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The Justice Department “deliberately targeted” supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement with harsh prosecutions at the “express direction” of former President Donald Trump and former Attorney General Bill Barr, according to a new report from the advocacy group Movement for Black Lives.

The report detailed 326 criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors related to last year’s protests following the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Federal prosecutors aggressively sought jurisdiction over the cases even though in more than 92% of the cases there were equivalent state-level charges that could have been brought instead, according to a data analysis by the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) clinic at the City University of New York School of Law. Federal prosecutions result in conviction at much higher rates than state charges and nearly 90% of federal charges filed against protesters carried stiffer penalties than equivalent state charges.

Federal prosecutors “exploited the expansive federal criminal code” to assert jurisdiction over cases that “bore no federal interest,” the report said. Prosecutors often cited federal jurisdiction in alleged offenses that happened near federal property, affected property that receives federal funding, or had some tenuous connection to interstate commerce. “The government greatly exaggerated the threat of violence” from protesters, the report said, noting that the “vast majority” of charges were for nonviolent offenses or restricted to property destruction.

Prosecutors in more than 25% of cases also “stacked” charges against defendants with multiple redundant charges stemming from the same act to increase potential sentences or coerce guilty pleas, the report said. The only two violent charges related to murder were brought against counter-protesters who were reportedly members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois.

“The empirical data and findings in this report largely corroborate what Black organizers have long known intellectually, intuitively, and from lived experience about the federal government’s disparate policing and prosecution of racial justice protests and related activity,” the report said, drawing comparisons between last year’s federal crackdown to how the federal government historically used Counterintelligence Program techniques to “disrupt the work of the Black Panther Party and other organizations fighting for Black liberation.”

“We want to really show how the U.S. government has continued to persecute the Black movement by surveillance, by criminalizing protests, and by using the criminal legal system to prevent people from protesting and punishing them for being engaged in protests by attempting to curtail their First Amendment rights,” Amara Enyia, the policy research coordinator for The Movement for Black Lives, told the Associated Press, which first reported the findings. “It is undeniable that racism plays a role. It is structurally built into the fabric of this country and its institutions, which is why it’s been so difficult to eradicate. It’s based on institutions that were designed around racism and around the devaluing of Black people and the devaluing of Black lives.”

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