Donald Trump speaks as Pam Bondi smiles during a press conference at the White House in Washington on Oct. 15, 2025. Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
It started on President Donald Trump’s very first day in office in 2017. Over 200 Inauguration Day protesters were mass arrested and charged with hefty riot and conspiracy felonies for simply being present and wearing black at a rowdy demonstration.
Since then, the government has sought and failed to convict left-wing activists on thin, unconstitutional claims of collective guilt.
Just as the J20 prosecutions, as the inauguration cases were known, fell apart, so too did cases accusing dozens of participants in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement of domestic terrorism, racketeering, and conspiracy.
It became a pattern of sorts. Prosecutors on both the federal and state level throwing extreme and overreaching charges at leftists, based on infirm theories of collective liability, aiming to paint antifascist, anti-racist movements as criminal terrorist networks. The evidence marshaled in these cases was consistently no more than typical First Amendment-protected activity, like making protest signs, raising bail funds, or being present at a demonstration. The cases drained movement energies and resources.
Again and again, though, they failed.
This was the pattern repeated in the malign, overreaching cases against protesters in Fort Worth, Texas. The anti-ICE activists had mounted a demonstration at a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement jail in nearby Alvarado.
There were consistencies with other anti-protest cases. There had been some illegal activity outside the Prairieland Detention Facility last July, and a police officer was shot. The government latched onto these circumstances to build its strategy of criminalizing dissent through guilt by association.
Even in conservative Texas, I didn’t think a jury would buy the government’s case that these defendants were “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” — an organization fabricated whole cloth by the Trump administration — who had orchestrated an elaborate ambush of the ICE facility.
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### Anti-ICE Protesters Convicted on Terrorism Charges for Wearing All Black
Last week, a jury found eight of the defendants guilty of terrorism charges for simply being present and wearing black at the protest. The government scored a resounding victory: A few of the protesters, none of whom had fired any weapons, were acquitted of attempted murder charges, but the Justice Department won on almost all the other charges.
“Most people looking at this case are still stuck on the shooting aspect, but the jury decided the shooting was beside the point,” a member of a support group for the defendants told me. “The verdict is that a normal noise demo deserves to be called terrorism and people should spend potentially the rest of their lives in prison. The implications of this are obvious, and people should know that the DOJ is going to try this again.”
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## Grim Precedents
The convictions mark a number of grim precedents. It was the first successful effort in court to paint anti-ICE, antifascist protest activity as not only criminal but also terroristic; the first time federal terrorism charges have been deployed in association with the “antifa” label; and the first time the Trump government’s collective guilt strategy won in court.
The terrorism-related charges in the case were filed just a month after Trump announced that he was designating antifa, which is not an organization, a “major terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under law for domestic groups.
It’s little wonder that the Justice Department is celebrating the convictions. Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that the “verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”
The prosecution’s case was extraordinarily weak — all they really proved was that the activists, some of whom knew each other, planned and attended a late-night demonstration during which certain illegal acts took place.
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If that can be sold to juries as the work of an organized terrorist cell, deserving of up to 15 years in prison, then Trump’s fantasy of rounding up and imprisoning leftists en masse becomes a reality. This was entirely the idea behind Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, released last September, which directs federal law enforcement agencies to target left-leaning groups and activities. One of the defense attorneys involved in the Prairieland cases told news outlet NOTUS that it “wouldn’t be a terrorism case if it weren’t for that memo.”
> The prosecution treated it as a given that antifascist, anti-government, left-wing sentiment was itself evidence of criminal conspiracy.
Throughout the trial, the prosecution treated it as a given that antifascist, anti-government, left-wing sentiment was itself evidence of criminal conspiracy. As The Intercept’s Matt Sledge reported, “prosecutors bombarded jurors with images of radical zines” and “anti-government internet memes, drawings of burning cop cars, and a video of an unidentified street brawl between far-left and far-right protesters.”
The fact that demonstrators wore black and covered their faces — a reasonable tactic in an era when federal forces are filming and openly harassing legal observers and anti-ICE protesters — was presented as material support for terrorism, for which the jury convicted eight defendants.
Another defendant was convicted for the crime of moving a box of zines and pamphlets.
What should have at most been individualized cases relating to a shooting and minor property damage were instead spun by the government into a delusional story of a planned ambush involving “explosives” — protesters set off retail fireworks — and “terroristic acts,” according to a Justice Department statement.
Whether certain illegal activity took place outside the Prairieland Detention Facility last July 4 was never up for debate in this case. Protesters spray-painted vehicles in the parking lot, and a police officer was shot in the neck by one protester, Benjamin Song. (Song was convicted of one count of attempted murder and could face up to life in prison.)
## Keep Up the Fight
The material support for terrorism and related convictions must be challenged in appeal. They are unconstitutional and were obtained in a trial riddled with irregularities.
For one, the Trump-appointed judge, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman, abruptly declared a mistrial during jury selection based on the initial jury pool reportedly showing too little sympathy for ICE.
When the trial restarted, the judge himself took charge of jury selection — a highly unusual move. Pittman also barred Song from presenting a self-defense argument. Access to the court for supporters, observers, and the media was also extremely limited.
“All the odds were stacked against the defendants from the start,” Xavier T. de Janon, a defense attorney representing one of the defendants, told Unicorn Riot. “The rulings of the judge, the way the courtroom was closed, the fact that the first jury was declared a mistrial, where this was happening, the very strict rules on who can even take these cases in north Texas, the sanctions that the judge imposed on defense attorneys for filing very normal motions — all of this piled up to end in this result.”
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It’s notable, too, that the defense attorneys did not mount a defense in court. Once the prosecution rested its ideology-drenched and inconsistency-filled case, the defense rested too, and closing arguments proceeded.
“We do not know how things would have gone otherwise, but the assumption that the state’s glaringly weak case was enough to convince a North Texas jury pool to vote not guilty was delusional,” a close friend of a number of the defendants who helped with court support efforts told me. “This is not merely 20/20 hindsight, many of the supporters and loved ones of the defendants disagreed with the decision when it happened.”
With the Prairieland defendants also facing state charges, and with appeals processes ahead, there is a clear need to present a robust case against the government’s pernicious and dangerous lawfare. Outside of future trials and court challenges, it is crucial that anyone invested in challenging Trump’s fascist deportation machine understand the stakes of these cases and show solidarity with defendants accordingly.
The Prairieland case, as I’ve previously noted, provided a convenient testing ground for state repression, in part because it has not been lifted up as a national cause célèbre against Trumpian overreach. The reasons why should be obvious: not only were there acts of minor vandalism, but also a police officer was shot — a highly unusual event at these sorts of demonstrations.
Read our complete coverage
## Chilling Dissent
No matter how unique, however, the Texas case reveals precisely the strategies the Trump administration will use, with the assistance of state forces, to target whole movements and communities with prosecutorial overreach and a logic of guilt by association. In the face of Trump’s escalations, this is no time for anti-ICE activists to distance themselves from protests where militant activity might occur; this is the chilling effect the government seeks.
It is the nature of contemporary far-right governance to throw everything against the wall, repeatedly, until something sticks to achieve its goals. Anti-trans laws that once roundly failed are now on the books in multiple states; once-constitutionally protected reproductive rights have been decimated.
With brute force, repetition, and relentlessness, Trump and his acolytes hack away at established protections. First Amendment-protected protest activity is no different. The Trump regime has been seeking to criminalize leftist dissent since the president’s first inauguration. For years, nothing stuck. We cannot let Prairieland be the turning point.
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**_I’M BEN MUESSIG,_** The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
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