Five months after Seattle, the movement converged on Washington for the April 2000 meetings of the IMF and World Bank. Police adopted the new preemptive playbook: the day before the main actions, fire marshals raided and closed the Convergence Center — the movement's organizing hub — seizing banners and puppets as "fire hazards," and a marching column of hundreds was trapped and arrested en masse near the Justice Department before any protest occurred. Roughly 1,300 people were arrested across the weekend, including legal observers and journalists.
Arrestees practicing jail solidarity — refusing to give names to force collective negotiation — were held for days in conditions that produced years of litigation. Nearly all charges were dropped or resolved with token fines, and the District of Columbia eventually paid millions across settlements for A16 and its successor mass arrests, with the 2002 Pershing Park kettle alone costing $8.25 million. The pattern was now fixed: unconstitutional mass arrest as crowd management, paid for by taxpayers years later, with the immediate goal — clearing the streets during the summit — achieved every time.