It was January 20, 2017, and Caroline Unger, a 24-year-old originally from Chicago, marched among the thousands protesting Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. She was in Washington, D.C., and those around her held signs with slogans like “Dump Trump” or “Make Racists Afraid Again.” The crowd was a mix, some dressed in casual attire and some clad in all black. As the day wore on, a limousine was set on fire by some protesters. Windows were broken. In total, 234 people were arrested that day and charged with a variety of crimes, including felony inciting a riot, rioting, conspiracy to riot, destruction of property, and assault on a police officer.

For Caroline, one of the scariest moments of the march was looking out for her best friend while attempting to avoid the clouds of tear gas and pepper spray dispersed by 3,000 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as 5,000 National Guard members and out-of-state police.

Law enforcement starting using force against the crowd after the damage to property started to occur, which they claim resulted in at least $100,000 worth of destruction.

Caroline says she was pushed against a building and struggled to breathe from the toxic fumes. She was among the protesters who were “kettled” by police, a tactic used to control crowds by enclosing large groups of people into a small area. Almost everyone who was rounded up in the kettle was arrested.

“It felt like we were treated like cattle when we were arrested after being in the kettle for 8-plus hours,” Caroline, an advocate for Sex Worker Outreach Project, as well as a member of Industrial Workers of the World, tells Teen Vogue. “I think one of the worst parts is that we were never told what was happening. No one would look us in the eye or talk to us directly about how long we would be in the cell blocks, and time itself became a torturous thing because it was held over us without any concern.”

Some of the 234 arrested reported being inappropriately touched by law enforcement or having their property taken but never returned. There were so many arrested on Trump’s inauguration day that the prosecution had to split the arrestees into trial groups, and Caroline became a J20 defendant in the June 4 trial group. Sentences ran up to 70 years.

The first of the J20 defendants to be tried had their felony riot charges acquitted in December 2017. In January, 129 defendants had their charges dropped on grounds that the prosecution did not have enough evidence to go to trial. Caroline was one of six defendants in a trial group seen by the court on June 4, and she had her charges dismissed, along with the other defendants in her trial group. The circumstances of her charges being dropped followed a pattern of the prosecution’s inability to build a solid case to prove that all the defendants had engaged in property damage and because it was discovered that the government did not turn over vital evidence.

The trial put emotional stress on Caroline, her partner, and her friends. During the year-and-a-half-long period before her charges were dropped, Caroline was unable to travel abroad and missed out on other opportunities, like working as a children’s camp counselor or in a domestic violence shelter, that were hindered by employment background checks that typically look for criminal history.

“I had to take the summer off from my master’s program for the trial, but other defendants were at risk of losing their professional licenses or got fired for the charges; I consider myself lucky,” she says. “I live in Baltimore and had to go to countless pretrial hearings, but there are defendants that lived across the country that had to continuously travel to the capital to hear court proceedings.”