562 Years
The Prairieland defendants got maximum sentences — longer than any January 6 rioter. The concealed FBI evidence was brushed aside. And this week, they took the template global.
This is the third piece in my coverage of the Prairieland case. For background, see “Attending a Protest Is Now Terrorism“ and “Prairieland Update: The Government Knew.”
Savanna Batten arrived late to a protest. The man who fired the only shots that night said she “didn’t know anything.” She was sentenced to fifty years.
Daniel Sanchez-Estrada moved a box of zines from his parents’ house to a friend’s apartment. He was not at the protest. He was sentenced to thirty years.
Maricela Rueda, his wife, shouted encouragement to detainees through a megaphone, then made a phone call from jail asking him to move that box. Seventy years. Her daughter is twelve. If the sentence stands, Mari will be eligible for release as her daughter approaches retirement.
In March, I wrote that the Prairieland verdict was a record of what had already happened, not a warning about what might. The sentencing phase is over now, and the record is complete.
Between June 23 and July 6, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced fifteen Prairieland defendants to a combined 562 years and two months in prison. On July 6, the final federal defendant added six more.
And the restitution owed to the detention center — the total dollar value the courts assigned to the property damage at the heart of this “terrorist attack”? $4,408.95.
Five and a half centuries of prison time. Four thousand dollars of damage.
The Sentencing
On June 23, eight defendants were sentenced in two courtrooms running simultaneously. Days earlier, without explanation, Judge Mark Pittman had reassigned four of the defendants to Chief Judge Reed O’Connor — another deeply conservative jurist. Pittman kept Benjamin Song, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, and Meagan Morris. O’Connor took Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, and Daniel Sanchez-Estrada.
The sentences:
Benjamin Song — 100 years. Maricela Rueda — 70 years. Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto — 50 years each. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada — 30 years.
On July 1, Ines Soto was sentenced to 50 years, matching his wife Elizabeth. Their three children have now lost both parents for half a century. Joy “Rowan” Gibson and Rebecca Morgan, who pleaded guilty but refused to cooperate, received 15 years each. The cooperators, the people who testified for the government, received between 22 months and 9 years. On July 6, Susan Kent, the final federal defendant, got 6 years for helping Song evade capture.
Both judges applied the terrorism sentencing enhancement to every count. Both ordered the sentences to run consecutively rather than concurrently — a discretionary choice that turned what could have been survivable sentences into life. Both denied every post-trial motion for acquittal or a new trial. Both framed the sentences explicitly as deterrence.
O’Connor told the courtroom the events of July 4, 2025 were “not by any stretch of the imagination a protest” but “an assault on democracy.” Sentencing Sanchez-Estrada, a man who was at home that night, O’Connor justified the thirty years by invoking the shooter Sanchez-Estrada had never met: “a known terrorist was on the run.”
When Song rose to give their allocution, they tried to explain, for the first time in the entire proceeding, why they fired: they saw Lt. Gross point his gun at another protester and feared they were watching a police killing begin. They invoked Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two Americans shot dead by federal agents in Minneapolis this winter. They invoked Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson, killed in their own homes by police not far from that courtroom. They asked the question at the center of all of this:
“What kind of people are not against fascism?”
Pittman interrupted them repeatedly, telling Song this was not the time for a political statement.
A terrorism sentencing — built on an executive order, a presidential memo, a think-tank roadmap, and a designation of an ideology — was not the place for politics.
Sanchez-Estrada, before receiving thirty years, told the court: “I am a father, I am a husband, I am a teacher, a poet... but I am not a terrorist.”
Longer Than January 6
Say the numbers out loud.
The longest sentence handed down to any January 6 defendant — for a violent, coordinated attempt to overturn a presidential election, in which more than 140 police officers were injured — was 22 years. Stewart Rhodes got 18 for seditious conspiracy. Trump pardoned approximately 1,500 of them on day one and commuted the rest — Rhodes walked free.
Eight Prairieland defendants who were acquitted of every violent charge, acquitted of attempted murder, acquitted of discharging a firearm, received 30 to 70 years. Every single one of them will serve longer than every single January 6 defendant would have served, had any of them been left in prison at all.
The government’s own numbers tell you why this is upside down. Per a CSIS study, left-wing extremists have carried out 41 attacks since 2016 and killed 13 people in a decade. Right-wing attacks: 152, killing 112. The administration’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy, released in May, does not mention right-wing extremism once.
And if you want to know what Texas justice considers actually forgivable, look at Waco, four weeks before the Prairieland sentencings.
What Texas Forgives
Former Waco attorney Adam Hoffman was charged with the continuous sexual abuse of an 8-year-old boy — a first-degree felony carrying up to life without parole. A jury deadlocked 7–5 in favor of guilt. Ken Paxton’s Attorney General’s office, which had taken over the case, then reduced the charge to two misdemeanors; per the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, prosecutors initially floated a deal of one day in jail. The visiting judge, disturbed, doubled the 30-day deal to 60; with good-conduct credit, Hoffman served 29 days and is not required to register as a sex offender. The victim’s mother said the AG’s office “bent the system to protect [Hoffman] instead of protecting my son... That is corruption.” Even some Republicans revolted: Rep. Jeff Leach called it “the most negligently, recklessly handled case” he’d ever seen from the AG’s office, and John Cornyn ran primary ads asking why Paxton “goes easy on child predators.” Last week, Paxton’s office refused to release its internal records on how the deal was made.
Hoffman walked out of the McLennan County Jail on May 25. Twenty-nine days after that, in the same state, Savanna Batten — who arrived late to a protest, and who even the shooter said “didn’t know anything” — was sentenced to fifty years.
And Paxton is no bystander to the terrorism campaign. In October, weeks after the antifa designation, his office declared that “transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture” and vowed to have law enforcement pursue and infiltrate “these leftist terror cells.” Cancer — the same word Stephen Miller chose this week before the diplomats of sixty-seven nations. This is a shared script, and Paxton has been reading from it longer than most.
He also knows better than anyone in Texas how mercy actually works, because he is its most successful client. Indicted on felony securities fraud in 2015, he delayed trial for a decade until the charges were dismissed last year under a pretrial deal — restitution, an ethics class, community service. Impeached 121–23 by his own party’s House on articles including bribery and abuse of office, acquitted by the Senate. The federal DOJ declined to prosecute. Meanwhile his office pursued voter fraud cases in which 72% of the targets were people of color — including Hervis Rogers, a Black man celebrated for waiting six hours in line to vote, arrested on Paxton’s order on $100,000 bail until Texas’s highest criminal court ruled Paxton had no authority to charge him at all. Few of Paxton’s voter fraud defendants ever served time. Paxton defended the prosecutions anyway, in his own words, as a way to “send a message.”
Send a message. That is what the Prairieland judges said too, in more decorous language, as they stacked the sentences consecutively and called them deterrence. It is the same message Texas has been sending for years, now nationalized and armed with terrorism statutes. Process for the powerful is mercy. Process for everyone else is the punishment.
And one name appears on both sides of this story’s ledger. Benjamin Song’s first arrest came in Austin in 2020, charged during the protests over the killing of Garrett Foster; the protester Daniel Perry shot dead at a Black Lives Matter march. A jury of Texans convicted Perry of murder. Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned him. Five years later, at sentencing, Song tried to explain, over Pittman’s interruptions, that they fired at Prairieland because they saw an officer aim his gun at a protester and believed they were watching it happen again. The trial record supports the premise: Gross himself, a correctional officer, and a Texas Ranger all testified that Gross may have drawn his weapon before Song raised his rifle, and an FBI official said he was not certain who fired first. Pittman barred the jury from considering self-defense anyway. So look at what Texas taught, and to whom. It taught Song that a man who kills a protester walks free with the governor’s blessing. Then it gave Song a hundred years for the fear.
This is the same state whose Attorney General spoke at the January 6 rally, refused — alone among all fifty state attorneys general — to condemn the attack that followed, and claimed the rioters were leftists in disguise. Severity is not about danger. It is about who you are, and what you protested.
The Hidden Evidence Didn’t Matter — Yet
In my last piece, I reported on the FOIA records obtained by In These Times: the FBI investigated “Antifa DFW” in 2018 and closed the case, finding no criminal violations and no threat to national security. The government’s entire terrorism theory rested on the premise that this network was a dangerous militant enterprise. Their own files said otherwise. The defense never received them.
At sentencing, the defense raised it. Both judges denied the motions and moved on. The concealed evidence, the government’s own agency concluding the alleged terrorist organization wasn’t one, was not worth a new trial. It was barely worth a pause.
But the issue is preserved, and it is now the centerpiece of the appeal. Every trial defendant has filed notice of appeal to the Fifth Circuit, raising First Amendment, sufficiency-of-evidence, proportionality, and Brady claims. And there is more to come. The records that broke this story exist only because reporter Adam Federman sued the FBI — and according to the government's own representations in that pending lawsuit, the agency possesses up to 250 pages of documents from the 2018 Antifa DFW investigation that have never been released. The pages we've seen were, in Federman's words, just a small portion. We know what the first documents said. We don't yet know what the rest say. What we do know is what it took to keep them out of the trial: prosecutors told the defense they'd fulfilled their discovery obligations, Pittman denied the defense motion seeking exactly this category of evidence and fined three attorneys $500 each for filing it, and the partial records that finally surfaced required a federal lawsuit by a journalist.
Yes, the appeals go to the Fifth Circuit, the most reversal-prone far-right court in the country. But even Fifth Circuit judges have careers that will outlast this administration, and “the prosecution concealed the FBI’s own exculpatory assessment while its hand-picked expert testified to the opposite” is the kind of sentence that appears in casebooks.
The Template Spreads
Bondi promised, on the day of the verdict, that Prairieland "will not be the last." She's gone now — Trump fired her in April, installing his own former criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, as acting Attorney General, reportedly in part because Bondi hadn't pursued the president's enemies aggressively enough. Understand what that means: the architect of this campaign was purged for insufficient zeal, and the campaign accelerated anyway. It was Blanche, whom Trump is now trying to install permanently, who celebrated the June sentences, promising "swift and uncompromising justice" for "antifa terrorists." And it is Blanche's DOJ writing the sequel: as Marcy Wheeler documented at emptywheel, the department took the original Prairieland conspiracy case built on anarchist and Black Bloc "propaganda" and rebranded it, in the thirteenth word of the superseding indictment, as "Antifa," a characterization she argues the trial evidence never supported; the Minnesota indictment now runs the same play nationally. The promise survived its maker. It was never about her.
In June, Minnesota federal prosecutors indicted fifteen activists from Direct Action Minnesota — union members, teachers, neighbors who organized against Operation Metro Surge, the deployment of roughly 3,000 federal agents into the Twin Cities to sweep Somali communities. During that operation, federal agents shot and killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. No agent has been federally charged. Instead, the people who protested the killings were indicted. Eleven of the fifteen are charged with nothing but conspiracy to impede a federal officer. The evidence of their “Antifa cell”? Signal. Shields. A bullhorn. A radio. A sweatshirt. A devil emoji in a group chat. Attending a DSA meeting.
When reporters pressed whether any of the fifteen had ever actually injured an officer, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen answered that "whether or not they actually at the end of the day caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime."
That is the Prairieland evidentiary theory, exported wholesale. What you wear is membership. How you text is terrorism.
In Atlanta, following Bondi’s December memo ordering every federal agency to trawl five years of files for “Antifa-related intelligence,” prosecutors resurrected the Stop Cop City cases — unsealing a federal indictment over 2022 conduct, after a state judge had already thrown out the sprawling RICO prosecution. When the courts reject a case, the answer is to re-file it under the terrorism framework.
And in the Minneapolis church case, thirty-nine people — including civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong and journalist Don Lemon, who was covering the protest — are being prosecuted for a demonstration inside a church whose pastor moonlighted for ICE.
But here is something the administration does not advertise, and you should know it: the template keeps failing when it meets an honest courtroom. In May, the government's flagship Chicago prosecution collapsed in open court: after Judge April Perry read the full grand jury transcripts and described a prosecutor "vouching" for the case and excusing grand jurors who doubted it, the U.S. Attorney himself appeared in her courtroom on the eve of trial and dismissed all remaining charges against the "Broadview Six" with prejudice, admitting "significant errors." The transcripts revealed how the indictment existed at all: two grand juries had refused to indict, a rarity a former chief of that office's criminal division said he'd be surprised to see three times in thirty years, before a third, personally addressed by the U.S. Attorney, finally returned charges. The collapse is still spreading: ten defendants across three cases have now been permanently cleared over the same prosecutor's grand jury conduct, the office is reviewing her cases back to 2007, and more than a hundred former federal prosecutors have condemned the episode.
Fourteen of the Minnesota 15 were released without bail at arraignment. The fifteenth, Kyle Wagner, has been detained since February on a separate Michigan case charging cyberstalking and interstate threats over social media posts about armed resistance to ICE — posts he contests as protected political speech, and whose fate will turn on the true-threats doctrine. He is also one of the four facing added counts in the Minnesota indictment itself. And the government's own paperwork can't keep its story straight: the DOJ's press release describes Wagner as having doxxed "a federal agent"; the criminal complaint says the person he allegedly doxxed was a pro-ICE civilian. Even in its flagship indictment, the government's characterizations don't survive contact with its own charging documents.
Video: Kyle Wagner hands out PPE to protesters during Operation Metro Surge in January. The Minnesota indictment cites a Facebook post in which Wagner announced he was bringing "a bunch of gas masks with filters" to a protest. He has been detained since February on a separate Michigan case; he is untried on all charges.
The honest caveat: the § 372 theory has won before a jury once — in Spokane, the pilot case for this entire strategy, arising from a sit-in three weeks before Prairieland, in which protesters blocked a detainee-transport bus. Even there, the acting U.S. Attorney, Richard Barker, resigned rather than sign the indictment: “None of the agents were hurt and none of the protesters were hurt either” and later called § 372 “a civil war-era law dusted off to punish members of our community.” The jury that convicted the Spokane Three was barred from considering the First Amendment and never heard that a federal judge had already ruled the underlying ICE arrest unconstitutional. Their acquittal motions and appeals are pending. So the template can win. What it has required, every time, is a courtroom stripped of context: Fort Worth’s jury barred from hearing self-defense, Spokane’s barred from hearing the Constitution.
These cases collapse when courts let defendants tell the whole story. They succeed when the story is cut.
Masks for Them, Terrorism for You
Hold two facts side by side.
Fact one: at the Prairieland trial, federal prosecutors argued that the defendants’ matching black clothing was itself material support for terrorism — that dressing alike to conceal identity from police was the crime. The DOJ’s own press release describes black bloc as a tactic designed to make members “indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement.” Concealing your identity from the state: terrorism.
Fact two: the same Justice Department is currently in federal court in at least three states — California, New Jersey, and Virginia — suing to protect the right of masked, unidentified federal agents to snatch people off the streets. And winning. In April, the Ninth Circuit blocked California’s law requiring federal agents to visibly display identification; a district judge had already enjoined the mask ban itself. The government’s argument for why agents must stay anonymous? That unmasking them risks doxxing — the exposure of their names, home addresses, and families. Concealing your identity from the public: an essential federal function.
The ACLU has called ICE’s routine masking “unprecedented in modern American law enforcement.” Twenty-plus state attorneys general told Congress the imagery of masked plainclothes agents pulling people into unmarked cars “evokes comparisons to repressive tactics that have no place in a free country.” It doesn’t matter. The courts, so far, have sided with the masks.
So this is the rule as it now stands: anonymity for the state is a protected federal interest. Anonymity for the citizen is evidence of terrorism. A ski mask on an ICE agent is officer safety. A black hoodie on a protester is material support. The same act, the same fear of retaliation, the same desire not to be identified by one’s adversaries — legal in one direction, decades in prison in the other.
And the machinery is learning the lesson. The Intercept reported this month that a Florida fusion center’s antifa threat assessment — sourced to Andy Ngo and Pizzagate conspiracist Jack Posobiec — now lists “doxing” and even “profane language against law enforcement” as antifa tactics, and warns that zines are recruitment propaganda, echoing the exact argument federal prosecutors ran at Prairieland. Identifying an agent is an antifa tactic. Being identified by one is a federal case.
It is not a metaphor: the Minnesota indictment criminalizes a Signal chat called "Whipple Watch," a community database logging the license plates of federal vehicles and where they were last seen. The government that has persuaded two federal courts to protect its agents' anonymity is prosecuting citizens for keeping a spreadsheet of government cars.
This Week, They Took It Global
On July 16, while I was writing this, Marco Rubio convened representatives of 67 countries at the State Department for a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” The agenda: persuade the world to adopt the framework that just sentenced a book club to five centuries in prison. Intelligence sharing. Cross-border financial tracking. More terrorist designations, building on last November’s designation of four European anarchist and antifascist groups as foreign terrorist organizations.
Rubio then announced a new visa restriction policy barring entry to foreign nationals who “finance, recruit, incite, or otherwise enable” far-left networks — “enemies of our civilization,” he called them. The policy technically applies only to foreigners. Read the operative words again — incite, enable — and ask how they’ll be construed by the same government that construed a box of pamphlets as terrorism logistics.
Stephen Miller stood before the assembled diplomats of sixty-seven nations and described “the leftist” — not the bomber, not the shooter, the leftist — as driven by envy, hatred, and jealousy. He called left-wing political violence a “fatal cancer of civilization.” He said appeals to civil liberties from the left are “completely pretextual” and “must fall on deaf ears.”
Must fall on deaf ears. The Deputy White House Chief of Staff, instructing the governments of the free world to stop listening when leftists invoke their rights.
Maricela Rueda invoked her rights. Fort Worth’s ears were deaf. Seventy years.
What Happens Now
The Fifth Circuit appeals are the main event. Watch for the briefing schedule, and watch the FOIA litigation over the 250 undisclosed pages of FBI records. Watch Spokane, where the pilot case now faces its first real test: Judge Pennell is weighing motions to throw out the Spokane Three's convictions as legally insufficient, and if she declines, the appeal goes to the Ninth Circuit — meaning the same conspiracy theory will soon be argued, simultaneously, in the country's most conservative circuit and its most liberal one. Whatever survives both is the law we'll live under. Watch the Minnesota 15 docket, where defense attorneys will be armed with the Broadview precedent and First Amendment motions, and where Kyle Wagner is expected to make his first appearance on the indictment in August. Watch the forty-day extradition clock running on Fergie Chambers in Spain, the first test of the campaign's financial front abroad. And watch for the first foreign activist or academic denied entry under the Rubio policy: that will be the test case, and possibly the first facial legal challenge this entire architecture has faced.
Eleven House Democrats sent a letter the day before the summit calling the counterterrorism strategy a “politically partisan document.” Thirty-one signed an earlier one demanding the Antifa order and NSPM-7 be rescinded outright. In February, Bondi acknowledged in House Judiciary testimony that a secret NSPM-7 target list exists — “I know antifa is part of that” — while refusing to show it to Congress. And when Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon pressed her to justify the list, the example the then–Attorney General reached for was Kyle Wagner: the man in the video above handing out PPE, untried, in a cell in Michigan. The ACLU has published analysis. The National Lawyers Guild has stood nearly alone in the courtrooms.
In March I wrote that Prairieland broke the pattern by succeeding. Now we know what success looks like:
Fifty years for arriving late.
Fifty years each for a married couple with three children.
Seventy years for a megaphone and a phone call.
Thirty years for a box of zines.
One hundred years for the only person who fired a gun — and everyone else sentenced as if they had.
562 years. $4,408.95.
That’s the exchange rate now. Remember it. Remember that this week, your government asked sixty-seven other countries to adopt it.
And remember what this record actually shows: every failure of the template required ordinary people. Grand jurors who refused to indict … twice. Courtrooms packed at arraignment. A small city in Maine that made ICE retreat in days by refusing to go home. The machine's one consistent weakness is people who show up. So show up: courtrooms are public, hearings are listed on the dockets, and juries are drawn from people like you.
To support the Prairieland defendants, visit prairielanddefendants.com or contribute to their legal defense fund.
To support the Minnesota 15, visit their chuffed page to make donations or read updates. Note that according to the Direct Action Minnesota Instagram, the funds donated will go to support other Minnesota activists.
To support Kyle Wagner, visit the gofundme set up by his parents to donate, read updates, or write Kyle.
And for the history of what American juries have done when the law and conscience diverged, from the Zenger trial to the Fugitive Slave Act, see FIJA's explanation of jury nullification.
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Attending a Protest Is Now Terrorism
Savanna Batten arrived late to a protest. Even the person who opened fire that night said she "didn't know anything." She is going to prison for up to sixty years.
Did someone repeal the US Constitution?
#Gestapo