. Once an immediate crisis subsides, legal mechanisms are engaged to discipline, isolate, and dismantle movements in the long term. Lawfare is particularly effective in this role as it blurs the line between civil and criminal punishment. Protest zones are restricted through court orders, as was the case for sites near Standing Rock in 2019 where demonstrators protested the South Dakota Access Pipeline. Mutual-aid spaces are shut down for code violations, most visibly in large mutual aid groups like Food Not Bombs but also common in community-based mutual aid groups. Civil injunctions, zoning violations, probation conditions, and administrative penalties serve as punishments which do not require criminal convictions. Punishment by the welfare state and legal system both potentially threaten one’s survival. Individuals are barred from associating with others, attending demonstrations, or entering certain areas as part of pretrial release or probation, even when no guilt has been established.
This blurring allows repression to occur without meaningful accountability. Repression distributed across institutions allows each process and tactic of politicized criminalization to appear routine in nature. Administrative detention, pretrial incarceration, and indefinite legal proceedings further reinforce this dynamic. People can be jailed because they are deemed a “risk,” didn’t meet conditions for bail, or because they are entangled in overlapping institutional jurisdictions. The process becomes the punishment. Even when charges are dropped, enough damage has already been done through lost time and physical, emotional, and mental impacts. This form of repression is particularly effective because it targets collective capacity rather than individual actions: isolating leaders, draining resources, and turning participation into a long-term personal risk. Militants and committed organizers are often singled out and tied up in legal proceedings that can last years. The RICO Case against Atlanta Stop Cop City organizers began in 2023 and was dismissed by judges in 2025. While this legal victory is one to celebrate, bail funds, legal defense costs, lost wages, and fines drain organizational resources that would otherwise support political education, infrastructure, or expansion.
Impacts on the organization of the revolutionary class are layered: isolation, anticipatory fear, resource extraction, fragmentation, and self-censorship. The sum of their impacts serves to steadily degrade the capacity for political movements to reproduce themselves. Internally strained and without adequate resources, political movements remain in a state of reaction.

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