Within months of the Standing Rock camps being cleared, Oklahoma enacted the first "critical infrastructure protection" law — felony penalties for trespass near pipelines, and organizational liability for groups that "conspire" with trespassers. The template, promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council with energy-industry backing, spread to more than twenty states. Louisiana's 2018 version was applied almost immediately to kayakers and landowner-invited protesters at the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, who found themselves facing five-year felonies for standing in a swamp.

The laws' purpose, critics argued, was not security but pre-emption: converting the misdemeanor civil disobedience that had powered Standing Rock into prison-time felonies before the next fight began, and threatening the nonprofits that might support it. Constitutional challenges, including White Hat v. Landry in Louisiana, chipped at the vaguest provisions, but the statutes largely survived — a standing warning that in much of the country, the criminal code around fossil-fuel infrastructure had been rewritten specifically for protesters.