The movement to stop Atlanta's planned police training center — "Cop City" — and defend the Weelaunee Forest produced the first mass use of a state domestic-terrorism statute against protest in American history. Beginning in December 2022, Georgia charged forest defenders under its domestic-terrorism law, which had been expanded in 2017 to cover property crimes; by mid-2023, forty-two people faced the charge, which carries up to thirty-five years. Arrest warrants cited evidence as thin as mud on shoes, camping in the forest, and possession of a legal-support hotline number written on skin.
The most sweeping single action came on March 5, 2023, when police raided a music festival in the forest a mile from any property destruction and charged twenty-three attendees — selected, defense lawyers showed, largely for being from out of state — with domestic terrorism. Two years on, the charges had produced no terrorism convictions, but they had done their pretrial work: denied bond or held on ankle monitors, barred from the forest, defendants learned that in Georgia the word "terrorist" now attached to sitting in a tree.