Jessica Reznicek, a Catholic Worker from Des Moines, publicly admitted in 2017 that she and Ruby Montoya had burned construction equipment and pierced empty sections of the Dakota Access Pipeline with welding torches — property sabotage, carried out, they said, to protect water, that injured no one. Reznicek pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to damage an energy facility. At sentencing in June 2021, the court applied a federal terrorism enhancement, treating the pipeline as government property and her acts as calculated to influence government conduct, and imposed eight years in prison plus millions in restitution.

The Eighth Circuit affirmed in 2022, and Montoya was sentenced to six years. The case became the environmental-justice movement's clearest evidence that "terrorism" in federal law had become a label for politically motivated property damage: advocates noted that the enhancement roughly doubled Reznicek's sentence for conduct that, absent politics, would have been ordinary vandalism. "Free Jessica Reznicek" campaigns made her one of the most widely recognized U.S. political prisoners of the decade.