The courtroom in Fort Worth, Texas, is relatively small, as far as federal courtrooms go, and its gallery only fits about thirty people. Before the doors open at 8 AM, a handful of journalists jockey for position in a line that stretches down the hall, vocally anxious about being barred entry. American tribunals, already bordering on the nonsensical, don’t need much prodding to cross over into the absurd, and the theatrics of this one begin in the foyer. The presiding judge sends everyone who doesn’t fit to an overflow room in Dallas, some forty-five minutes away by car. On certain days, there are more people than seats and, in the hallway, fault lines emerge quickly. Some journalists have tried and failed to elbow out family members of defendants or volunteers taking extensive and excellent court notes. Given the media attention around this case, its potential to set a dystopian legal precedent, and the astronomical sentences hanging over the defendants, the judge’s choice to move this trial from a bigger room into a much smaller one seems less irrational than almost certainly political. Today, mercifully, everyone who wants in gets in.
Standing trial inside are the nine Prairieland Defendants, eight of whom were arrested for their participation in, or mere proximity to, a noise demonstration outside an ICE detention center near Dallas last July, during which one police officer was nonfatally shot. The ninth defendant was arrested ex post facto for moving a cardboard box of zines from his parents’ home to another residence. Bearing the brunt of the Trump administration’s anti-antifa zeal, all nine people have been accused, in ludicrous fashion, of domestic terrorism, and face up to decades or life in prison.
According to the defendants, the purpose of the Independence Day gathering was a noise demonstration, a type of protest commonplace outside prisons, jails, and detention centers on holidays, especially those celebrated with pyrotechnics. Last year, dozens of noise demos were held simultaneously across North American cities on New Year’s Eve—including an annual protest outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn—and many used fireworks to great effect.
At noise demonstrations, those outside also often bang on pots and pans—following, perhaps, the cacerolazo tradition common to protest across Latin America—sing loudly, chant for sustained amounts of time, and cheer whenever their communication is reciprocated. People inside often press their bodies against the thin strips of window and, in sharp and devastating silhouettes, hammer on the glass, flicker their lights, or hold up signs. The purpose of this type of boisterous action is to remind those imprisoned that they are not forgotten, and it is the very conditions of incarceration that make such cacophony and bright lights necessary. When communication is successful and those inside respond to the noise, it can feel like miraculous and nearly impossible contact has been made with people who have been stolen to another world.
The sounds within the courtroom, by contrast, are subdued. Although gallery seating is severely limited, the courtroom itself is vertically spacious, with a soaring ceiling whose elaborate trim sports an art deco flourish. Behind the judge’s bench, the far wall features sleek chevrons of wood paneling topped with ornate crown molding and gold cornices. Reason is the life of the law, reads the block text carving just below the ceiling, Nay the common law itself is nothing else but reason. Behind me, two large paintings of ranch life on the Texan frontier—men balanced on split rail fencing, men subduing a large horse—take up the entirety of the back wall.
I’m joined in my observations by the wife of one of the defendants. She points at a large ceiling medallion above our heads, featuring a bundle of rods embossed over a sunburst and topped with a menacing ax. This icon is called the “fasces,” she tells me, an old Etruscan symbol of the power to punish (by whipping) and execute (by beheading). Its later adoption by Benito Mussolini, who transformed it into the most well-known symbol of Italian authoritarianism, explains the etymology of the word “fascist.” (Its linguistic root of “bundle” also found its way into the Tex-Mex dish known as “fajitas.”) When the nine defendants accused of antifascism file into the courtroom, wearing suit jackets and sweaters, they sit directly below the fasces. They have been incarcerated since last summer. Classified as “aggressive and dangerous” by Tarrant County Jail, the defendants have endured frequent strip searches and months of solitary confinement. They have been shackled to carts when transported and denied access to medication, books, exercise, and adequate food. Two defendants, who are trans women, have been held in men’s jails and deadnamed in their indictments. Bail for each defendant has been set at $10 million.
By early March, nearly three weeks of witness testimony, a cascade of news articles contradicting the police narrative, and detailed lawyer statements have finally clarified what happened at the protest last summer. In a large Signal group, a flyer was posted for a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. On the evening of July 4, about eleven people showed up, carpooling with friends or relatives, with the intent, according to one defendant, to “lift the spirits of the detainees with a fun fireworks display and go home.” Some came in black bloc while others dressed in jeans, basketball jerseys, tank tops, shorts. Someone brought a cooler full of fireworks; others came armed, anticipating counterprotestors, although all the guns but one were left in their owners’ cars. (This is Texas, after all, a state where it is very, very legal to bring guns to a protest.)
Around 10:30 PM, some demonstrators set off fireworks: Showers of red, green, and pink that popped over the fences of the detention center in a decidedly mild showing for the day in question. People incarcerated inside Prairieland noticed the fireworks and approached their windows. (One of the people inside was Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian protester arrested after the Columbia University protests in 2024 and held in detention for nearly a year. She was finally released this March.) Someone had a megaphone and used it to remind detainees that they were loved, that they were not forgotten. A woman named Meagan Morris waited in her van to give protestors a ride home, playing Pokémon on her Nintendo Switch. Others scrawled anti-ICE slogans on a guard building and on a cop car, slashed a van’s tires, and disabled a security camera. Soon after, the protest dispersed.
Just before 11 PM, however, an officer from the Alvarado Police Department arrived on the scene, answering a 911 call from corrections officers who had seen the fireworks. Participants had been talking peacefully with two unarmed wardens, but Lieutenant Thomas Gross exited his vehicle, saw two lingering protestors turn to flee, and pulled out his gun. A shot rang out from a different direction, fired by a protestor keeping watch named Benjamin Song, and Gross was grazed on the shoulder before returning fire. (Song’s lawyers maintain that this was suppressive fire, meaning shots fired at the ground designed to distract, not kill; that the grazing bullet, which showed evidence of impact with a hard surface, was a ricochet; and that Song’s actions likely saved the lives of the other protestors.) Officials from every available department—Rangers, sheriffs, local and state police, State Troopers, ATF, FBI—poured onto the scene. Anyone lingering was arrested immediately, on the street or in their vehicles, including Morris. In the betrayal on which much of the case would hinge, a few of those arrested handed over their phones, turned over their Signal chats, gave out addresses, alibis, and names, and directed the cops in the direction of others who were connected in some way with the noise demonstration.
During the months following the protest, a government dragnet rounded up nineteen “Prairieland Defendants,” more than a third of whom weren’t actually present at the noise demo. One person, Dario Sanchez, was arrested solely for removing someone from a Signal chat in the days that followed. Daniel Sanchez Estrada was detained for moving a box of zines.
In late September, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, President Trump signed an executive order designating “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization—despite the fact that Kirk’s alleged shooter had no meaningful connection to “antifa” and no legal definition of domestic terrorism exists under US law. Three days later, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum, writing that “a new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them—is required.”
On the basis of these documents, the Trump administration charged eight of the Prairieland Defendants with “providing material support for terrorism,” which threatens up to twenty years in federal prison. Sanchez Estrada later joined them, federally charged with conspiracy to conceal documents and, on the state level, with hindering the prosecution of terrorism. He faces up to forty years in prison. The defendants have been labeled “terrorists” by Attorney General Pam Bondi and “violent extremists” by FBI Director Kash Patel. The federal government has portrayed these protestors as part of a far-reaching criminal enterprise called the “North Texas Antifa Cell,” labeling their fireworks as “explosives,” their black clothing as “tactical gear,” and their use of Signal, a common encrypted messaging app used by organizers, journalists, and politicians alike, as a “hallmark of antifa.”
In December, a top FBI official called antifa “no different than Al Qaeda or ISIS.” When asked about the group’s size and location during testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security, he came up predictably short on specifics but affirmed the federal government’s aggressive crackdown on social movements. “The investigations are active,” he said. “We’re building out the infrastructure right now.” A central debate of the Prairieland trial has been whether “antifa,” an umbrella term used for a loose constellation of left-wing groups and common practices united, as the name suggests, by their opposition to fascism, is just a philosophy or refers to an actual group. “We’ve beaten this horse ad nauseum,” complained the presiding judge during the defense’s re-cross-examination of the witness, despite allowing the prosecution ten days to embellish some very scurrilous distortions of what is essentially a political orientation. Perhaps the healthiest response to this witch hunt has come from the National Lawyers Guild, who, when accused of being the legal arm of the “antifa” network in October, responded not by sidestepping the claim but by reminding the public that of course they are against fascism, and proud of it.
The voice that commands “all rise for the jury” is resounding and disembodied. As we stand, I look around for the bailiff but cannot find one. The twelve jurors file in, and the energy in the courtroom shifts perceptibly. I wonder if they know about jury nullification, considering judges and lawyers are not permitted to inform them about it, and if so, what personal combination of ethics and courage would be required for them to act on it. But jury nullification, I remind myself, is only applicable if you believe the prosecutors. We rise again for the judge. We sit back down.
Judge Mark T. Pittman, a Trump appointee, has made a series of bureaucratic moves that, if technically his prerogative, have stacked the odds in favor of the prosecution. On the first day of court, after jurors repeatedly vocalized anti-ICE sentiments, Pittman declared a mistrial and threatened to hold one of the defense attorneys in contempt for wearing a shirt featuring Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights icons. Jesse Jackson had died that day, and the attorney donned the shirt in his honor. Pittman then moved the trial into a smaller room with less public access and dismissed the jury, repicking a new one. In an unexpected and highly unusual move, Pittman took over jury selection himself. In response, activists outside the courtroom created a huge, intricate, and three-dimensional casino game made out of cardboard and spray-paint. “The jury pool is not a slot machine,” declared Lydia Koza, wife of one of the defendants. “The judge and the prosecution do not get to re-roll this as many times as they want.”
Pittman also granted a prosecutorial motion that precluded any arguments of self-defense from the defendants—a move made even more consequential once it was revealed in court that the police officer had pulled his gun first. The judge banned any recording of the courtroom proceedings and declared his intention to make the case a “rocket docket,” meaning a trial that moves as quickly as possible, despite the defense scrambling to assemble their legal strategy after being given only half as much preparatory time as the prosecution. Pittman fined defense attorneys hundreds of dollars for not cc’ing the prosecution on a routine email and barred George Lobb, a high-profile, high-quality defense attorney, from representing the defendants in federal court on the basis of not being “local” enough, despite living in Fort Worth.
Pittman, a founding member of the Fort Worth chapter of the Federalist Society, has a history of bullying lawyers; the notoriously conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled three times that his excessive sanctions against attorneys have gone too far and constitute “abuse of discretion”—including one case where Pittman dismissed a suit solely for a plaintiff’s failure to retain local counsel. During the trial, Pittman met privately with former attorney general William Barr, who has advocated for taking “all action necessary” against “far left extremist groups and anarchic groups using antifa-like tactics.” Although the profoundly anti-intellectual fervor of the Trump administration’s anti-antifa campaign predates this court case and its presiding judge, Pittman has been no exception, comparing the Prairieland Defendants to those who supplied arms for the Irish Republican Army. (The prosecutors, for their part, compared them to nearby Waco’s Branch Davidians.)
The new jury is reportedly quieter than the old one. I catch one of the jurors staring into space as the prosecutors scroll for minutes on end through an old Twitter account for the Emma Goldman Book Club, allegedly administered by three of the defendants, lingering on tweets they consider particularly radical. They pause and click on a seemingly arbitrary video from a street brawl at a protest in 2016, prompting their witness to discern, based on blurry flags and dubitable context clues, if these protestors are part of the “antifa” network. This witness, a bald, belligerent man named Kyle Shideler, is a researcher at the Center for Security Policy, a think tank known for peddling conspiracy theories and Islamophobia designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Shideler, a self-proclaimed “expert” on antifa, is himself evidence of the federal government’s intimacy with his far-right advocacy group, as he was tapped to help draft the very indictment in question.
The prosecutorial strategy is a puerile one: completely overwhelm the jury with unrelated images of leftist protest—for ten full days!—and then hope for guilt by association. Lawyers for the government have shown pictures of zine covers, images of burning cop cars, and anti-government memes. The more obviously illegal allegations, like shooting at a cop or acts of vandalism, are not the principal focus of the government’s arguments. Instead, the state evidently hoped to establish the existence of a “North Texas Antifa Cell,” which would set precedent for the future criminalization of leftists and anti-ICE activists across the country. To that end, the government’s lawyers provided six terabytes of evidence for the defense to review, the equivalent of one and a half million photos, three thousand hours of video, or hundreds of millions of pages of documents. Much of the evidence is made up of the images I saw projected on the courtroom monitors: the cover of a zine about anarchism, an array of pamphlets and stickers displayed on a table, a group of people posing in black, etc. One defendant’s satirical text messages to his wife and misspelled calendar invites, accessed through his iCloud data ceded to the government by Apple, provided a visceral reminder of the familiar refrain: “Don’t send anything over text that you don’t want read back to you in court.”
One of the zines found in the box transported between residences by Sanchez Estrada, and used as evidence of domestic terrorism, is a movie review of Midsommar and Hereditary by feminist theorist Sophie Lewis called “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real.” The government’s use of her essay, Lewis wrote to me, would have been “flattering” had it not been “painfully, cringe-makingly obvious that the FBI picked up the printout, read only the title, and decided that it was some kind of confession of demonic intent.” The FBI, it seems, had no problem judging a booklet by its cover; the assignment, like presenting on a novel without touching it, is not to actually read the book but only to convince your classmates of what happened in it. When setting one’s sights on political literature, it’s helpful to criminalize not only the possession of critical reading material but also its regular discussion. The Emma Goldman Book Club “sounds very innocuous,” said the prosecutor. “It’s camouflage for what it is.”
These clear violations of the First Amendment, which protects the right to possess film criticism and expertly folded political reading, finally garnered substantial media attention a little too late. For months, local news stations and national right-wing media published only blue-washed snippets of what had happened at the noise demonstration, similar in quality to what you might expect from the New York Post, incidentally the first publication to report on the protest. Their copaganda was then parroted back by institutional media like the New York Times, the WashingtonPost, the Guardian, CNN, ABC, and CBS. In September, KERA News, a local NPR radio station, was the first to report critically on the trial, followed five weeks later by the Intercept.
Yet despite the jaw-dropping inanity of the indictment, the judge’s caviling, and the army of strawmen supplied by the prosecution, supporters were feel increasingly hopeful as the trial dragged on. “You could run a truck full of reasonable doubt through this case!” Koza told me over the phone. All the cooperating witnesses—defendants who not only pled guilty but also agreed to collaborate with the government—seemed to be telling on themselves, testifying that “antifa didn’t exist,” that it was “language the government made up,” and detailing the tortuous conditions that compelled them to take plea deals. (One witness came so close to breaking her plea agreement on the stand that Judge Pittman ordered the jury out of the room before recommending that she speak with her lawyer.) To top it off, certain witnesses couldn’t recognize the written statements they purportedly signed, leading lawyers to conclude that the federal government fabricated them.
Supporters were comforted, too, by the knowledge that every previous effort by the government to prosecute “antifa” as such has failed. On January 20, 2017, two hundred protestors in black bloc disrupted Trump’s first inauguration; the protestors, along with journalists, medics, and legal observers, were arrested and charged with felonies for riot and conspiracy. Yet the federal government failed to convict them, with juries acquitting participants and rejecting the government’s attempt at “conspiracy liability”—which holds a group responsible for the actions of a few—and the cases, collectively known as J20, collapsed. More recently, the Georgia state government charged sixty-one participants in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement with Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations charges, known as RICO and designed to go after the mafia, not protestors. Last September, after a two-year legal battle, all RICO charges against the defendants were dismissed in what one expert called “probably the highest-profile failure of using conspiracy charges to indict a protest movement.” In what has become a grotesque pattern of state overreach, the government charges left-wing protestors engaged in protected First Amendment activity with the most serious felonies available, throwing everything at the wall just to see what sticks. So far, nothing has.
Following the high-profile resistance to the ICE invasion of Minneapolis over the last few months, friends and family of the Prairieland Defendants felt the tide may have turned in their favor. Supporters tried to temper their optimism, knowing that the feeling is dangerous. And yet, said Koza two weeks into the trial, “it gets harder by the day to imagine a conviction.”
So when the verdict came down on a Friday afternoon, after two days of jury deliberation, supporters were floored. Convictions across the board: one defendant on attempted murder charges, two defendants on conspiracy to conceal documents, and eight defendants on riot, using explosives, and providing material support to terrorists.
Most of the Prairieland Defendants are also still facing state charges, including those whose cases hinge on their use of Signal. Supporters are calling for fundraisers, noise demos, Emma Goldman book clubs, and letter-writing to the defendants in jail. They are also asking themselves a question grimly relevant to activists across the country: Why were these domestic terrorism charges the first to stick? While the government’s war against antifa has escalated greatly since 2017, or even 2023, the answer also has to do with the solidarity offered to the defendants beyond their immediate support campaign—and the lack thereof.
In addition to the dramatic snitching that started the night of the protest and continued onto the witness stand, fissures soon appeared around the defendants in subtler ways. During the long weeks after July 4, the defendants’ ad-hoc support committee found it challenging to find people to side publicly with their loved ones. Lawyers, even movement lawyers, fled from the case. Nonprofits ostensibly focused on ensuring First Amendment protections also turned their backs. (To this day, the ACLU of Texas has yet to comment.) “The reputation of these cases, and the way that the federal government described them, made people run from them,” said Xavier de Janon, lawyer for one of the defendants at the state level and director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild. According to de Janon, the fact that there was a gun present and that the black bloc participants did not conform to certain standards of respectable activism made this case seem unsavory or too risky to support.
The prickliness of the case was heightened by the dominance of the police narrative within media coverage, helped by the fact that the defendants themselves, whose phones were confiscated upon arrest and who knew their jail calls were being monitored, were unable to give outlets their own story or were initially fearful of doing so. A flurry of news articles on the case’s disturbing implications for First Amendment rights began to be published only during the trial—and, in many cases, after the verdict. “It was only after the convictions that the liberal and progressive and leftist media started focusing on it,” said de Janon. “[But] the facts have never changed.” Democracy Now!, for example, wouldn’t respond to media requests from the support committee for the entirety of the trial, only running a piece once the verdict had come down.
During the trial, Judge Pittman would often reference any news article featuring him that had appeared the previous day, suggesting he was acutely attentive to the media narrative and could have been affected—and perhaps gotten away with less—had he been placed in the spotlight sooner. Despite the best efforts of courtroom architecture, the legal arena is never separate from the political terrain outside. It is a bitter irony that in a case in which prosecutors— pointing to Signal chats, text messages, and crowdfunding sites—were desperate to evidence nefarious connections, more nefarious connections might have changed the verdict. It seems the more antifa networks there are, the harder it is for prosecutors to find them. It is a truism borne out by facts that movement victories reflect the strength of our networks, while losses reflect their insufficiency. “Where were we?” asked de Janon, referring to the long months after July 4. “Where were you? Where was I?”
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