Draconian Sentences in “Antifa” Frame-Up –
Free the Prairieland Defendants!

Prairieland Trial:
A Sledgehammer Against the Left

Supporters of the Pairieland defendants outside the sentencing in Fort Worth, Texas on 23 June 2026.
(Photo: Matt Sledge / The Intercept)

For Donald Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) minions, the 10 September 2025 killing of ultra-rightist Charlie Kirk was a not-to-be-missed opportunity to launch a long-prepared war on the left. On September 22, Trump designated “antifa” (for antifascist) a “domestic terrorist organization,” even though there is no “antifa” organization. Three days later he issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), supposedly “countering domestic terrorism.” Introducing NSPM-7, the fascistic White House deputy chief of staff and national security advisor Stephen Miller declared that this is “the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism, to dismantle antifa.” In reality, the Trump regime is using the “antifa” bogeyman to criminalize the entire left.¹

Stephen Miller, the architect of NSPM-7, along with Jared Kushner, and Kash Patel at a White House Oval Office presenting the presidential  “memorandum” aiming at criminalizing the left. (Photo: C-Span)

Nine months later, in the first test case of Trump’s NSPM-7 diktat, on June 23 in a Fort Worth, Texas courtroom, eight activists received sentences ranging from 30 to 50 and even 100 years in prison. The sky-high sentences were the result of a frame-up trial about a protest outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Alvarado, Texas on July 4 last year, where a police officer was wounded. In all, 22 people were arrested in connection with the incident. On top of a bogus “attempted murder” charge against the main defendant, Benjamin Song, in October 2025 an additional “terrorism” charge was added. In the end, 16 defendants were declared guilty of “providing material support to terrorists,” a catch-all category which let the MAGA judges impose maximum prison time.

There is certainly good reason to protest at the Prairieland facility, one of scores of ICE concentration camps around the country, where immigrants are held in deplorable conditions. As of July 11, over 65,000 people are in ICE detention nationwide, 70% of whom have no criminal conviction at all, not even for traffic violations. Over 16,000 are held in 61 facilities in Texas. ICE gives Prairieland (a privately run outfit) a “superior” rating, but detainees report medical neglect, poor food and other violations. Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student who was one of over 100 arrested for participating in the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University, was held for a year at Prairieland and “described the conditions there as humiliating and horrible.” She had a terrible fever but was denied medical care until she had a stroke and ended up in the hospital, chained to the bed “like an animal.”²

The Prairieland Detention Center, one of the many private ICE concentration camps around the country where immigrants are held in deplorable and deadly conditions. (Photo: Mark David Smith / Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

July 4th Noise and Light Protest Outside ICE Detention Center

Around 10:30 p.m. on July 4th 2025, about a dozen local activists set off consumer-grade fireworks (legal in Texas) as part of a “noise demonstration” in solidarity with the prisoners inside Prairieland. A Signal chat group to prepare it was named Funday Crew 1. After firing off some “Roman candles” (a traditional holiday firework) and yelling “esperanza” (hope) in Spanish, they were told by a Prairieland guard to leave and proceeded to do so. It all lasted 15 minutes. But as they were leaving, a local cop arrived. He immediately drew his 9 mm Glock and aimed it at a person who had spraypainted a guard shack and car and was chased by another Prairieland guard. In response, Song, a former Marine Corp reservist who was legally armed, fired. The police officer was struck by a bullet that passed through his neck, but he returned fire, hitting Song’s rifle. The cop was treated at a hospital for non-life-threatening injuries and released within hours.

Eleven protesters were arrested at the scene or leaving the area as more local police and fire vehicles arrived. Song hid out, but over the next few days another eleven people were picked up, charged with aiding him evade capture or concealing evidence. Song was eventually arrested at a friend’s home on July 15. Song had led a “gear check” on July 3 to go over plans for the Fourth. But while the U.S. Attorney claimed this was a “planned ambush with the intent to kill” ICE officers, none of those arrested (including those who turned state’s evidence) ever suggested that violence was planned. And while the feds later called the protesters a “North Texas Antifa Cell” (which does not and did not exist) and labeled them “terrorists,” those actually terrorizing the population are the U.S. government and its ICE and Border Patrol thugs.

Lacking evidence that the defendants were “antifa,” the government tried to insinuate it by crude amalgams. A 16 November 2025 Superseding Indictment claims, “Members of the Antifa Cell wore ‘black bloc’ – dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities.”³ At trial, the prosecutors put a “homeland security expert,” one Kyle Shideler,⁴ on the stand to read Trump’s September 22 executive order equating “antifa” with terrorism. This “expert” then told the court that wearing “black bloc” clothing was a common tactic of antifa. In his closing statement, the prosecutor said all-black “tactical” clothing was used to “camouflage” the “ambush.” But the cops’ body-cam footage shows protesters in short-sleeve t-shirts, tank tops and a variety of clothes and colors. And, of course, ICE/CBP agents are typically clad in camo.

According to the indictment, “the Antifa Cell” brought eleven firearms to the Prairieland protest. But those guns were unassembled or locked in their cars – hardly an indication of an “ambush” or the intent to “storm” the ICE facility. And this is Texas, where having guns at demonstrations is legal. Even MAGA Republican governor Greg Abbott said “There are protests and other activities that occur all the time when people are carrying guns” (“The ‘Antifa’ Scare Goes on Trial in North Texas,” Texas Observer, 17 February). The indictment argues that for “opsec” (operational security), members of the non-existent Cell “used an encrypted messaging app [Signal] to coordinate.” Yet, under questioning, the “antifa expert” admitted to using Signal himself, as do ICE/CBP agents. (WarSec Pete Hegseth used it for the murderous bombing of Yemen.)

The fireworks that the Prairieland defendants were sentenced to decades in prison for firing off on July 4th of 2025. Some “riot”! The whole event lasted 15 minutes. The cop showed up as they were walking away.
(Photo: U.S. District Court For the Northern District of Texas Fort Worth Division)

Then there were the fireworks. Almost all the defendants who were present at Prairieland that night were convicted of “riot, with the intent to commit an act of violence” and “conspiracy to use and carry an explosive.” The supposed “riot” was the noise demo, and the “explosives” were the Roman candles the protesters shot off to produce a light show for the immigrants locked up in Prairieland. The government claimed that the “explosives” were fired “towards Prairieland,” yet surveillance camera shots in the indictment show fireworks going off on the road outside the barbed-wire perimeter. Shooting off fireworks on the Fourth of July – some “crime”! But in MAGAland it’ll get you 50 years in the federal supermax prison at ADX Florence in Colorado, where inmates are held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.

The anarchist “zines” that Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years for moving. Although he was found guilty of moving a box, the contents were never used as evidence in the trial.  

And the “zines,” small DIY publications, in this case anarchist or anti-fascist pamphlets? Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not present at Prairieland or involved in any preparations, was sentenced to 30 years for moving a box of “numerous Antifa materials” from his parents’ home after getting a call from his wife Marcela Rueda. These had titles like “War in the Streets,” “Insurrectionary Anarchy,” “Another Critique of Insurrectionalism,” etc. – all covered by Frist Amendment (freedom of speech) protection. He was charged with “corruptly concealing a document” to “impair” its “availability for use in an official proceeding.” Except these zines had zero to do with the July 4 event – and nothing in the box was even used as evidence! Its only use was as an “antifa” prop. The purpose: to make having leftist literature a supposed proof of “terrorism.”⁵

The government made much of the fact that the protesters met in the Big Gay House, a communal living space where several who are transgender lived and was reportedly a favorite meeting spot for the Dallas-Fort Worth left. Prosecutors scrolled through a Twitter account for the Emma Goldman Book Club (“EGBC”), which some defendants were part of, highlighting materials read to show they were anarchist. What a revelation! And several defendants were members of the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA). That shouldn’t cut much ice in Texas, where an estimated 36% of the population owns firearms and gun clubs are legion. But the government presented a diagram of overlapping circles of members of the “EGBC,” the SRA and people they label “antifa” converging on “direct militant action.” So it’s guilt by association, and – eureka! – a “conspiracy”!

A Travesty of a Trial and Sentencing Rigged by a Pair of MAGA Judges

All the supposed proofs don’t amount to a hill of beans. The escalating indictments, shambolic trial and off-the-charts sentences have been a political prosecution from beginning to end. They are a model for police-state rule. Start with the elastic “terrorism” and “conspiracy” laws. “Material support for terrorists” can mean anything. Even the seven who took plea deals in return for testifying for the feds got six to nine years on this. As former federal terrorism prosecutor Jeffrey Breinholt put it, “if you can charge their supporters with material support, you’re off to the races. You can eliminate groups that way” (quoted in “When a Police Officer Was Shot, Prosecutors Called It a Terrorist Plot. The Truth Is a Lot Messier,” Texas Monthly August 2026). Removing a defendant from a Signal chat was charged as tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution of terrorism.

A key role in rigging the trial was played by the federal judges of the North Texas district, notably Trump-appointed trial judge Mark Pittman and chief judge Reed O’Connor, a G.W. Bush appointee, both longtime members of the conservative Federalist Society. During initial jury selection in February, Pittman declared a mistrial, supposedly because a defense attorney wore a t-shirt with images of Martin Luther King and Shirley Chisholm barely visible under her blazer, but quite possibly because some of the early selected jurors seemed less than enthusiastic about ICE. In the new trial, the judge did the “voir dire” questioning of jurors himself, rather than let defense attorneys have a crack at it. Having gotten himself a hand-picked jury, Pittman proceeded to rule against the defense time after time, and repeatedly cut off defense attorneys.

One of Pittman’s most consequential rulings was to accept a prosecution motion to bar the lead attorney for Benjamin Song, Phillip Hayes, from arguing that his client fired in order to prevent a third person from being shot (the one that the local cop was aiming at). Prosecutors cited a precedent from the 1993 ATF/FBI attack on the Branch Dravidian compound in Waco, Texas. That mass murder by an army of federal agents was ordered by Democrat Bill Clinton’s attorney general to enforce anti-democratic gun laws.⁶ After an assault and a 51-day siege, the feds set off a blaze, killing altogether 86 of the residents of the racially integrated compound, including 25 children. In the trial of the survivors, self-defense was ruled out because supposedly the Branch Dravidians fired first. In the Prairieland case, the feds said Hayes couldn’t argue self-defense because the defendants had set off fireworks!

In 1993 many gun rights defenders (rightly) denounced the Clinton administration’s violation of the Branch Davidians’ Second Amendment rights at Waco. But now that the Trump regime is sending people to prison for decades over the Prairieland protest, claiming that bringing firearms to a protest is proof of “terrorism,” we don’t hear a peep of protest.

Hayes also sought to argue that Song was not aiming to hit the officer but at the ground, as “suppressive fire” to stop the cop from shooting, and that the bullet may have ricocheted. In fact, the bullet showed evidence of contact with a hard substance, and surveillance video showed plumes of dust in front of the police officer. But when the lawyer tried to raise this in closing arguments, Pittman cut him off, saying if you can use “suppressive fire to stop a law enforcement investigation, then we’re at a bad stage in our history.” At sentencing, Song tried to read a statement saying he sought to prevent “another Alex Pretti, another Renee Good” – killed by federal agents in Minneapolis – or “another Botham Jean,” murdered in his apartment by an off-duty Dallas cop in 2018. The judge shut him up, saying “we don’t need a political statement.”

For the sentencing, Pittman was joined by chief district judge O’Connor. While federal judges in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere have ruled against aspects of the government’s militarized mass deportations, this pair of MAGA judges have made the North Texas district the go-to venue for the Trump regime in pushing its reactionary “culture war” agenda. Thus, the federal government brought a case against Rhode Island Hospital, demanding the names and Social Security numbers of minors who had received gender transition treatment, to the U.S. district court in Fort Worth.⁷ So the blatantly prejudicial Prairieland trial proceedings and maximum sentences meted out are hardly surprising. The government and the courts were out to make an example of the protesters.

Hope Song, the mother of Benjamin Song, spoke outside the sentencing on June 23. She denounced the prosecutors’ “lie, a government lie, made to prosecute innocent people in order to get political persecutions, which they are now using as a blueprint to prosecute innocent people all over the country as ‘domestic terrorists,’ which they are not." She then read her son's prepared statement, which the judge refused to let him give while sentencing him to 100 years in prison. (Photo: screen shot from AP video)

The sentences for the eight defendants announced on June 23 were: Benjamin Song, 100 years for attempted murder, “riot” and “material support for terrorism”; Maricela Rueda, 70 years for riot and material support, while Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, Elizabeth Soto and Autumn Hill got 50 years for the same; Daniel Sanchez Estrada, 30 years for “document conspiracy.”  Ines Soto – labeled by the government “cell head of ANTIFA DFW, which operated under the front: ‘Emma Goldman Book Club’” – was sentenced to 50 years on July 1, while six defendants who pled guilty received sentences ranging from 6 to 15 years (the latter for those who refused to testify for the government). Nathan Baumann, the spray painter, who lied about his role and testified at length for the prosecution, got only 22 months.

In short, nine defendants treated as hostile by the government received a total of 500 years on trumped-up charges stemming from a protest that lasted all of 15 minutes until a cop arrived who immediately whipped out his automatic pistol, adopted a menacing shooter’s stance and was lightly wounded, released from the hospital within hours. The charges are false to the core: there was no attempted murder, no riot, no aid to terrorism, no concealing of evidence. The supposed “ANTIFA DFW” is an invention of the fevered brains of the architects of the MAGA would-be police state. Even those who pled guilty to the bogus charges were victims, although the five finks who testified for the prosecution are another matter. But nobody should be behind bars for this clueless, liberal protest gone awry.

Meanwhile, as many liberals have noted, the nearly 1,600 people convicted or awaiting trial for the January 6 (2021) riot at the U.S. Capitol were granted a blanket clemency by Trump on Day 1 of his second term. The sentences of 14 actual fascists, members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, were commuted. The trial of the Prairieland defendants was never about what happened on 4 July 2025. It was a sledgehammer to establish a legal precedent coupled with NSPM-7 whereby dark clothing, Signal chats, hand-printed zines and phone calls about pets become “material support for terrorists.” In the same vein, the prosecution of the Minneapolis 15 seeks to use the “antifa” hook to lay the basis for criminalizing labor militants and rapid response groups. FBI director Kash Patel (Trump’s man at the Pentagon on January 6) boasted “We will continue dismantling violent extremist networks and the funding pipelines that support them.” Already they’ve greatly expanded their witch-hunting “watch lists.”

The Prairieland defendants are appealing their convictions and sentences, although the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans (which would hear any appeal) is notoriously ultra-conservative and has seldom (if ever) overturned an egregious conviction or sentence from the North Texas district. And the defendants won’t find any sympathy at the sycophantic Supreme Court, which in June 2024 ruled that the U.S. president can do pretty much whatever he wants (unless he steps on the toes of big capitalist corporations, as over tariffs). The labor movement and all defenders of democratic rights must denounce the Prairieland frame-up, part of the sinister drive against the rights of all, and demand freedom for the Prairieland defendants. It will take the might of a mobilized, class-conscious working class, and ultimately the proletariat in power, to bring justice for the victims of the ruling class, from Waco to Prairieland and beyond.

Free the Prairieland defendants!

The real terrorists: masked ICE and Border Patrol agents in black and tactical camouflage in Minneapolis, January 2026, where the feds murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Mobilize labor’s power to drive out the ICE Gestapo and stop the deportations! (Photo: AP)

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