During the anti-capitalist march on the morning of Donald Trump's first inauguration, a minority of participants broke windows along the route through downtown Washington. Rather than arrest individuals, D.C. police boxed the entire march — and everyone swept along with it — into a kettle at 12th and L Streets, holding more than 230 people for hours without food, water, or bathrooms before mass arrest. Journalists, legal observers, medics, and bystanders were taken along with marchers; detainees reported pepper spray, rough handling, and invasive manual searches in processing.
The kettle itself was familiar from the summit-protest era; what followed was not. Instead of the usual pattern — mass arrest, dropped charges, eventual settlement — federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office chose to charge virtually everyone in the net with identical felonies, on the theory that presence at the march made each person liable for every window broken by anyone. The District later paid $1.6 million to settle arrestees' civil claims, but by then the criminal cases had already made J20 the era's defining test of collective liability for protest.