The Department of Homeland Security monitored web posts critical of a proposed police training center in Atlanta known as Cop City and shared its findings with state and local law enforcement ahead of a crackdown that left one protester dead and more than 40 others charged with domestic terrorism.
The federal reports, shared with the Atlanta police and the Georgia bureau of investigation, concluded that property damage in the name of stopping Cop City, a planned $90m police training center in Atlanta’s South River Forest, was consistent with “anarchist violent extremist” and “environmental violent extremist” ideologies. A separate report from the multiagency National Counterterrorism Center reached a similar conclusion.
The records, seen by Drilled and the Guardian through a public records request, provide new details about how federal agencies founded in the wake of 9/11 laid the groundwork for Georgia to charge organizers camping in the woods as terrorists, and reflect a wider US and global crackdown on environmental protest.
“DHS’s communications undoubtedly contributed to Georgia authorities’ harsh crackdown on the Stop Cop City movement,” said Charlie Hogle, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, over email. “The documents reinforce our concerns about DHS’s overbroad and stigmatizing use of ‘domestic violent extremism’ and related labels, which has long resulted in unwarranted surveillance, investigation, and even prosecution of environmental and racial and social justice activists.”
One of those activists is Vienna Forrest. In the summer of 2022, she moved into a tent in the woods alongside other “forest defenders” who sought to block construction of the 380-acre police training center. When she first heard that police were describing activists like her as eco-terrorists, “It seemed like an improbable joke to us,” she said.
Though some forest defenders appear to have participated in property destruction or built barricades to keep police or private security from evicting them, others simply occupied the space to prevent construction of a project they worried would lead to over-policing and exacerbate environmental injustices.
Forrest described the group as “a bunch of young punks, partying in the woods and feeding their community”. There, Forrest met and fell in love with an activist known as Tortuguita, whose legal name was Manuel Paez Terán.
A year and a half later, Forrest has a much more somber take on what it means to be called an “eco-terrorist”. Last December, she was arrested in the woods and charged under Georgia’s domestic terrorism law, which was broadened in the wake of the 2015 killing of nine Black parishioners by a white supremacist gunman in Charleston, South Carolina.
Then in January, state troopers shot and killed 26-year-old Terán during an attempt to evict the forest defenders. The Georgia bureau of investigation had briefed officers in advance of the raid that they would be encountering dangerous domestic terrorists, according to records obtained by Rolling Stone. Authorities claimed Terán fired first, but there were no witnesses besides the police. An autopsy later revealed that Terán had been shot 57 times in the head, torso, hands and legs.
Officers arrested several more people that day on domestic terror charges. Arrest affidavits for 14 of the forest defenders stated that DHS designated members of Defend the Atlanta Forest as “domestic violent extremists” and said the group had taken responsibility, via web posts and graffiti, for vandalism and arson, throwing Molotov cocktails and fireworks, and blocking access to private land.
As the year progressed, more Cop City protesters were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. Then, in May, three organizers who operated a bail fund were charged with charities fraud and money laundering. Their arrest affidavits also included language stating that DHS had designated members of Defend the Atlanta Forest as domestic violent extremists. The Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, claimed in a statement that the non-profit workers “facilitated and encouraged domestic terrorism”.
A representative for DHS told Drilled and the Guardian that the agency “does not classify or designate any groups as domestic violent extremists”. However, a bulletin the agency released in May indicates its officers did consider some Cop City opponents to be extremists.
The National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin referred to Cop City opponents as “alleged DVEs”. Additional records, first published by Unicorn Riot, showed that the FBI was labeling Cop City opponents as “anarchist” and “environmental violent extremists” in August 2022.
The lack of clarity drew the attention of the senator Raphael Warnock and some of the nation’s largest civil rights organizations, who wrote letters this summer to DHS demanding that the agency publicly disclose “all information and DHS intelligence or situational awareness reports that DHS provided to Georgia state and local law enforcement”.
The records published in this report help answer this request, providing some of the only details about how DHS and other federal agencies communicated with Atlanta officers in the months before the charges were filed.
The DHS files are Open Source Intelligence Reports, a type of surveillance product that has repeatedly come under scrutiny, including in a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice. OSIRs contain “raw unevaluated information” and do not go through the same vetting process as other DHS reports. The top of each report includes a statement saying: “This information may not be used as the basis for any US legal process” including “incorporation into affidavits or other documents relating to subpoenas, search, electronic surveillance, or arrest warrants; and/or as evidence in criminal prosecutions”.
In an emailed statement, a representative for DHS said that the agency “is committed to preventing all forms of terrorism and targeted violence, and does so in ways that protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, and that adhere to all applicable laws. To that end, DHS regularly shares information regarding the heightened threat environment with federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial officials to ensure the safety and security of all communities across the country.”
The agency pointed out that the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which produces the OSIRs, announced last May that it was undergoing an overhaul to increase oversight.
The Georgia bureau of investigation referred Drilled and the Guardian to the office of the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, which sent the following statement: “We have continued to defend the First Amendment right to peacefully protest, but protestors use words. Violence is not ‘speech’ and will not be tolerated in Georgia.”
Documents received in response to the public records request also reveal that the Atlanta police department received reports from federal agencies and academic institutions examining, defining and debating the nature of eco-terrorism. One report includes a term paper by a homeland security officer for the Atlanta fire department in which the author repeatedly refers to Defend the Atlanta Forest members as “eco-terrorists” or environmental “terrorists”.
The Atlanta police department declined to comment on the documents, and the report’s author did not respond to a request for comment.
Atlanta officers also received quarterly issues of The Searchlight, a magazine-style bulletin dedicated to “violent extremist threats to critical infrastructure” published by the National Counterterrorism Center. The September 2022 issue describes anti-Cop City destruction of construction vehicles and office buildings as “Anarchist- and Environmental Violent Extremist–Related Attacks”. The article was placed on the same page as a blurb about the Islamic State.
“The National Counterterrorism Center’s mission is to protect the United States by analyzing, integrating, and sharing terrorist threat-related information with partners,” said a spokesperson for the center. “NCTC primarily focuses on addressing international terrorism threats, though also provides support to the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation as the government leads for countering domestic violent extremism.”
Together the materials show how evolving ideas about an eco-terrorist threat met a movement aimed directly at law enforcement and turned into one of the most severe crackdowns against environmental activists in a generation.
Lauren Regan, the director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which is providing legal defense for some Cop City opponents, suggested that the idea of eco-terrorism exists only to criminalize disruptive environmental activism. “Far-right extremists and their water carriers have used that phrase for an incredibly wide swath of anything that they don’t like, whether it is very traditional civil disobedience or whether it engages in economic sabotage,” she said. “It is all being dumped into this label called eco-terrorist, which is basically just a slanderous term.”
Not all the eco-extremism literature sent to officers indicated that so-called “environmental violent extremists” were dangerous. A DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis summary titled Domestic Violent Extremist Attacks and Plots in the United States From 2010 Through 2021 listed white supremacists as by far the most common perpetrators, tied to 51 attacks and plots. Environmental violent extremists were responsible for six incidents.
The targeting of Atlanta protesters has continued. In September, the Georgia attorney general charged 61 organizers, including Forrest, with criminal racketeering, under the state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as Rico, which was designed to take down organized crime. Such charges could carry 20-year sentences.
“To think of us as some evil masterminding organization is just ridiculous to me,” Forrest said. “If you’ve ever been in the forest, ‘organization’ is not the word I would use for it.”
In recent years, fossil fuel companies have repeatedly filed civil Rico lawsuits against environmental activists and their supporters. Targets like Greenpeace say the suits are meant to smear the organizations’ names, drain them of resources and chill activism. However, cases of public officials filing criminal Rico charges against activists are exceedingly rare in the US.
The September indictments included money-laundering charges for the three non-profit workers and domestic terrorism charges for five people. Georgia prosecutors have not yet said whether they will pursue domestic terror charges against the other dozens of defendants.
Project opponents have continued to protest, fight in court and pursue other strategies to halt the advancing construction – but the forest is no longer occupied.
The arrests and accusations have had life-altering consequences. Online bullies have doxed some terror defendants, posting information about their families, residences and employers. The terror label provided fodder for rightwing critics, who used it to amplify claims of growing leftwing violence – even though an analysis by Grist showed that most of the allegations in the Rico suit are tied to non-violent actions.
In the case of Terán, the eco-terrorist label may have cost him his life, activists believe.
Forrest remembers the last time she saw Terán. She had been released on bond under the condition that she wouldn’t use social media to contact members of Defend the Atlanta Forest. Concerned, many of her friends avoided talking to her – but not Tortuguita, who used they/them pronouns. Although they hated leaving the forest, they would regularly stop by the house where Forrest was staying to make sure she wasn’t feeling left behind.
“They took me and two friends to get Vietnamese and Mexican food and just get really full,” Forrest remembered. “We went to this drive-in movie theater and watched a really shitty horror movie.” It was a Monday.
That Wednesday, state troopers entered the forest. According to the records obtained by Rolling Stone, they approached Tortuguita’s tent believing that “domestic-terror suspects were present on the property and known to be armed and extremely violent”.
This article is co-published with Drilled, with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and is part of its multimedia investigation into the effort to criminalize environmental and climate protests.
