After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration declared a war on the left. The White House hosted a theatrical day-long press conference on the threat that antifa poses and issued new law enforcement guidance that instructed the FBI to closely monitor groups that oppose borders, capitalism, and traditional family values. While this fearmongering rhetoric has long invited mockery—fueling memes like “Antifa Supersoldiers” and “Antifa Stole My Girlfriend”—Trump’s DOJ now is proceeding as if these caricatures describe a credible threat and, earlier this month, took its first prisoners in this nascent war. Nine activists now face years in prison for their involvement in a protest outside of an ICE training facility. The case, out of Prairieland, Texas, pilots the White House’s theory that antifa is a vector for left-wing terrorism. At trial, prosecutors focused not only on what the activists did but what they thought.
The criminal charges stem from a nighttime demonstration outside the Prairieland immigration detention facility on the evening of July 4th. Activists used fireworks and their amplified voices to make enough noise to reach the people held inside. At some point during the demonstration, an Alvaro Police Department Lieutenant was shot, and a total of 19 people were ultimately arrested in connection with the protest. Nine of them faced trial in early March for charges including attempted murder, riot, and material support for terrorism, while seven others pleaded guilty to material support for terrorism and offered themselves as cooperating witnesses to the government. Others face charges in state court.
This case serves as a stark warning of the Trump administration’s willingness to use the criminal law as a weapon against its political opposition. Yet it also highlights a longer history: over the past several decades, various government actors, state and federal, have steadily eroded our constitutional rights and undermined our collective capacity to express hostility and build alternative institutions. As I explain in the following post, the laws that the Trump administration deployed in this case have been laid down by successive generations of legislators responding to security concerns, both domestic and international. Those laws, which have been calibrated to favor convictions at great expense, enact a form of guilt by association that is antithetical to collective political action.
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To what extent can prosecutors infer criminal liability from a person’s political ideas and social ties? At different moments in American history, courts have given different answers to this question. During the Red Scare a century ago, law enforcement and courts treated membership in the Communist Party as tantamount to a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. During Jim Crow, segregationists tried similar arguments, but in tort law, to undermine the advocacy of the NAACP and civil rights activists.
Eventually, however, the Supreme Court affirmed limitations on this practice. Membership, in say the Communist Party, was itself insufficient for criminal liability. Prosecutors needed to show the person had a specific intent to engage in criminal activity when she joined the organization. That criminal activity could include making speeches or distributing literature, but only if it was calculated to incite imminent lawless action or otherwise presented a clear and present danger. Speaking about revolutionary action in the abstract would not suffice. These limitations form part of the expansive First Amendment that exists in popular imagination and which formally forbids guilt by association and protects speech that advocates for illegal conduct. Yet these protections have always been modest. Anarchists, socialists, and communists, particularly Black Communists, still went to prison for their speech and their organized resistance to war and capitalism.
Over the past four decades, particularly since 9/11, legal actors have built on this architecture of repression. Legislature passed laws, prosecutors developed arguments, and courts affirmed convictions that comply with the letter of the law but still effectively impute guilt by solidarity. Typically, those cases have involved allegations that the defendant lent some support to urban gangs or transnational Islamist networks. But the floor for what counts as support keeps getting lower. Retweeting a video associated with a gang or ISIS propaganda is treated as material support for an unlawful cause. Such activity tends to be treated as conduct, rather than speech, diminishing constitutional scrutiny. It is to our collective detriment that, in the name of security, neither courts nor the public intervened to stop convictions in these cases.
Indeed, as my new research shows, the First Amendment, and the rights to association and speech more specifically, do not impose any strict constraints on federal prosecutors, who enjoy the broadest legal authority when they are pursuing international terrorism. But even state prosecutors have successfully argued that gangs are purely criminal enterprises, stripping participants of their right to associate with one another. Meanwhile, when a person faces a criminal accusation, their entire life and internal world become material for the prosecution to exploit. Certain ideas, like revolution or jihad, and certain artistic forms, like rap lyrics, are frequently proffered as evidence of the defendant’s motivations for violence and their desire to work with others to achieve their apparently illegal goals. And because ideas, propaganda, and art move more easily than blueprints, prosecutors seeking to dismantle large groups of people seize upon these types of evidence.
Turning to the Prairieland prosecutions, we see the Trump administration’s willingness to extend these laws and arguments beyond Islamists and gangs. Because you endorsed the same ideas as the person who pulled the trigger, or because you both offered support to the same political causes, you too are liable for their conduct.
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The demonstration on the night of July 4th, 2025, was the second of the day.* That afternoon, the group behind the nationwide No Kings protests, 50501 (“50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement”), had organized its own demonstration. The DOJ’s lawyers built its case around the contrast between the two protests, good and bad, peaceful and violent. Indeed, the DOJ elevated 50501’s protest as an exemplar for proper political action and even called one of its project managers to testify at trial. Nelida Frias, the afternoon protest organizer, characterized 50501 as so anodyne and nonconfrontational to render its activities almost nonsensical. On the stand, Frias appeared to deny that the No Kings Protests were directed towards anyone in particular, like Trump. She also explained how she had worked closely with local law enforcement in planning the event and that the group had chosen July 4 to celebrate a better version of America.
The evening action was different. Organizers did not coordinate with the local police. They hoped to introduce an element of surprise with their noise demonstration. The activists brought a megaphone, fireworks, and spray paint. Some also brought lawfully permitted firearms, as Texas law allows them to do. One of the demonstrators yelled “Esperanza” (“hope”) on the megaphone, as well as “you are not forgotten.” At some point, when law enforcement officers responded and those demonstrating dispersed, one of the activists is alleged to have shot a lieutenant. While the initial narrative in the media was that the group had planned the attack to stage a break-in, as the trial grew closer and the DOJ turned over witness statements, the story grew more complicated.
On the eve of trial, the defense learned that federal officers may have been the first to draw their weapons, a fact it hoped to use to raise self-defense. But Judge Pittman ruled against them. With that avenue foreclosed on the first day of trial, the DOJ had already secured a significant victory—all attention would be on the activists rather than on law enforcement. Now, the jury would focus on whether the organizers had orchestrated a deliberate attempt on the lives of law enforcement and whether these attempts could be attributed to not only the person who pulled the trigger, but others at the scene as co-conspirators. The defense and prosecution sparred over whether the activists could have foreseen that firearms would be used to shoot an officer, or whether they brought them to use them lawfully. Texts between the activists demonstrated some hesitation about bringing firearms. Ultimately, the jury refrained from attributing liability to other activists for the attempted murder, pinning it exclusively on Benjamin Song, the activist alleged to have pulled the trigger.
Initially, attempted murder was the most serious charge on the indictment. But after Kirk’s death, federal prosecutors reindicted the case under the federal material support for terrorism laws. But who was the victim of the terror? The police officer or the building? Invoking a never-before-used section of the law, the DOJ may have successfully prosecuted the activists under the terrorism law for tagging a building with the phrase “ICE = Pigs.” When jurors convicted all eight of the activists for material support for terrorism, but only one for attempted murder, it suggested they were more convinced that the graffiti was a group effort, rather than the shooting.
For all the charges, prosecutors fixated on the pamphlets and news articles the group of friends shared in preparation for the protest. While some of the people charged were members of the Socialist Rifles Association, and others identified as anarchists who organized a book club under Emma Goldman’s name, there was no enforced political identity that united the people charged. Nor did any of the signal chats or literature offered at trial use the term “antifa.” Instead, prosecutors used articles, stickers, and posters to infer logistical coordination from broad ideological alignment. These included pamphlets like “Organizing for Attack! Insurrectionary Anarchy,” “Fuck La Migra” stickers, and letters that included quotes like “What is a riot but freedom from injustice, burn everything that was not meant for us.” These types of materials were so important to the case that prosecutors charged and successfully convicted Daniel Sanchez, who did not attend the July 4th demonstration, with concealing evidence when he moved a box of pamphlets and articles from one location to another. There is a real concern that jurors did so, at least in part, because they disagreed with the ideas expressed in the literature in his possession.
The government used these stickers, political pamphlets, and ideology in three ways: to show that the defendants were united, motivated, and dangerous. The government’s lawyers argued that the defendants’ common political grievances established their desire to coordinate their criminal activity as a unified bloc. Yet how each of them—Benjamin Song, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Autumn Hill, Elizabeth Soto, and Ines Soto—individually contributed to the property damage now known as terrorism is unclear. They may have done nothing more than fail to stop it. While prosecution might counter that these individuals still offered important moral support by helping to transport the cans of paint and by being at the scene, you can begin to see how widely the DOJ is casting its net. Now that property damage can sustain a terrorism charge, and given how easily prosecutors can make a person’s political opinions germane to a criminal trial, we should anticipate more aggressive and overtly politicized charging by federal prosecutors under pressure from the Trump administration.
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Imagine attending a protest, and because some people engaged in conduct a prosecutor could plausibly assert as criminal, you too are charged with a crime for being present and sympathetic. That is exactly what happened in Atlanta in the case against 61 Stop Cop City activists in 2023, who were charged with domestic terrorism and racketeering under the RICO statute. After Prairieland, it’s not difficult to imagine Trump’s DOJ interpreting sharing political pamphlets or hosting a party as recruiting and soliciting others to commit crimes—even terrorism—if there is a prosecutor motivated enough to advance such a case.
Prosecutors have tremendous leeway in describing conduct as criminal. Pitching a tent in an encampment, for instance, could be interpreted as innocuous, a violation of a local ordinance, a misdemeanor trespass, or felony mischief if law enforcement can establish some sort of damage to the property. A prosecutor can select from this menu of choices depending on how dangerous they perceive the activity to be, a criterion capacious enough to allow them to import their own political preferences. And then there are many types of statutes that allow prosecutors to lump people together and argue they acted collectively. If there is a social circle of friends and acquaintances, broadly politically aligned on the tactics to deploy and the goals to achieve, and someone in that network engages in illegal conduct, that could be enough to bring down the entire motley crew. If there are more cases like the Prairieland and Stop Cop City cases, law enforcement will be able to recalibrate the risks for collective action and shift norms about the proper way to express dissent.
This would be a political disaster, and the left ought to do all it can to fight such prosecutions and to convey their authoritarian nature. Yet there may also be a silver lining: if the administration accelerates its campaign against so-called left terror, one hope is that people will more clearly register the harms of powerful criminal laws, like terrorism, RICO, conspiracy, and gang statutes, that can be used to undermine collective political action.
* My summary of the trial draws from notes taken by a support committee found here: https://prairielanddefendants.com/. I did not observe the proceedings, nor did I rely on a trial transcript. My analysis is thus tentative and subject to change.
