“False imprisonment” is a charge that could be wielded against the scores of pro-Palestinian protesters taking the streets, bridges, and tunnels of cities across America by storm. 

While local and federal law enforcement authorities remain largely silent, legal action might be the only way to tame what many are calling illegal demonstrations. Some attorneys are encouraging drivers trapped in standstill traffic to file lawsuits against the protesters. 

The latest such disruption took place Monday, when a coordinated anti-Israel demonstration took hold of the Holland Tunnel, and the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges in New York. Amid calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, dozens of demonstrators sat down on roadways and chained themselves together, blocking traffic for hours and causing residual delays around the tunnel and throughout the city.

“It’s an outrageous dereliction of duty on the part of law enforcement to allow organized rioters to illegally disrupt life in major cities across the country,” a law professor, David Bernstein, tells the Sun. “Trapping people in their cars for hours is especially egregious behavior, a form of temporary imprisonment.” 

At the Holland Tunnel, 125 protesters blocking New-Jersey bound lanes were arrested, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department tells the Sun. The deputy commissioner for public information at the NYPD did not immediately respond to the Sun’s request for details about other arrests. City, state, and national leaders have yet to intervene as such disruptions become increasingly frequent. 

Another anti-Israel protest blocked Interstate 5 at Seattle over the weekend. In a post on X, the director of litigation at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, Ted Frank, is encouraging people who were stuck in the traffic to file for civil damages. “People who were trapped would have a cause of action,” he tells the Sun, “for at least the nominal damages and punitive damages for the false imprisonment.”

Organizers, meanwhile, say it is their right to protest. “As the violence escalates, we have to make our message known, and it’s not coming from the top, so the people are sending the message,” actress and activist Susan Sarandon told CBS’s Jessica Moore at the Manhattan Bridge on Monday. “After all, it is our tax dollars.” 

The protest was organized by an “autonomous collective” of members of groups demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, according to a press release circulating about the “anti-zionist, free Palestine organizers.” Those groups include the Palestinian Youth Movement, Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, the Democratic Socialists of America, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Critical Resistance, and Writers Against the War on Gaza.

If organizations are using their nonprofit status to facilitate illegal protests, they should be held liable for damages, Mr. Frank says. Those who lost wages and potential business due to the disruptions have a claim to economic damages as well. “Civil litigation is one path to deterring organizations from being involved and thus making it harder to organize these things,” he says, “but an investigation is needed.” 

An injunction against future attempts to block streets and trap people in their cars would elevate such behavior from a question of local law enforcement intervention to one of criminal contempt, Mr. Frank says. If a plaintiff comes forward, he says his firm would look at the arrest records and sue the protesters, as well as the organizations believed to be behind the protests, if necessary. 

Mr. Bernstein, in a post on X, pointed to the inaction of the Justice Department, which could have grounds to file criminal and civil actions against the organizers on the basis of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The issue could also be prosecuted federally as a conspiracy to interfere with the exercise of the right to interstate travel, protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and reaffirmed by the 1966 Supreme Court ruling, United States v. Guest.

Economics might ultimately be a more potent weapon. Corporations with offices in New York whose operations are disrupted could exert financial pressure to leave for the suburbs or the American south. “I think until there’s that sort of financial pressure,” says Mr. Frank, “city leaders don’t have the incentive to get activists mad at them, because then the activists target them, rather than the innocent New Yorkers.”

“It’s Democrats who control these cities,” says Mr. Frank. “It’s Democrats who control the federal law enforcement apparatus. And I imagine it’s not a very high priority to crack down on your voting base.” Thus, their inaction may be politically motivated, he explains. “I think they’re politically afraid of turning them” — anti-Israel protesters — “into enemies.”