In below freezing weather last night, law enforcement deployed tear gas, water cannons, percussion grenades, and rubber bullets against hundreds protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. News reports confirm over 160 people have been injured. Tell the DOJ to investigate and demilitarize police responses to nonviolent #NoDAPL water protectors.

Right now on a North Dakota prairie, nonviolent protesters are being confronted by police in riot gear with armored military vehicles, automatic rifles, sonic weapons, concussion grenades, attack dogs, pepper spray, and beanbag bullets. This sovereign nation of the Standing Rock Sioux – one of many constantly threatened by environmental injustice – is fighting to keep its water safe and clean by means of an historic protest. But law enforcement agencies are treating them like wartime enemies. Riot police raiding a protest camp even yanked indigenous people from prayer in sweat lodges...

The Department of Justice can help stop this militarized response to indigenous activists and their allies fighting for clean water. It oversees the various federal programs that may have supplied much of the equipment being used against protesters – and it can put those oversight measures to use... The pipeline could destroy ancestral burial grounds and poison the water supply for an entire sovereign nation and millions of Americans downstream who rely on the Missouri River. This is worth standing up for – these brutal police tactics are not appropriate or just.  Tell the DOJ to investigate possible constitutional violations and suspend police use of federally supplied military equipment.