How will Trump handle protesters?

On January 20, 2017, Elizabeth Lagesse stopped by a coffee shop in downtown Washington, DC, on her way to Donald Trump’s first inauguration as United States president.

The chemical engineering student had planned to join the protests taking place against his incoming administration.

But as soon as she walked out of the cafe, Lagesse found herself swept up in a police “kettle”, a controversial manoeuvre in which officers encircle crowds, preventing anyone from leaving. Lagesse was arrested along with dozens of others.

Some 234 people, including journalists, medics and legal observers, were ultimately arrested in Washington, DC, that day. All faced felony charges, including rioting and conspiracy to riot — serious crimes that carried the risk of decades in prison.

“I didn’t even get to do any protesting,” Lagesse told Al Jazeera. She spent more than a year fighting the charges. “It was 18 months of our lives and eight felony charges.”

Experts have argued that what happened was a startling example of government overreach, with historic implications for the right to free assembly under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Those implications, experts warn, resonate well into the present day, as Trump prepares to take office for a second term on Monday.

Police had clashed with a handful of protesters in the lead-up to the 2017 inauguration. With chants of "F*** Trump" and "Make racists afraid again", several black-clad demonstrators smashed the windows of local businesses, including a bank. A limousine was set on fire. Officers responded with rubber bullets and tear gas.

But the government decided to charge nearly all the people arrested that day by advancing a unique argument: that all the protest participants — not just those who had carried out the vandalism — shared responsibility for supporting criminal conduct.

“It was a really shocking prosecution, and I don’t think people fully dealt with the potential ramifications of it,” said Chip Gibbons, the policy director at the free-speech group Defending Rights & Dissent.

“They brought really heavy-handed charges. It was really an abuse of the First Amendment.”

The cases became known as the "J20" prosecutions, and the vast majority eventually fell apart.

Prosecutors secured plea agreements from just 21 defendants, but the few cases that made it to trial ended in acquittals.

Charges against the other defendants were also dropped after a judge ruled that the lead prosecutor in the case, Jennifer Kerkhoff, withheld evidence and presented manipulated video footage, among other issues.

Lagesse, however, points out that the question at the heart of the case — whether hundreds of people can be held responsible for the actions of a few — was never fully rejected during the proceedings.

“You can say it's never OK to break a window at a protest or it's always OK to break a window at a protest, but that's not the question here,” Lagesse said. "The question is, can you just sweep up over 200 people, without any evidence, and put them through misery?"

She fears the fact that judges did not directly respond to the government's claims leaves open the possibility of similar prosecutions in the future.

“The court didn't say, ‘Hey, no, you can't charge all these people with conspiracy.' That would have been nice.”

Since 2017, a number of other protests have made national headlines. Demonstrations were a common occurrence during Trump's first term: Protesters rallied against Trump's efforts to impose a ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries and his policy of splitting migrant families at the border.

And then, there were the demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minnesota. His death in 2020 spurred millions of people to pour into streets across the country, calling for police reform and an end to racial discrimination. It was one of the largest protest movements in US history.

Lagesse also pointed out that demonstrations featuring far-right groups have also drawn attention away.

Nearly four years after her arrest, on January 6, 2021, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in a violent attempt to stop the certification of his 2020 electoral defeat.

“January 6 kind of eclipsed everything that happened with the inauguration before,” said Lagesse.

With another Trump presidency looming, Lagesse remains concerned that further crackdowns on protest could be on the horizon.

She believes Trump's aggressive rhetoric towards his critics signals a more repressive climate to come.

“Last time, Trump came into office not knowing much and not being very organised. Now he's done it before, he knows what he's doing, and he's got all these people helping him,” she said. “I wouldn't be surprised if there were more crackdowns on protesters — and more effective ones this time.”

Mark Goldstone, a Washington-based lawyer who initially represented about 50 of the J20 defendants, also worries that prosecutors have grown more aggressive in their charges against protesters.

He referenced recent high-profile cases like the years-long standoff between police and activists opposed to a planned law enforcement training centre in Atlanta, Georgia, known as “Cop City”.

Dozens of people in the "Cop City" protests have been charged with crimes, including “domestic terrorism”.

“There is Cop City in Atlanta, the primary example,” said Goldstone. “But also environmental groups, climate change groups, Gaza protest groups have seen charging decisions that may have not been made in another era.”

Goldstone fears that, under a second Trump administration, protests like what happened in 2017 could be met with a similarly iron-fisted response.

“The charges would likely stick, and the government would likely ask for long jail terms against the defendants,” Goldstone said. “And Trump prosecutors would argue that maximum sentences should be applied to these people, similar to the way that the [January 6] defendants were treated.”

Whether new protests materialise against a second Trump term remains to be seen.

So far, the public’s response to Trump’s victory has been relatively muted, with none of the mass demonstrations that characterised the aftermath of his first win in the 2016 presidential election.

Advocates note that this lacklustre response is not necessarily because of repressive law enforcement tactics — or at least, not only because of them.

Gibbons, the free-speech advocate, pointed out that the George Floyd protests in 2020 came after the J20 prosecutions and grew in intensity and scale even after thousands were teargassed and arrested.

Instead, he suggested there is an element of “protest fatigue” and a “sense of helplessness” following Trump's victory in the 2024 election.

“We have seen a downturn in protesting," Gibbons said. "But I’m not willing to say that the lack of protest is because people are chilled.”

He noted that some of Trump's critics had become disillusioned with the current administration of President Joe Biden, particularly over his support of Israel's devastating war on Gaza.

“It feels like, other than Gaza, people are really burned out on protest,” Gibbons said, adding that even protests against Israel’s war have dwindled after hundreds were arrested at campus protests over the last year.

Gibbons observed that other government leaders, including at the state and local levels, have also passed laws to discourage or penalise protest.

A 2021 Republican-led law in Florida, for instance, indicates that a protester could be charged with a third-degree felony "if he or she willfully participates in a violent public disturbance involving an assembly of three or more persons".

Advocates argued the law could be used to pursue charges of "collective responsibility" in court, and in 2024, the Florida Supreme Court ultimately ruled that peaceful protesters could not be charged under the law.

“There is a sustained federal, state and local crackdown on dissent that takes place beginning with the inauguration of Donald Trump and continuing through Cop City that is designed to discourage people from protesting,” said Gibbons.

Lagesse has also observed that many protesters seemed to have lost steam this election cycle.

But she believes that prosecutions like hers send a message that keeps people from exercising one of their most fundamental rights: the right to protest.

“If you are a young teenager or someone who, for whatever reason, has never protested anything before and you're reading in the news all the time, ‘Protester pepper-sprayed. Protester charged with felonies. Protester arrested. Protester beaten with baton,' maybe you’re not going to go out and protest that first time,” Lagesse said.

“Maybe you’re going to tell your kids not to protest because it’s too dangerous.”