They're Prosecuting the Protest Before It Starts

In a quiet Vermont town where ICE's national spy hub sits among the farmland, the state's top prosecutor spent the eve of the biggest protest the center has ever faced filling out charging papers on the people who planned it.

"Whether I agree or disagree with what a protest is about cannot determine whether someone is held accountable under the law."

— Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General

Williston, Vermont, is a suburb of Burlington with a population of roughly 10,000, best known for its historic buildings and farmland. It is also home to a low-slung building of glass and dark-blue ribbed sheet metal that houses one of the most consequential facilities in the Trump administration's immigration machine: ICE's National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center.

The NCATC is one of only two facilities of its kind in the country. According to government contractor postings, it is designed to employ at least a dozen analysts working 24 hours a day, returning target information in as little as 30 minutes. The job is to scour the internet and trawl social media for leads on the people ICE wants to find. It operates in tandem with the office that runs ICE's national tipline and the agency's National Law Enforcement Support Center, both also based in Williston.

The stated function is not a secret. The agency's own budget materials describe the expansion. What is less clear is who else the database is for.

The most powerful building in Williston does not hold people. It holds information.

For two years, the building has been the target of one of the state's largest recurring protests. Hundreds have rallied outside the center, and dozens of people have been arrested. For most of that time, nothing happened to the arrested.

Sarah George, the elected state's attorney for Chittenden County, where the center sits, repeatedly declined to prosecute the demonstrators: 13 after a February action, six after an April standoff, and four more in May. In a statement covering the April cases, she wrote that charging people "with no criminal records" and expecting them "to bear the burden of all the harm caused that day" was "not something I was interested in our office being a part of." She said police escalation had contributed to the situation.

Then, in late September, the docket moved. Vermont State Police stopped delivering the protest citations to George's office. Instead, the cases went straight to Attorney General Charity Clark, a Democrat, whose office filed misdemeanor charges against 13 protesters who took part in a July sit-in at the center. Twelve of them were arraigned in adult criminal court on Thursday, and all pleaded not guilty. State Senator Tanya Vyhovsky, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of the unusual routing around the local prosecutor: "This type of stepping outside of our normal court system, as far as I can tell ... there's no real precedent for it."

Clark's office initially charged an 18-year-old protester in adult criminal court, in defiance of Vermont's Raise the Age law, which sends most offenses committed by people under 19 to family court precisely to shield the defendant's identity. The office later moved the case to juvenile court, but by then the teen's name had already been published in multiple news outlets. Matthew Bernstein, the state's child, youth and family advocate, put it plainly: "Once that's happened, then it's too late to reverse it."

The state charges were a warm-up. On September 30, federal prosecutors in Burlington announced their own case: five people, aged 22 to 80, charged with knowingly obstructing access to a federal facility. The names: Peter Booth, 58, of Jericho; Lexington Kennedy, 22, of New York; Henry Prensky, 80, of Burlington; Roan Wade, 23, of Red Hook, New York; and Sherri Wormser, 57, of Colchester.

The incidents, according to the Justice Department, were body blocks. On February 9, all five entered the atrium of the White Cap business park and used their bodies to block the access doors between the atrium and the federal facility, ignoring repeated warnings until officers physically removed them. Booth and Prensky repeated it on May 14. Kennedy and Wade did it again on July 24. If convicted, each faces up to 30 days in prison and a $5,000 fine.

First Assistant United States Attorney Jonathan Ophardt framed the theory of the case in a press release: "By repeatedly blocking the entrances and exits to this federal facility, the defendants created a risk to the safety and wellbeing of the Vermonters who work there." Then, in the closing line, a threat aimed well beyond the five named: "The United States Attorney's Office for the District of Vermont will prosecute all those who knowingly obstruct access to federal facilities."

The punishment for blocking a federal door with your body is thirty days in a cell. The people who run the database get a budget.

Now the timing. Both waves of charges, state and federal, were filed within days of each other, and both landed on the eve of a national "week of action" organized against the Vermont facility. Organizers expect hundreds of participants and say the actions will be the largest direct confrontation the surveillance center has ever drawn.

Julie Macuga, an anti-ICE organizer, read the calendar the way most people would: "Our assumption has been that they did this so close to the week of action in order to try to intimidate people, in order to make people think twice about doing civil disobedience, for fear that they're going to get charged."

Roan Wade, one of the charged protesters, who faces both the state and federal cases, offered a different diagnosis: "Repression breeds resistance. If anything, it's caused a lot more outrage."

The local politics are the part that should be making the most noise. Clark is a Democrat, and the state's Democratic establishment did not stay quiet. Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale, a Democrat, said the office was acting "at a moment when the federal government is escalating attacks on immigrants and our civil liberties," and that Vermont "should not be using its prosecutorial power in ways that chill free speech and peaceful dissent." She added: "There is still time to change course, and I urge the Attorney General's Office to dismiss these charges."

Wade put the contradiction in a single sentence: "It highlights some of the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party. The same folks who claim to be opposing Trump and fighting this fascist administration are also prosecuting protesters."

On the other side of the aisle, Governor Phil Scott, a Republican, told reporters the decision was a hard one to make and that "So I applaud her for making that decision, and we'll see where it goes from here." Amanda Janoo, who is running against Scott for governor, offered the line the campaign season will be quoting: "The question for every institution and every elected official right now is not simply: What are we allowed to do? It is: What does this moment require of us?"

Translation: in one of the most reliably anti-Trump states in the country, the party that opposes the federal immigration state now shares its prosecutorial reflex.

The spy center is built on a premise: that people can be found before they can be counted. The analysts in Williston will tell you the database is for fugitives, not citizens. But the dockets in this case read like a stress test of the machine, run on the people standing closest to it. Up to 18 people across the state and federal charges, an 18-year-old's name leaked into the adult system, a federal prosecutor's public promise that anyone who blocks the doors will be prosecuted, and a state attorney general who insists her personal opinions about a protest "cannot determine" whether someone is held accountable.

The week of action is coming anyway. Hundreds of people are heading to a town of 10,000 to stand in the doorway of the machine that tracks the rest of the country, and the charging papers will not stop them.

But that was never the point. The docket is really asking a different question: what does it cost to stand in that doorway, and once the state publishes the price, can this country afford it?