Statement on the Administration’s Plan to Wall Off Lafayette Square
On Friday, the Trump administration released a formal proposal to permanently fence off Lafayette Square – a historic space for public protest across the street from the White House.
Officials in the first Trump administration reportedly discussed a permanent fence around the park in May 2020, when protesters gathered there en masse in response to George Floyd’s murder. Rumors of this formal proposal were leaked to reporters anonymously last month. The plan, jointly crafted by the White House, the Interior Department and the Secret Service, features permanent eight-to-nine-foot fencing that government officials would have sole discretion to close if they allege there is a “security risk.”
Nothing in the proposal defines what counts as a “security risk.” In practice, this means that the decision to bar a peaceful protest from this park rests entirely with the officials whose actions are the focus of the protest.
“Fencing off Lafayette Square is a transparent attack on our First Amendment right to gather and non-violently protest in front of the People’s House,” said Jane Fonda, co-founder of the relaunched Committee for the First Amendment. “This president being so much more thin-skinned than his predecessors does not justify barring the American people from a public space whenever he wants to hide from those who disagree with his criminal and incompetent actions. This is a clear example of an autocrat trying to quash dissent by shoving it out of sight, and an overt attack on participatory democracy in the United States.”
“Lafayette Square is not the president’s front yard: it is the quintessential historic location for the American people to assemble and petition the Executive Branch, and it belongs to them,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, constitutional rights attorney and Steering Committee member of the Committee for the First Amendment. “From the suffragists to the Civil Rights movement to this day, this park has been the single most significant site to protest the actions of the president for more than a century. There is no lawful authority for the Trump administration to lock the people out of this iconic public forum. A permanent fence with an on/off switch controlled at the discretion of the government is not a security measure — it is an instrument for the suppression of dissent.”
This action must be understood in connection with other unlawful efforts by this administration to quell protests, including deploying National Guard troops to US cities and designating “antifa” – an organization that does not exist, but is an umbrella term for many groups that oppose fascism – as a domestic terrorist group. The Committee for the First Amendment opposes all efforts by the government to limit, chill, or outright block people’s ability to assemble and protest, and no fence will keep us from exercising those rights ourselves.
