Lincoln Memorial Inauguration Protest Closure: Is Trump's Women's March On Washington Closure Outrageous Or Standard Procedure?

Over 100,000 people were expected to convene on the National Mall the day after President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office but the future commander-in-chief may have found a way to block the protest. A women’s march scheduled for the Saturday morning after Inauguration Day will be denied access to the Lincoln Memorial, a site that embodies American tradition for civil dissent.

The National Parks Service announced that the memorial and other historic sites in the nation’s capital will not be open to rallies, a decision that was made on behalf of the Presidential Inauguration Committee, the Guardian reported Thursday. The service filed for a “massive omnibus blocking permit” that would keep protesters off of large swaths of the Mall and other politically historic locations in Washington, D.C., for days and weeks around the inauguration.

Battles over access to political sites leading up to and on Inauguration Day aren’t uncommon but the effort to curb dissent the day after is “extremely unique," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a constitutional rights litigator and the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund

“It hasn’t come up in any way previously, where you’ve had a groundswell of people trying to have access on the Saturday, January 21, and thousands of people want to come, and the government is saying we won’t give you a permit,” Verheyden-Hilliard said at a press conference by Answer Coalition, an organization that works to end war and racism. “What they’ve done is take all of these spaces out of action.”

While some of the locations that are being blocked are historic places of dissent, others serve a practical purpose for the inauguration festivities that the National Parks Service views as places of construction. The event requires the erection of viewing stands and bleachers that could make the areas dangerous should they remain open to the public.

Still, the people who planned on protesting Trump as a part of the women’s march on Washington, which gained steam online after the president-elect's victory in November, see the closure of many of the sites as an attack on their First Amendment rights. There were 135,000 people who had said they were planning on attending the rally and another quarter million who registered their interest on Facebook.