The era's least visible political prisoners committed no crime at all. Federal grand juries investigating the Puerto Rican independence movement, the sanctuary networks, and clandestine organizations subpoenaed activists en masse; those who refused on principle to testify about their movements were jailed for civil contempt — imprisonment without charge, trial, or conviction, renewable subpoena by subpoena. Puerto Rican independentistas made non-collaboration a doctrine: Julio, Andrés, and Ricardo Rosado, Maria Cueto, and others served months and in some cases years across the late 1970s and 1980s solely for their silence.

Because civil contempt is nominally coercive rather than punitive, the resisters occupied a legal void — no sentence to appeal, no parole date, release only upon submission or the grand jury's expiration. Movement lawyers documented how the device functioned as internment: activists cycled from subpoena to cellblock and back, organizations were mapped through who refused, and support committees learned to treat grand-jury resistance as a form of political imprisonment in its own right. The tradition they built — refuse, organize, serve the time — passed directly to the resisters of the Green Scare and Standing Rock decades later.