Background

At the same time that the Trump administration and other proponents of bigotry, repression and environmental devastation have ratcheted up their verbal attacks against the protests they are facing, they are also taking concrete actions to match their rhetoric and shut down free speech actions. The PCJF is taking action in rapid response to this initiative. We won't allow the Trump administration to repress and silence the voices of the people who are speaking out in opposition and protest.

After the initiation of a successful campaign that led to over 90,000 comments being submitted to the National Park Service, the PCJF is preparing to file litigation to challenge the new anti-protest rules proposed by the Trump Administration and Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke as soon as they are formally announced to take effect.

New proposed rules would impose steep fees and costs on demonstrations in Washington, D.C; effectively ban protests on the iconic White House sidewalk; force protesters to pay the costs of barricades erected at police discretion, park officials wages and overtime, and harm to grass from standing on it; create waiting periods removing any obligation of the government to promptly process or approve permits; restrict and suppress spontaneous demonstrations that respond to breaking events; create hair-triggers allowing police to end protests for the most minor of issues; restrict sound and staging; ban long term vigils or protest presences; make protesters pay for expensive "turf covers," among many other radical restrictions of free speech rights.

These changes will affect all parkland under the National Park Service (NPS) in the nation's capital including the National Mall, Lafayette Park, the White House Sidewalk, Lincoln Memorial, the Ellipse, National Monument grounds, Freedom Plaza and the sidewalks and parkland along Pennsylvania Avenue - including the sidewalk in front of the Trump Hotel. 

This is a dangerous anti-democratic proposal. If allowed to take effect, this will mark the end of free speech as we know it in Washington, D.C., and will be a dystopian model that spreads across the county.

When the rules were announced, the PCJF mounted a broad based fight-back campaign, undertaking a thorough legal analysis to break down the massive enactment, making it available to other groups so they could spread the word to their constituencies, and working with partner organizations to assist with submission of their detailed comments into the administrative record as well as submitting the formal substantive comment on behalf of 36 civil rights, civil liberties, environmental, labor, anti-war, and social justice organizations.

In doing the line-by-line analysis we discovered and exposed that the NPS had hidden in the regulatory details the planned closure of the iconic White House sidewalk to future protests. We sounded a clarion call to make others aware.

We brought the issue out to the public with an OpEd in the Washington Post, "The Trump Administration Wants to Tax Protests. What Happened to Free Speech?" A week later, the Washington Post editorial board issued its own editorial declaring a "resounding no" to the changes.

The work is now underway for the next critical phases of this fight: An ongoing public campaign to counter the Trump's narrative that maligns protest as the work of a mob. And a carefully-crafted and thorough legal challenge to enjoin the regulations that is ready to meet the Trump administration head-on as soon as it announces final rules are to take effect.

If these new restrictions and burdens on free speech are allowed here in Washington, D.C., they will become a model that will stifle voices of every progressive movement for social, economic and environmental change across the nation. Over the past two decades the PCJF has successfully fought and won landmark constitutional rights impact litigation defending and expanding the exercise of fundamental rights to free speech, protest and assembly. Our litigation against the National Park Service included obtaining a federal court injunction against their unconstitutional handling of the very permit system at issue now. We are proud to stand on the front lines of this fight and we won't back down.