Texas “Antifa Cell” Terror Trial Takes on Tough Questions About Guns at Protests Against ICE

A group of activists gathered outside the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas last July 4 with fireworks and plans to mount more than a polite protest.

They were there for less than an hour before things took a turn: A police officer was wounded by a gunshot.

Only one member of the group is accused of pulling a trigger, but 19 people went to jail on state and federal charges. Attorney General Pam Bondi labeled the defendants terrorists, and FBI Director Kash Patel bragged that it was the first time alleged antifa activists had been hit with terror charges.

Months later, the Trump administration recycled the label to smear Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Minneapolis residents who were shot and killed by federal immigration agents. They were supposedly dangerous left-wing agitators, in Pretti’s case legally carrying what the government said was a “dangerous gun.” The videos of Good and Pretti’s killings disproved the administration’s lies.

Unlike the Minneapolis shootings, the full events at Prairieland were not caught on video. Instead, a jury in federal court will hear evidence against nine defendants at a trial starting next week, which will serve as the first major courtroom test of the Trump administration’s push to label left-wing activists as domestic terrorists.

Court hearings in the case have taken place under heavy security, with police caravans whisking defendants to and from an Art Deco courthouse in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. Inside the courtroom, straight-backed officers maintain a perimeter.

The odds once looked long for the Prairieland group given the conservative jury pool and the seven defendants who pleaded guilty before trial, including several who are cooperating with the prosecution. The protests, crackdowns, and killings in Minneapolis, however, may have shifted perceptions of what happened seven months earlier in Texas.

“When they were crafting this indictment, they came up with that there is such a thing as a ‘north Texas antifa cell,’” said Xavier de Janon, a lawyer representing one defendant in state court. “I wonder how they are going to make it stick when their attempts at framing Alex Pretti didn’t work, fell flat on its face.”

Jurors in the Prairieland case will be faced with key questions about protest in the Trump era. Are guns at protests a precaution or a provocation? Can the government succeed in using First Amendment-protected literature, such as anarchist zines, to win convictions? And how far can activists go when they believe their country is sliding into fascism?

Making Noise

Federal investigators and a support committee for the defendants offered starkly different takes on the purpose of the late-night gathering at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.

For the feds, it was a planned ambush of law enforcement staged with guns, black garb, and bad intentions. Prosecutors described the defendants as “nine North Texas Antifa Cell operatives.” Supporters of the defendants say the protest was an attempt to conduct a noise demonstration, of the sort that have since become common outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement buildings in places like Chicago and Minneapolis.

The Prairieland facility, which was built to hold 700 people, housed over 1,000 by the spring of 2025. The privately operated detention center was in the news again this week, when the family of a Palestinian woman detained there since last year on alleged visa violations said she had been hospitalized after weeks of deteriorating health.

On July 4 last year, a larger group of protesters had staged a traditional demonstration of the conditions inside the lockup. That night, a group of people who had conferred on an encrypted chat app arrived outside the detention center.

Around 10:37 p.m., the fireworks started flying, according to the testimony of an FBI agent at a pretrial hearing. Some of the group of a dozen or so slashed tires on cars in the parking lot near the detention center and sprayed “ICE Pig” on one car.

Guards called 911. Local police showed up. Within minutes, an Alvarado police officer who answered the call had been shot in the neck.

The U.S. attorney’s office alleges that the shooter was Benjamin Song, a former Marine Corps reservist who was a fixture in local left-wing organizations such as the Socialist Rifle Association and Food Not Bombs.

At a preliminary hearing in September, prosecutors painted a dramatic picture of the shooting: Minutes after police arrived, Song allegedly shouted “get to the rifles” and let loose with an AR-15 that had a modified, binary trigger designed to fire at a fast rate.

At the same hearing, however, defense attorneys poked holes in the government’s narrative that the shooting had been planned.

Prosecutors’ case that the group wanted to commit violence depends heavily on messages that members of the group allegedly sent through the encrypted messaging app, Signal, or at an in-person “gear check” before the action.

“I’m not getting arrested,” Song allegedly said at one point.

Defense attorneys objected to the idea that such ominous-sounding statements were proof that the group planned an attack.

Under questioning from a defense attorney, an FBI agent acknowledged that no one had talked about killing police that night in the Signal group. Meanwhile, in addition to guns and black clothes, the protesters brought bullhorns.

One defense attorney asked an FBI agent on the case whether the group’s members might have thought they needed guns for self-defense from police.

“A person peacefully protesting, I would say there’s no risk to be killed by law enforcement,” said the agent, Clark Wiethorn.

When asked whether he would acknowledge that at least some of the protesters had no plans to commit violence, the agent pushed back.

“I would say every person out there had the knowledge of the risk of violence,” Wiethorn said.

While the government has portrayed the group as a disciplined team of antifa attackers, the messages show members of the group squabbling.

“All this stuff was kind of ad hoc,” said Patrick McLain, the attorney for defendant Zachary Evetts. “When I’m reading these texts, they were just all over the place, and they’re getting into stupid arguments with each other.”

Casting a Wide Dragnet

Song, the former Marine accused of shooting the officer, managed to escape a massive police response that night. According to testimony at a pretrial hearing, they hid in brush for 24 hours before supporters whisked them away.

Shawn Smith, an assistant U.S. attorney, said at the hearing that the fact that so many people were willing to help Song “speaks to the kind of personality of Mr. Song and what he can motivate.” At another point, he likened Song to a cult leader.

In the weeks that followed, investigators arrested and charged people with far looser connections to the action at Prairieland.

One of them was Dario Sanchez, a soft-spoken teacher who lives in a Dallas suburb. He was at home on the morning of July 15 when officers ripped open his door and tossed flashbangs to gain entrance.

In an interview with the Intercept, Sanchez said he was taken away in handcuffs. Law enforcement attempted to question him in a car, warning him that he faced decades in prison if he did not cooperate. Sanchez said he told his interrogators that he knew nothing about the July 4 protest – but that did not stop them from arresting him.

The allegations, Sanchez would later learn, centered on the claim that he purposefully booted a defendant accused of helping Song out of a Discord group chat operated by the Socialist Rifle Association.

Sanchez was arrested twice more, once when he was rearrested on a new charge, and another time on an alleged probation violation.

He faces only state charges in Johnson County, Texas, and he plans to take his case to a trial that has been set for April, after the federal proceeding is over.

Law enforcement has delved deep into messages among the protesters that night that appear to show allegiance to antifascism.

To boost their case against the defendants, the government has secured the services of a witness who works at a right-wing think tank, the Center for Security Policy, that was founded by Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.

Prosecutors also highlighted the pamphlets and zines that two of the defendants were publishing from a garage printing press, and the membership of some defendants in a local leftist reading group, the Emma Goldman Book Club.

The titles the government spotlighted at the September hearing include “Safer in the Front,” “Our Enemies in Yellow,” and “Why Anarchy.”

One defendant faces charges solely for ferrying such materials from one residence to another at the request of his wife, which advocates say essentially criminalizes the possession of materials protected by free speech.

“I think what they’re going to be poring through in those things is any writings in there that advocate violence or harm, and somehow they are going to try to stretch that out,” McLain said. “They are really stretching.”

Judging by the Signal messages obtained by the government, many of the Prairieland defendants self-consciously distanced themselves from more mainstream protesters. Still, the case could have implications beyond the Dallas-Fort Worth anarchist and socialist scenes – even though at the September court hearing, a prosecutor appeared to express surprise at schisms on the left.

“They actually don’t like these liberal protesters who are out there just holding signs?” Shawn Smith, the prosecutor, asked the FBI agent, who agreed with him.

The Trump administration cited Prairieland as part of a supposed wave of antifascist terrorism backed or encouraged by nonprofits and Democrats. In his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, issued in September, Trump cited both the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Prairieland action as proof of a wave of organized political violence from the left.

“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,” Trump said.

Although many of the Prairieland defendants had already been arrested by the time of NSPM-7 was issued, it was only in October that the government obtained its first indictment charging some of them with material support of terrorism.

Sanchez believes prosecutors have pursued the case so aggressively because of a “weird antifa delusion.”

“These people can’t imagine that someone would care about someone else, really,” Sanchez said. “Why the hell would a bunch of people show up to protest outside an ICE detention center? Why would anyone care about these people? They can’t fathom that people would have that amount of empathy, and so in their minds, they have to cook up the idea that this has to be some kind of weird conspiracy.”