Federal judges in Fort Worth, Texas, sentenced eight people to a combined 450 years in prison June 23 for a protest outside an ICE jail.
These are the harshest sentences in a U.S. political protest case since Haymarket.
On May 1, 1886, Chicago workers struck for the eight-hour day. Lucy Parsons, born into slavery and raised in Texas, helped lead some 80,000 workers into the streets. Days later, after a bomb went off at a labor rally in Haymarket Square, the state hanged four anarchists — Lucy’s husband Albert among them. Prosecutors did not prove they threw the bomb. They argued that their ideas made them dangerous.
The prosecutor told the jury to make examples of them and save society. At Prairieland, the judge said the sentences were a message to “anyone who shares a similar ideology.”
The government hanged the Haymarket men to break the eight-hour-day movement. Now it is trying to bury the Prairieland defendants to break the fight against ICE raids and deportations.
Benjamin Song got 100 years. Maricela Rueda got 70. Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris and Elizabeth Soto got 50 years each. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada got 30.
None of them killed anyone. Seven of the eight were convicted of rioting, “providing material support to terrorists,” and using and carrying “an explosive.” The government called fireworks “explosives.”
The charges grew out of a July 4, 2025, noise demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, an immigrant lockup run for profit by LaSalle Corrections. Protesters gathered to let the people caged inside know they had not been forgotten.
Some set off fireworks and damaged a guard station and vehicles. When Alvarado police arrived, gunfire from a wooded area wounded Lt. Thomas Gross in the neck.
Song, a former Marine and firearms instructor, was convicted of firing the shots. He has said from the start that he fired only after he saw Gross raise his weapon at the back of an unarmed protester who was running away.
At sentencing, Song said he was glad the people at Prairieland didn’t end up like Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson and others killed by law enforcement.
A box of pamphlets, 30 years
The sentence that exposes the whole operation belongs to Sanchez-Estrada.
He was not at the protest. He is a teacher, a father and a green card holder. From jail, his wife, Rueda, asked him to move a box of political pamphlets the couple kept at home.
He moved it. For that, the government charged him with “corruptly concealing a document” and sent him to prison for 30 years.
The box held leftist zines. Under the First Amendment, owning them is no crime. That was the problem the prosecution had to get around.
Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation put it plainly: if Sanchez-Estrada moved the literature because he feared the state would use it against his wife, that says everything about the prosecutors and nothing about him. The government could not make leftist literature illegal. So it used the literature to paint Sanchez-Estrada and Rueda as part of a criminal political conspiracy.
Then it punished him for moving the box.
For that, he got 30 years.
That is the message the court intended. A federal judge said as much from the bench: the punishment was for the ideas.
‘Antifa’ is a word, not an organization
The Justice Department called the sentencing the first against people “affiliated with Antifa” since Trump’s September 2025 executive order branding antifa a “Domestic Terrorist Organization.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the sentences showed that “Antifa terrorists” would face “swift and uncompromising justice.” FBI Director Kash Patel said the FBI would keep “identifying, locating, and dismantling Antifa,” while U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould called the protest a “vicious, armed attack.”
There is no national antifa organization with membership rolls, officers, headquarters or command structure. Antifa is only a word meaning against fascism. The government knows this.
That is why the label is useful. It lets prosecutors take a circle of friends, neighbors and union members, call them a “cell,” and turn their politics and associations into a criminal conspiracy.
The defendants denied any such membership. They said they came to Prairieland to stand with immigrants in cages. The court treated their beliefs as evidence against them.
The machinery was built out of a fraud. After Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, Trump and the right immediately blamed “the radical left.” They had no left-wing organization, no antifa cell and no radical-left plot. So they invented one.
Days later, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. It directed federal agencies to hunt the left under the banner of “domestic terrorism.” Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi followed with a December memo widening the powers of federal police and prosecutors.
Prairieland is the first test. The Justice Department used that framework to send people to prison.
The agents walk free
The same double standard runs through Minneapolis. ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good, a mother of three and a legal observer, on Jan. 7. She was sitting in her car. Border Patrol agents targeted and killed Alex Pretti, a VA intensive-care nurse, on Jan. 24 as he filmed them and directed traffic. Eleven days earlier, federal agents had thrown him to the ground at another protest. He came back anyway. They killed him with a phone in his hand. Both stood against the raids.
The government claimed Good ran the agent over and called it “domestic terrorism.” It said Pretti drew a gun and attacked. The videos showed both were lies. Then it shielded the agents and went after the observers.
Five months later, no federal agent has been charged. The Trump administration has worked to shield the killers and starve any investigation
The agents who killed walk free. The people who protested the killing go to prison.
That is how this system works. It protects ICE, Border Patrol and the courts. It punishes the people who stand in their way.
Pittman, who presided over the trial, is a Trump appointee. Earlier in the case, he declared a mistrial after prospective jurors voiced opposition to ICE, treating hostility to mass deportation as disqualifying bias.
O’Connor, a Bush appointee, is another Federalist Society judge. Together, they turned an anti-ICE protest into a warning to the whole movement.
The road from Prairieland runs through Minneapolis
The case is already a template.
On June 16, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen — the same prosecutor who pushed to investigate Renee Good’s family instead of her killer — invoked NSPM-7 to indict 15 organizers in Minnesota.
He tied them to two Minneapolis groups, Direct Action Minnesota and the Black Cat Workers Collective, and called them antifa. Their alleged crimes were blocking ICE vehicles, tracking agents and standing between federal cops and the neighbors those cops came to kidnap.
Several are union members and activists. Rosen could not name a single agent injured by the conspiracy he described.
Trump did not invent the drive to make political protest illegal. Under Biden, Democratic officials, police and campus administrations carried out fierce attacks on those protesting the Gaza genocide.
The opening blow came at Columbia in April 2024, when the university called in the NYPD to break up the Gaza encampment and arrest more than 100 protesters. Two weeks later, police stormed Hamilton Hall and swept the campus again. The crackdown spread from Columbia and City College in New York to UCLA, George Washington University and campuses across the country. By early May, more than 2,000 people had been arrested.
Biden gave the crackdown political cover. As police were clearing encampments, he told the country that “order must prevail.” The message was clear: protest against the Israeli regime’s war on Palestine — a war waged on behalf of the U.S. corporate ruling class — could be treated as a crime.
Trump is now taking that weapon and aiming it at anti-ICE organizers.
The case is not finished.
Eight more face sentencing July 1. Ines Soto was convicted with the others but received a continuance.
Seven others pleaded guilty before trial to a single terrorism count — “providing material support to terrorists.” The support, in plain terms, was showing up. One admitted to spray-painting cars. One saw a flyer on Discord and drove out alone thinking there would be fireworks. Others carpooled or helped plan the noise demonstration. The government’s own indictment listed the “material support” as “personnel (including themselves)” — meaning the crime was being one of the people there. For that, they each face up to 15 years.
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