Two Henrico residents arrested for involvement in Jan. 6 incident

In his re-election bid, former President Donald Trump is targeting the January 6, 2021 election.

attack on the Capitol as a key part of his campaign.

The attack, which left five people dead and about 140 police officers injured, was the deadliest on the Capitol since 1998. While Trump denied he was involved in the attack in the immediate aftermath, he has since embraced it as an act of patriotism, going so far as to describe the pre-riot rally as a “love fest” in an interview with Fox News. Before the election, he promised to pardon those who were “wrongfully” arrested.

Since March 2024, Trump has publicly referred to convicted rioters as hostages, changing the terminology to bolster his campaign. This revisionist approach has fueled the fervor of his supporters, many of whom now see those imprisoned as martyrs to the cause—some of Trump’s supporters even declared him a martyr after he survived the July 15 assassination attempt.

In a statement, Judge Royce C. Lamberth warned against allowing January 6 to become “a precedent for further violence against political opponents or government institutions.”

Right-wing terrorism in the U.S. has found tragic, deadly, and racist expression in crimes. Consider the 2022 shooting death of 10 black people by a white nationalist at Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York. Or when, in 2023, three black people were killed by a far-right 21-year-old at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida. A report by the Anti-Defamation League linked white supremacists to 21 of the 25 domestic extremist-related murders in 2022.

The January 6 riots were an exceptional event that culminated years of political division and growing right-wing extremist activity and violence.

As early as 2009, the Department of Homeland Security noted a cyclical pattern in the emergence of right-wing extremism, catalyzed by the economic crisis and the election of America’s first black president in the 2000s.

To illustrate how widespread such activity is across the U.S., Stacker examined where the most rioters were arrested on January 6, using Justice Department data from July 30, 2024. States are ranked by the number of rioters arrested there. Ties are determined by the number of rioters per million people, though some correlations remain.

Of the 1,297 arrests documented in the Justice Department database, 104 were not included in the ranking because they did not include arrest locations. Wyoming and North Dakota were also excluded because those states did not report any arrests.

An estimated 2,000 to 2,500 people entered the Capitol during the January 6 riot. As of January 2024, the Justice Department has charged more than 1,424 people in connection with the riot, either for actions that took place that day or for association with those who carried them out. Of these, about 820 have pleaded guilty, and about 884 have been tried and convicted.

The Justice Department continues to actively pursue cases; full details of all current Capitol siege cases are publicly available from multiple sources. In July 2024, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to limit the obstruction of justice charge for Joseph Fischer in Fischer v. United States. This decision has implications for the prosecution of 350 convicted felons charged with the same charge in the January 6 riot.

On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump “is entitled to some immunity” from four felony charges that he committed to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 election and remanded the case to a trial court. His trial has now been postponed until after the 2024 election. In her dissenting opinion, which she read aloud from the bench, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor wrote, “When he uses his official powers in any way, the majority reasoned, he will now be immune from criminal prosecution… Out of concern for our democracy, I dissent.”

Meanwhile, arrests related to the insurrection continue: William George Knight, a man with distinctive blond dreadlocks and facial tattoos, was arrested on May 26, 2024. He was accused of “plunging a giant metal ‘TRUMP’ sign into a line of police officers” and then shoving an officer. Footage shows him among the first to breach the Capitol barriers.

Read on to find out where the most rioters have been arrested so far.

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