Attending a Protest Is Now Terrorism
Eight people are going to prison for decades because they wore black to a demonstration where someone else fired a gun. This is what the government wanted. And you could be next.
Update 7/18/2026: Sentencing is complete, read 556 Years
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.
Daniel Sanchez-Estrada wasn’t there at all. He moved a box of pamphlets from his parents’ house to a friend’s apartment. He faces forty years. ICE has placed a hold on him and publicly revealed his immigration status.
Autumn Hill's entire political history before this was volunteering for a nonprofit and marching in a Pride parade. Her home was where some defendants met the night before. She spent nearly four of her ten months of pretrial detention in solitary confinement. She faces ten to sixty years.
On March 13, 2026, a federal jury in Fort Worth convicted nine people of providing material support to terrorists. Not for shooting anyone. Not for planning violence. For attending a protest outside an ICE detention facility while wearing black.
Let me say that again: wearing matching clothes to a protest is now terrorism under federal law.
This is the first federal terrorism conviction targeting alleged antifa members in American history. The FBI director confirmed it was unprecedented. The Attorney General promised it would not be the last.
The Prairieland case is not a warning about what might happen. It is a record of what already has.
The Night
On July 4, 2025, roughly eleven people gathered outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. The facility, run by LaSalle Corrections, was holding over 1,000 detainees despite a 707-person capacity.
Their plan was a noise demonstration—a disruptive protest form where people make noise with megaphones, instruments, fireworks, whatever's at hand. The purposes overlap: breaking the isolation of people detained inside, disrupting operations, making those who run the facility feel watched and unwelcome. Noise demos have been held outside jails, prisons, federal buildings, and hotels where ICE agents stay. The Fourth of July provided cover—fireworks wouldn't seem out of place. They brought fireworks, spray paint, signs reading “Resist Fascism” and “Fight Oligarchy,” and a megaphone. Maricela Rueda used the megaphone to shout to detainees through the fence. Some approached windows and smiled.
At approximately 11:00 PM, Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross arrived alone. His body camera captured what followed: he saw figures in black, including one carrying an AR-15. Someone shouted “Get to the rifles!” Within seconds, Benjamin Song opened fire from a wooded area. Gross was struck once in the neck.
A critical disputed fact: Gross himself, a correctional officer, and a Texas Ranger all testified that Gross may have drawn his weapon before Song raised his rifle. An FBI official at a September hearing said he was not certain who fired first. Judge Pittman ruled self-defense legally invalid anyway—because the defendants’ illegal acts prompted the police response in the first place.
Gross returned three shots, then collapsed. He was airlifted to a hospital, received stitches, and was released within 24 hours. He returned to active duty.
Song, who uses they/them pronouns, fired eleven rounds before their rifle jammed. They fled into a sunflower field and evaded capture for eleven days before the FBI arrested them via SWAT raid.
Song had history with Texas law enforcement. In 2020, they were arrested in Austin and charged with two counts of aggravated assault against a public servant during protests over the death of Garrett Foster—a protester shot and killed by U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry at a Black Lives Matter march.
Whether Song’s shots were justified is genuinely unclear from the trial. Multiple witnesses—including an FBI official—couldn’t say who drew first. Pittman blocked the self-defense argument anyway. Song was convicted of attempted murder and faces twenty years to life.
Set that aside. This article isn’t about Benjamin Song.
Eight other people who did not fire a single shot are going to prison for ten to sixty years. Not because they planned the shooting. Not because they knew it would happen. Because they were there, and they wore black.
Here’s what the jury actually found: every defendant except Song was acquitted of attempted murder and discharging a firearm. They were cleared of the violence. They were convicted of terrorism anyway.
The prosecution’s own expert admitted that everything that happened that night was “consistent with a noise demonstration up until the rifles.”
How Your Body Becomes a Crime
The government charged the defendants under 18 U.S.C. § 2339A—”providing material support to terrorists.” This statute was enacted in 1994. It has been used against Al-Qaeda supporters. It has been used against ISIS recruiters. Until Prairieland, it had never been used against domestic protesters.
The definition of “material support” is broad. It includes property, services, weapons, explosives. And critically, it includes “personnel (1 or more individuals who may be or include oneself).”
Here is what the lead prosecutor told the jury:
“Providing your body as camouflage for others to do the enumerated acts is providing support. It’s impossible to tell who is doing what. That’s the point.”
Read that again. By wearing matching black clothing, each protester allegedly provided their “personnel” as material support for terrorism. Their physical presence created visual camouflage that enabled Song to shoot without being individually identifiable.
The prosecutor called this theory “actually very simple.”
It is simple. Terrifyingly simple. Your body is now a weapon if you stand near someone who commits a crime while dressed like you.
The fireworks they shot toward the fence? Charged as “explosives” under federal law. The spray paint on government vehicles? Destruction of government property—a statute that hadn’t been used as a terrorism predicate for at least a decade. Now it carries twenty years.
Spray paint is terrorism. Your presence is terrorism. Attending a protest is terrorism.
The People They’re Destroying
Maricela Rueda is a thirty-three-year-old poet training to become a postpartum doula and mother to a 12-year-old daughter. She used a megaphone to shout slogans to detainees. A jailhouse phone call to her husband became the basis for a conspiracy charge. She faces ten to sixty years.
Elizabeth and Ines Soto are a married couple with three children whose home contained a printing press for political pamphlets. They rode to the protest with Savanna Batten and were arrested while leaving after the gunshots. They each face ten to sixty years.
Daniel Sanchez-Estrada is a tattoo artist and illustrator. A former DACA recipient who obtained a green card through marriage. He was not at the protest. The FBI followed him as he moved a box of widely available political pamphlets—titles like “If It’s Vacant, Take It”—from his parents’ home to a friend’s apartment after a jailhouse phone call from his wife, Maricela, who had attended the protest. His attorney called the charges “carrying a box and conspiracy to carry a box.” He was offered two plea deals, both requiring him to surrender his green card and face deportation to Mexico, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was fourteen. He refused both. He faces forty years.
Dario Sanchez is a middle school computer science teacher. He was not at the protest. He wasn’t even in the planning chats. Days after the shooting, a fellow member of the Socialist Rifle Association—an educational gun club—showed up at his door in a panic after an FBI raid. The man asked to be removed from group chats. Sanchez obliged. For that, the FBI broke down his door with an armored vehicle, handcuffed him and his girlfriend, and charged him with hindering prosecution of terrorism. He was arrested three separate times on variations of the same charge. The third arrest came after monitoring software flagged “concerning internet history”—searches that his bond officer, not Sanchez, had actually conducted. His attorney called the bond conditions “the most oppressive I’ve ever seen in almost 13 years of doing this.”
An FBI task force officer offered Sanchez a deal: let police pose as him online and he could avoid fifty years in prison. He told KERA:
“They threatened me with 50 years of jail time and told me to tell them about some other people, and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I had nothing to do with any of this stuff.”
A teacher. Fifty years. For removing someone from a Discord server.
Eight of the nineteen people charged were not at the protest at all. Not nearby. Not watching. Not there. The dragnet reached into homes, jobs, and group chats to find people whose only connection was knowing someone who knew someone who was there.
These are not terrorists. These are people who showed up. Who wore black. Who owned pamphlets. Who made phone calls. Who helped friends. Who removed someone from a chat when asked.
The government is sending them to prison for decades to prove a point about what happens when you resist.
The Charges Came After the Assassination
The original charges filed in summer 2025 did not include material support for terrorism.
Then, on September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University. The shell casings were engraved with a mix of anti-fascist references and internet memes—"Hey fascist! Catch!" alongside video game codes and furry subculture jokes. NBC News found no evidence connecting the shooter to any left-wing group.
Twelve days later, Trump signed an executive order declaring antifa “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” Three days after that came NSPM-7, directing federal task forces to prioritize left-wing networks. The memo listed as indicators of potential terrorism: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
The superseding indictment adding terrorism charges came in November.
Former DOJ domestic terrorism counsel Thomas Brzozowski told the Texas Observer what was obvious:
“It’s pretty facially an attempt to mollify the White House post Charlie Kirk’s assassination... What I’m seeing is the unfettered use of these very powerful tools and these very powerful statutes, absent any sort of norms or guardrails.”
The Brennan Center for Justice found the antifa designation has no basis in law. No statutory mechanism exists to designate domestic terrorist organizations. The Supreme Court explicitly distinguished domestic from foreign organizations. The order targets an ideology, not an entity.
This designation has never been applied to the Ku Klux Klan.
The Trial Was a Preview of What’s Coming
Judge Mark Pittman is a Trump appointee and founding member of the Tarrant County Federalist Society chapter—the conservative legal network that has served as a pipeline for Republican judicial appointments since the Reagan era. The Fifth Circuit has previously ruled he abused his discretion in sanctioning attorneys. He has been identified as a target for Republican judge-shopping.
On the first day of trial—the same day Jesse Jackson died—defense attorney MarQuetta Clayton, the only Black woman among the defense lawyers, wore a t-shirt under her blazer bearing images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Shirley Chisholm, and scenes from the civil rights movement.
Pittman declared a mistrial. He called the shirt “politically charged” and compared it to a prosecutor wearing “a shirt with Donald Trump riding an eagle.”
After the mistrial, Pittman took over jury selection himself—something highly unusual. He ordered attorneys to submit questions under seal. He alone questioned prospective jurors. He moved the trial to a smaller courtroom and established an overflow room thirty miles away with an unreliable livestream. He gave the prosecution nine peremptory challenges instead of the standard six. Each defense attorney received two.
He fined three defense attorneys $500 each for a “frivolous” discovery motion. He refused to allow one attorney to represent his client, threatening ninety days’ contempt. He struck down the self-defense argument by comparing the case to the Branch Davidians—the 1993 Waco cult standoff that ended with 76 dead.
And according to the New Republic, former Attorney General William Barr visited Judge Pittman privately during the trial, claiming it was “a tour of the courtroom.”
The defense called no witnesses. Both sides rested on March 10 after ten days of testimony, forty-five witnesses, and over two hundred exhibits—with the defense presenting zero evidence. They made their case entirely through cross-examination of government witnesses.
The jury deliberated for less than a day. Guilty on terrorism charges. All eight.
The “Expert” Who Wrote the Playbook
The prosecution’s sole expert witness on antifa was Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy—an organization designated an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This was his first time ever testifying as an expert witness in any trial.
Shideler started focusing on antifa in 2017 after previously concentrating on radical Islam. He was a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, which supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
One week after the Kirk assassination—and two months before the terrorism charges were added to the Prairieland indictment—Shideler published “How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks” in The American Mind, a Claremont Institute publication. The subhead: “A roadmap for the Trump Administration.” The piece explicitly called for using material support charges against groups like the John Brown Gun Clubs—the exact organizations defendants were linked to—and urged a “whole-of-government approach” to prosecuting the far left.
Then he conferred with prosecutors a month before the indictment was filed. Then he admitted he helped write the federal indictment. “I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition of antifa, and they used it.”
Then he testified as an “expert witness” in support of his own design.
At trial, he testified that Signal use, black clothing, and “security culture” were “consistent with antifa practices.” He called Signal “a hallmark of antifa.” Under cross-examination, he admitted he himself uses Signal.
The government called the defendants a “North Texas Antifa Cell.” But cooperating witnesses said no such thing existed. One testified that “the term antifa was just an ideology based on being opposed to fascists, not an organized group.” Multiple cooperators said they were surprised by the violence. Even Shideler acknowledged antifa has no national organization, membership rolls, or recruiting practices.
Judge Pittman himself asked why “antifa” needed to be in the jury charge at all: “Whether it’s antifa or the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter?”
This Was Always the Point
AG Pam Bondi celebrated the verdict: “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last.”
FBI Director Kash Patel called it proof of the FBI’s commitment to “dismantling Antifa and its funding networks.”
U.S. Attorney Raybould promised to “hold others accountable who perpetrate such violence and fund these ANTIFA groups.”
They are telling you what they’re going to do. Believe them.
Prairieland is not an isolated case. It’s a proof of concept. Defense attorney Xavier de Janon stated the DOJ is pursuing similar characterizations “in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Portland and now in Vermont.”
In Minneapolis, thirty-nine people were indicted after entering a church during Sunday services to protest ICE—including civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong and journalist Don Lemon. The church’s pastor doubled as acting ICE field office director.
The historical parallels are instructive. The Green Scare of the 2000s—when the FBI designated the Earth Liberation Front as the top domestic terror threat despite never killing anyone—used identical tactics. The J20 prosecutions of 2017, charging over 200 Inauguration Day protesters with felony riot and conspiracy, ultimately collapsed. The Stop Cop City RICO case in Atlanta targeted dozens with domestic terrorism charges that have largely failed.
Prairieland broke the pattern by succeeding.
And the contrast with January 6 is not subtle. Trump pardoned approximately 1,500 January 6 defendants on his first day in office, including those convicted of assaulting police officers. Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader sentenced to eighteen years for seditious conspiracy, was freed. Ed Martin, who live-tweeted from the Capitol during the insurrection, was appointed interim U.S. Attorney for D.C.
The double standard extends to Texas too. Daniel Perry—the Army sergeant who killed Garrett Foster at that 2020 BLM protest—was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years. Governor Abbott pardoned him. The man who killed a protester walks free. The people who attended a protest over that killing face decades in prison.
Violence in service of the state is pardoned. Presence at a protest against the state is terrorism.
This Could Be You
I need you to understand something.
If you have ever worn black to a protest, the Prairieland precedent applies to you.
If you have ever used Signal, the prosecution would call that “a hallmark of antifa.”
If you own political pamphlets, those can be introduced as evidence of terroristic intent.
If you have ever given a friend a ride after something went wrong, you could face federal charges for aiding terrorism.
If you have ever removed someone from a group chat when they asked, you could be charged with hindering prosecution of terrorism. A teacher is facing fifty years for exactly that.
If someone you don’t know commits a crime at a protest you attend, your presence is now “material support.”
This is not paranoia. This is what happened. This is the verdict. This is the law now, until a court says otherwise.
Former DOJ domestic terrorism counsel Brzozowski warned that the material support statute is “uniquely susceptible to potential overreach, conceivably stretching alleged ‘material support’ to including something trivial, like carpooling to a protest.”
Carpooling to a protest. That’s the example the former government official gave.
What Happens Now
Sentencing is scheduled for June 2026 before Judge Pittman.
Appeals are planned. Attorney Cody Cofer confirmed: “We still have First Amendment and sufficiency of the evidence issues to address on appeal.” Those appeals will go to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—a court the Texas Observer describes as “notoriously far-right” with a history of “opinions so extreme that they’ve been overruled by the Supreme Court.”
The National Lawyers Guild has been the most active civil liberties organization, issuing at least five statements since August 2025. NLG President Suzanne Adely warned the case helps the government “see how far they can go in criminalizing constitutionally protected protests.”
The ACLU has been notably silent. No standalone press release, no formal statement, no amicus brief specifically addressing the Prairieland verdicts. A remarkable absence given the First Amendment implications.
Lydia Koza, Autumn Hill’s wife, wore her blue wedding dress to court for the verdict. She said:
“Federal prosecutors told a panel of Northern District of Texas residents with a straight face that lighting off fireworks on the Fourth of July was terrorism. I cannot think of anything more un-American than that.”
Defense attorney Christopher Weinbel told the Washington Post:
“I feel like the U.S. lost here with this verdict and what it means for future defendants.”
He’s right. The U.S. did lose. We all did.
The Three Precedents
Prairieland establishes three things simultaneously.
First: Wearing matching clothing to a protest can constitute material support for terrorism if someone else at the protest commits violence. Your body is camouflage. Your presence is a crime.
Second: Possessing political literature, using encrypted messaging apps, and belonging to activist organizations can serve as evidence of terroristic intent. What you read is evidence. How you communicate is evidence. Who you associate with is evidence.
Third: Spray-painting government property can trigger terrorism sentencing enhancements carrying decades in prison. Vandalism is terrorism.
None of this was charged as terrorism until political events created the framework and the pressure. An assassination with no proven connection to any organized group. An executive order with no basis in law. A directive listing opposition to capitalism as a sign of terrorism.
And then eight people who did not fire a single shot became terrorists.
The AG promised this would not be the last. She was telling the truth. The question is whether anyone will treat it like she was.
Attending a protest is now terrorism.
Wearing black is now terrorism.
Owning pamphlets is now terrorism.
Helping a friend is now terrorism.
Removing someone from a group chat is now terrorism.
Being present is now terrorism.
This is what they wanted. This is what they got. And unless something changes, this is what’s coming for everyone who stands against them.
Nine people learned that on March 13, 2026.
Any of us might be next.
To support the defendants, visit prairielanddefendants.com or contribute to their legal defense fund.
Prairieland Update: The Government Knew
Prairieland Update: The Government Knew
This is breaking news regarding the Prairieland defendants whom I wrote about earlier this week in Attending a Protest Is Now Terrorism.
Can We Talk About Protests? A Story Through Pictures
Trigger Warning: This post contains images of violence at protests. While I’ve avoided the more graphic imagery available, it can still be a lot to take in.
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This piece is about nine people who just got convicted of terrorism and the families being torn apart right now. If your first reaction is that the timing is inconvenient for your weekend plans, sit with that. These people don't get to pause their reality. The point isn't to scare you out of protesting—it's to make sure you know what just happened so you can go with your eyes open. Know what they've built. Go anyway. Protect each other.
The Prairieland defendants don't get to look away. Neither should the rest of us. Solidarity means in these moments, too.
https://criticalreflections.substack.com/p/when-it-gets-dangerous
In Babi Yar, hundreds of people stood to be shot dead. As a child I asked why these people didn’t rush the shooters so that some would live, even if they were killed. I understand now, you are beaten down until you won’t/can’t fight.
We must remain resolved to maintain our American democracy.