Washington (AFP) — A group of former FBI agents filed a lawsuit on Monday claiming they were unlawfully fired for kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in the US capital.

The 12 agents were fired earlier this year by FBI Director Kash Patel, who has been accused by Democrats of purging the bureau’s ranks of agents perceived as being disloyal to President Donald Trump.

The lawsuit filed by the agents — nine women and three men — in a federal court in Washington seeks their reinstatement and names Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi as defendants.

In their complaint, the agents, who filed the suit anonymously, recounted the circumstances in the capital on the day they took a knee.

It was 4 June 2020, less than two weeks after the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a Black man whose murder by a white police officer sparked nationwide racial justice protests.

The FBI agents, who had a background in counterintelligence and counterterrorism, were deployed by the bureau in a “powder keg” downtown Washington without the “training, protective gear, or less-than-lethal munitions that would enable them to engage in crowd control,” they said.

“They were confronted by a mob that included hostile individuals alongside families with young children,” they said, and they “made a considered tactical decision” to take a knee.

“Responding to the dangerous situation before them, Plaintiffs avoided triggering violence by assuming a kneeling posture associated with de-escalations between law enforcement officers and their communities during this period of national unrest,” they said.

“Complaintiffs’ de-escalation response was immediately successful,” they said, and “as a result of their tactical decision to kneel, the mass of people moved on without escalating to violence.”