4 March 26 - april 1, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Unprotected Protesting Prairieland verdict leaves questions for left-wing groups, free speech advocates. BY AUSTIN WOOD O n March 13, eight defendants became the first people con- victed of terrorism charges as part of an alleged “antifa” cell in a Fort Worth federal court- room. The federal jury returned a mixed verdict for the nine defendants standing trial over the July demonstration that ended in the non-fatal shooting of Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center. Eight of nine defendants were convicted of providing material sup- port to terrorists, while only one — Benja- min Song, identified by federal attorneys as the group’s leader — was convicted on one count of attempted murder. The ninth defendant, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was convicted of corruptly concealing documents and conspiracy to conceal documents for moving “insurrec- tionary” materials from his Garland resi- dence to a location in Denton. He did so, prosecutors said, at the direction of his wife and co-defendant, Marciela Rueda. Song had also been charged with addi- tional counts of attempted murder due to re- ports of corrections officers being shot at, but jurors chose not to convict on those charges. Defense attorneys had previously suggested that the bullet Gross was hit by had ricocheted off the ground. Additional counts defendants were con- victed of include rioting, conspiracy to use, and the use of explosives. The explosives charges are tied to the fireworks launched outside the facility on July 4, which prose- cutors have alleged were set off in an at- tempt to lure law enforcement into an “ambush.” Defendants have maintained that they were participating in a noise-making demonstration in solidarity with those de- tained at the facility. Vehicles were damaged during the dem- onstration, and a guard shack was vandal- ized with anti-law-enforcement messaging, according to images from the Department of Justice. Song now faces up to life in prison, while other defendants could be sentenced to any- where from 10 to 60 years of incarceration. U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman is ex- pected to begin sentencing in June. Six other cooperating witnesses who testified against the defendants with plea deals in place will also be charged at that time. “Everything about this trial from begin- ning to end has proven what we have said all along: this is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top,” a support group for the defen- dants wrote in a statement following the verdict’s announcement. “The state never had a case. The state only has its intimida- tion, torture, and suppression. The federal government came out in force: using repres- sion, terrorism charges, home raids, multi- million dollar bails, and torturous jail conditions.” Terrorists or Protesters? O ver a nearly three-week period that included a mistrial, federal prosecu- tors painted the events of July 4 as a coordinated attack on law enforcement per- petrated by what acting U.S. Attorney Nancy E. Larson called “an anti-ICE, anti-law en- forcement, anti-government, anarchist group” in a release announcing indictments in November. Prosecutors pointed to en- crypted Signal chats, coordinated all-black outfits, body armor, “military grade” medi- cal kits and firearms found at the scene as evidence of the group’s organization. “Antifa is a domestic terrorist organiza- tion that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities — not under President Trump,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump ad- ministration systematically dismantles An- tifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.” Bondi’s statement reflects something le- gal experts and First Amendment groups have expressed concern about: that the case will be used as a stepping stone for further prosecutions against an organization some say isn’t a group at all, but rather a blanket term for left-wing ideologies. In an previously-published statement to the Observer, Todd Sandler, an economist and expert on terrorism at the University of Texas at Dallas, described antifa as “an empty shell of an umbrella ‘group’ for left- wing organizations that are anti-racist and anti-fascist” and that “calling antifa a terror- ist organization is akin to saying that holding anti-fascist and anti-racist [views] makes you a terrorist, which is against free speech.” The government upgraded the charges facing the defendants to include terrorism in November. A few months earlier, Donald Trump designated antifa as a domestic ter- rorist organization by executive order, which defined it as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the over- throw of the United States Government.” Trump’s designation of antifa as a terrorist group came shortly after the killing of right- wing activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk while speaking on a Utah university campus on Sept 10. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also announced plans to “infil trate and up- root left ist ter ror cells” since Trump’s exec- utive order. Jenny Carroll, a professor at the Texas A&M School of Law and a former public de- fender who has written about issues in po- licing protests, said she didn’t think evidence pointed to an organized group ef- fort to seriously attack law enforcement. “You want to make sure that the people who you’re assigning this increased liability to actually are part of this group that poses this big danger, and that’s what I think was missing for me in this case,” Carroll said. “It just didn’t seem like there was this big con- nection among all these people to some broader organized group where they had agreed upon this type of action, or that it was foreseeable that someone would engage in this type of action.” During the course of the trial, the defen- dants and their lawyers said they did not know about plans to ambush law enforce- ment and that firearms were brought to the protest for self-defense. Most of the 11 fire- arms reported were left in cars during the protest, defense lawyers said during the trial. Four defendants — Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris and Rueda — were also charged with attempted murder, but ju- rors failed to convict on those counts. They had been charged under the doctrine of Pinkerton Liability, which holds that defen- dants can be held liable if they could reason- ably foresee that a crime would occur. According to a DOJ release, three of the defendants, Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, and Savanna Batten, were members of a book club that distributed “insurrectionary mate- rials,” which included short, self-published booklets called zines. Prosecutors intro- duced the zines and other materials as evi- dence of a network of anti-government groups aligning under Song’s leadership to form a terrorist antifa “cell.” From what she saw, Carroll said the ma- terials produced certainly indicated a dislike of the current administration, but failed to suggest an organized terrorist cell. “It can’t just be, ‘we’re agreeing, in theory, that there’s a problem with the U.S. govern- ment.’ It has to be, ‘we agree there is a prob- lem with the U.S. government, and we want to commit criminal acts to overthrow or un- dermine U.S. policy.’ That, to me, seemed to be lacking,” Carroll said. A Gray Area E xactly what constitutes a domestic terrorist organization is a gray area under U.S. law. Unlike foreign terror- ist organizations, there is no formally out- lined procedure for designating a domestic terrorist organization, nor is there a list of such organizations. “It’s not enough to just say I disagree with the government; it’s that they are actu- ally taking acts that are going to undermine the government,” Carroll said. “And that’s an incredibly broad definition, and you have an executive branch that has the power to des- ignate those organizations, and that’s the same branch of government that then has the power to prosecute them. And in this era, the executive is gaining a lot more power than they have previously had.” She also said the terrorism charges likely persuaded the jurors to view defendants less favorably and that the government’s steps to label protesters as terrorists mirror a wider pattern of suppression that she said may have a “chilling” effect on protesters. “We’re seeing this certainly in the pro- Palestinian protests,” Carroll said. “We’re seeing this, I think, now, in a lot of the anti- ICE protests. We’re seeing the federal gov- ernment bring claims against people and try to argue that it’s part of this larger organiza- tional effort to undermine the U.S. govern- ment, as opposed to individual citizens exercising individual rights collectively…” “One of the reasons that’s so troubling to me — not just as a scholar, but as a citizen of the United States — is that one of the really fundamental things the founders under- stood when they created the country, in 1787, as they were writing what became the Constitution, adding the Bill of Rights, Patrick Williams Protesters demonstrated outside of Dallas City Hall on Thursday, Jan. 30. | UNFAIR PARK | >> p6
