Dan Smith, Acting Director of the National Park Service, will appear on Wednesday before the U.S. House of Representatives.

"Our client's visit to the Bible Museum turned into a Kafkaesque ordeal of humiliation, detention, interrogation and ultimately an FBI counter-terrorism investigation caused by the Museum's racist actions and false reporting," stated PCJF Executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard.

A truly amazing effort by everyone who joined together and flooded the National Park Service with over 140,000 comments! This is a powerful push back against the Trump administration's new rules designed to crush protest in the nation's capital. People across the United States have made it clear that they are not going to sit back and allow their First Amendment rights to be eviscerated.

The proposal to turn Metro into a private livery service for Nazis is outrageous and unconstitutional. Neither Metro nor the police should act as private security or escorts for white supremacists who choose to come to Washington, D.C.. ATU Local 689 members and Metro workers should not be required to act as their chauffeurs. Click the link to read the full statement.

The PCJF is suing to obtain government disclosure of documents regarding the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and its officers’ relationships with Project Veritas, Oath Keepers and other right-wing groups who acted as proxy with the MPD to infiltrate and surveil protest groups. Read more

On the night of November 20, 2016 law enforcement unleashed specialty impact munitions, explosive grenades, chemical agents, and water cannons in freezing temperatures injuring and maiming water protectors engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected protest activities and prayer circles. We are proud to be part of the civil team litigating this case.

The U.S. Attorney’s office “is desperate in the remaining cases to establish that people can be imprisoned not for criminal actions but rather for their association and proximity to others,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a constitutional lawyer and executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, told The Intercept. “The third category of defendants are being prosecuted based on presumed shared political views and association, specifically participation in a political march while wearing black.” Read more

A public records request and lawsuit by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund confirms that the Metropolitan Police Department failed to issue dispersal warnings or orders prior to mass arrests at the Trump Inauguration. The police actions on January 20 violated laws enacted by the D.C. Council in 2005, as well as the MPD’s own Standard Operating Procedures requiring such notice prior to arrest.

After months of denial and stonewalling by the General Service Administration (GSA), the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has uncovered through painstaking and persistent litigation that certain government communications between the GSA and the Trump Organization negotiating terms of the arrangements for the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue have been kept outside agency records, on private email. Read more