Protests scheduled to take place around President-elect Trump’s inauguration next month won’t have access to the Lincoln Memorial and other sites on the National Mall.
The Guardian reported the National Park Service has filed documents securing large swaths of the Mall for inauguration events, essentially shutting them off to protesters. While this is standard procedure for inaugurations, and would have happened if Hillary Clinton was elected instead, it has angered some who planned to protest Trump.
“It hasn’t come up in any way previously, where you’ve had a groundswell of people trying to have access on the Saturday, Jan. 21, and thousands of people want to come, and the government is saying we won’t give you a permit,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a constitutional rights litigator and the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.
A march on the Lincoln Memorial was scheduled to be held on Jan. 21, and hundreds of thousands of people said on Facebook they planned to attend. Organizers have said they will find a different location for the march.
The problem is the Mall is essentially a construction zone, according to Mike Litterst, a spokesman for NPS.
He said the bleachers and viewing areas for the inauguration began being built on Nov. 1 and will take until March 1 to be removed. The entire area is “effectively” a construction zone until then, he said.
“This is always the way it happens,” Litterst said to the Washington Post. “What makes this so complicated is that not only is this inauguration, but because there has been so much interest on both sides of this election, we are seeing all of these extra events that want to take place at the same time.”
