'This is injustice': how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison [View all]

Last edited Wed Jun 24, 2026, 12:45 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: The Guardian

Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.

After a three-week trial, a jury found eight of nine protesters guilty of “providing material support to terrorists”, among other crimes. For the Sotos, this “material support” included owning a “printing press” used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club, the federal government argued. The couple had already left the scene by the time guns were drawn. All eight of the defendants sentenced so far have received unusually harsh sentences – 30 to 100 years – essentially life in prison.
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The Prairieland case was the first tried and convicted under the Trump Department of Justice’s “counter-terrorism” initiatives targeting “antifa” – short for antifascist – a decentralized movement the administration has officially categorized as a “domestic terrorist organization”. The federal government argued the Prairieland defendants, what they called a “North Texas Antifa cell”, had planned the demonstration as an assassination attempt against a law enforcement officer. The government alleged this conspiracy even though the defendants were loosely connected, and some who attended the protest did not even know each other.
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But after the Prairieland conviction, federal prosecutors have had at least one other success: in Spokane, Washington, three people were convicted last month of conspiring to impede a federal officer over a protest to block an ICE vehicle attempting to transport two migrants. And the justice department shows no signs of stopping. Last week, 15 people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, were hit with the same charges of conspiracy to obstruct ICE operations, and were accused of being a part of “antifa” groups that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement”.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

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