On May 31, 2023, a SWAT team raided an Atlanta house and arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund — Marlon Kautz, Adele MacLean, and Savannah Patterson — charging them with money laundering and charity fraud for the ordinary operations of a bail fund: posting bond and paying legal expenses for arrested protesters. The warrants cited reimbursements for camping supplies, gasoline, and forest-kitchen food as evidence of a criminal enterprise. A skeptical judge granted bond over the state's objection, remarking that the evidence presented was thin.

Bail funds had bonded out civil-rights workers since the 1960s without their operators being treated as launderers; the arrests — condemned by more than forty legal organizations and cited by the White House press corps as a First Amendment alarm — marked a new front in protest prosecution: criminalizing the support infrastructure that makes exercising rights survivable. The three were subsequently folded into the RICO indictment. For movements nationwide the message was unmistakable, and the case has become the standing citation for why prisoner support, jail support, and legal defense are themselves now contested political terrain.