This week, two federal judges in Fort Worth handed down extreme prison sentences to a group of activists who showed up at an ICE facility on the 4th of July to protest and make noise for the people inside. A police officer was shot and injured that night, but people that had nothing to do with the shooting were still included in conspiracy charges and labeled as terrorists.
Benjamin Song, the only one of the defendants accused of firing a weapon, got 100 years. Maricela Rueda got 70. Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, Savanna Batten, and Elizabeth Soto each got 50. Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not even present at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of his own antifascist zines after the protest occured. A ninth defendant, Ines Soto, will be sentenced next week, and seven more people who took plea deals are each looking at up to 15 years.
The trial was rigged
The protest happened on July 4, 2025, outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. The group planned for a noise demonstration with fireworks meant to let the people inside know that somebody on the outside saw them. Even the government’s own witness agreed that nothing more serious than that was planned. One witness told the court it felt more like a party than anything else. Then Alvarado police lieutenant Thomas Gross arrived, got out of his car, and pointed his gun, and Song fired, hitting Gross in the shoulder with a wound that the officer ultimately survived. Some reports said that it was his neck, but most of the recent reporting has specified that it was his shoulder, which seems more realistic considering his recovery.
Song’s case is not very complicated, but it’s not as clear as the government made it sound either. When Thomas Gross got out of his car, he was the one who drew his weapon first, and witnesses say he pointed it at someone who was running away from him. Song’s lawyers argued that he fired suppressive shots toward the ground and that the bullet ricocheted off a hard surface before it grazed Gross in the shoulder. Unfortunately, the jury never heard any of this because Judge Mark Pittman had already granted a prosecution motion that barred the defense from arguing self-defense at all. So by the time it came out at trial that the cop pulled his gun first, the defense had already been blocked from building their case around it.
Pittman ran the rest of the trial the same way. He is a Trump appointee and a member of the Federalist Society, and he declared a mistrial on the first day over a defense attorney’s T-shirt that showed civil rights leaders, which he decided was prejudicial. He was reportedly unhappy with how the first pool of jurors answered questions about ICE and the police, so he brought in a smaller pool and questioned them himself. He moved the trial into a smaller courtroom, which reporters took as an attempt to keep the press out. When Zachary Evetts’s lawyers filed motions asking the government to hand over whatever evidence it used to decide that the “North Texas Antifa Cell” was a militant operation, Pittman denied the request and fined each of them $500 for what he called frivolous filings.
The government managed to convince a jury that dressing in all black and using the Signal messaging app amounted to material support for terrorism. The fireworks the demonstrators set off became, in the indictment, an “explosive,” which let prosecutors stack conspiracy and explosives charges on top of everything else. Savanna Batten was tied to the conspiracy largely through her black clothing. Elizabeth Soto was tied to it through her black clothing and the small printing press she used to make anarchist zines. Both of them got 50 years.
Sanchez Estrada’s sentence is even more rediculous. He was not even at Prairieland on July 4. He was convicted of corruptly concealing a record because he moved a box of antifascist zines that belonged to him, and for that he received a 30-year sentence. His wife, Maricela Rueda, got 70 years in part because she asked him to move the box.
One of the judges, Reed O’Connor, justified the length of the sentence by saying that a known terrorist was on the run when the box got moved, which is the kind of circular logic that only holds together if you have already decided that everyone in the room is a terrorist before the trial starts. He also said that this decision was intended to discourage others from taking similar political action.
A hate group helped write the indictment
Antifa is a decentralized anti-fascist movement, not an organization with members or a headquarters or a chain of command. The FBI itself could not say how many members antifa has or where it is based, for the obvious reason that there is nothing there to count. Even Mark Pittman, the Trump-appointed judge who ran the trial, questioned whether he needed to mention antifa in his instructions to the jury at all.
One of the people who helped write the indictment that defined antifa for the jury was Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy, a think tank that has been long classified as a hate group. A month before the indictment came down, Shideler had published a roadmap telling the Trump administration how to dismantle “far-left” networks, and then he turned around and testified as the government’s expert on the people it was prosecuting.
NSPM – 7 Crackdown
The protest came in July 2025, but the heavy terrorism charges came later, after the September killing of Charlie Kirk gave the administration the opening it wanted. Trump signed an executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization and issued a national security memo, NSPM-7, calling for an extreme crackdown on the left, and only then did federal prosecutors in north Texas escalate what they were charging. FBI Director Kash Patel posted about the case to signal how much it mattered to the people at the top, and the Justice Department put out a release on Tuesday celebrating these as the first sentences of antifa-affiliated defendants since the executive order.
They said these were the first sentences, which obviously means that there will be more. In fact, additional arrests have already begun. Minnesota prosecutors just charged 15 people this month over ICE protests on a theory that they belong to antifa. In Alabama, prosecutors brought material support for terrorism charges against two people accused of setting a shopping cart on fire after a Black Lives Matter march. The Prairieland case was the first to test these charges, and now that it has worked, they will throw these charges at everyone they can.
Article posted with permission from John Vibes
