Prairieland, TX – A sprawling court case from a protest at an immigration detention center could determine how the United States government deals with dissent.

The charges originated from a protest at the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, where a police officer was shot.

In a superseding indictment filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern Texas on Nov. 13, prosecutors charged eight defendants with providing material support to terrorists, an increase from the two who had such charges levied against them in the initial indictment filed on Oct. 15.

“For the first time, Antifa-aligned anarchist extremists have been hit with federal terrorism charges after a July 4th attack on an ICE facility in Texas,” FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X on Oct. 17 following the initial indictment.

None of the arrested suspects have any connections to an organization named Antifa and only one was affiliated with a group that described itself as anti-fascist.

Since the beginning of the year, the federal government has been accelerating its war on the American left, targeting dissent with loose terminology and reaching for legislative and executive tools created at the turn of the century with the War on Terror. Whether this political strategy amounts to anything more than rhetoric could revolve around the outcome of the Prairieland case, which could set a precedent for bringing cases against individuals and organizations that the government labels as terrorists.

Much of the strategy was spelled out in National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), a memorandum on countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence that was released on Sept. 25. The memorandum outlined “common threads” that animate a supposed rise in political violence: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity; “extremism” on migration, race and gender; and hostility towards individuals who “hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The threat from such vague classifications is broad, especially as terrorism designations include financial connections.

“The same laws they create, precedent and strategies–they’ll just export it elsewhere very quickly,” said Xavier de Janon, the Director of Mass Defense at the National Lawyers Guild. “There’s no limit for the government on what Antifa is, clearly.”

De Janon compared the case to that of No More Deaths in 2019, where members of the humanitarian non-profit were charged with misdemeanors and felonies. The government charged one of the defendants with conspiracy and illegal harboring, both of which were later dropped. “They tested [that case] and it didn’t work,” de Janon said. “Now we’re at this Antifa test.”

At the signing of NSPM-7, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told the press that this marked the first all-of-government effort to “dismantle left-wing terrorism.”

The memorandum was published more than two weeks after the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10 during a speaking event, which served as a catalyst for much of what would follow.

“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Trump said in a press release just hours after the assassination, before a suspect had even been taken into custody.

Three days prior to NSPM-7 being signed, on Sept. 22, Trump declared Antifa a domestic terrorist organization through an executive order, the first ever designation of its kind in U.S. history. Not even the Ku Klux Klan received such a designation when it was bombing Black churches throughout the South.

Along with the designation came an official definition of Antifa: “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” This definition was later used in the federal indictment.

Despite this claim, it is widely agreed upon that there is no single “Antifa” organization or network of associations. A document prepared by the Congressional Research Service in 2020 asserts that the anti-fascist movement has no organizational structure or detailed ideology, and that a wide variety exists in the groups that associate themselves with the movement depending on how those groups define fascism.

The vagueness of NSPM-7 underscores its applicability beyond Antifa. According to Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN05) in a post on X, Antifa makes up “the violent foot soldiers of the Democrat Party.”

Four European anti-fascist organizations were designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the State Department on Nov. 13. The groups are Antifa Ost (Germany), the International Revolutionary Front (Italy), Armed Proletarian Justice (Greece) and Revolutionary Class Self Defense (Greece).

“It’s been said again and again by everyone you ask, including former FBI agents, former prosecutors, that there is no such thing as an Antifa organization in the United States,” de Janon said. “But when you go around it and you designate something abroad as Antifa, and then you come back here and claim, ‘Oh, there’s a North Texas Antifa cell’ … It’s like putting puzzle pieces together when there is no reality about it.”

A lot of power rests with the federal government in federal prosecutions, according to de Janon. One advantage the government has is it can put things in writing in legal documents without having to first prove it. An example of such an act is designating the Prairieland suspects as belonging to an Antifa cell without any proof that such a cell even exists.

The Department of State press release announcing the move claims it supports NSPM-7, citing the traits listed in the memorandum, that the movements are anti-American, anti-capitalist and anti-Christian.

“Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designations are one of the most powerful legal instruments in America’s counterterrorism arsenal,” according to an article written by former DOJ Counsel for Domestic Terrorism Thomas Brzozowski. “Originally conceived to combat international terrorist networks like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS), these designations trigger sweeping financial sanctions, severe criminal penalties, and extensive surveillance authorities.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on political violence on Oct. 28, where a panel of so-called experts that included the Daily Wire host Michael Knowles created a narrative that linked the Prairieland attack together with other events, such as the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024, and the Annunciation Catholic school shooting in Minneapolis this past September.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) opened the hearing with a timeline of such events, characterizing each as “far left” and connecting it with a broader conspiracy involving Congressional Democrats.

“The activists on the ground claim to be revolutionaries fighting the powers that be,” Schmitt said. “But the truth is, they were backed by the full force of the ruling regime … How often have we heard Democrats praise these radicals for their idealism? How many elected officials have called riots the language of the unheard? The violence stalking our streets today is a feature, not a bug.”

The foreign terrorist organization designation was previously floated at an Antifa roundtable held at the White House on Oct. 8, where the Trump administration invited a number of independent journalists–mostly associated with Kirk’s Turning Point USA – to share their alleged experiences with Antifa.

Self-avowed Antifa expert and senior editor for the far-right website Post Millennial Andy Ngo was one of the speakers, who Trump introduced by saying “Ngo has been repeatedly beaten by Antifa thugs. Andy is a very serious person too. Been watching him for a long time.” The Post Millennial is a Canadian media company that aggregates press releases and reporting from other media companies, spun to appeal to far-right audiences online with click bait titles, according to Right Wing Watch.

Ngo, sitting at the far end of the table, told the president that he would like to see Antifa labeled as a foreign terrorist organization. Later, a member of the press asked the president if he was willing to do just that.

“I think it’s the kind of thing I’d like to do,” Trump said. “If you agree, I agree. Let’s get it done.”

Ngo was one of the earliest individuals to tie the Prairieland attack to Antifa in an X post he made to his 1.8 million followers on July 7, only three days after the event. The slogans that appeared on some of the alleged attackers’ possessions – such as a flag reading “Resist Fascism, Fight Oligarchy” and a collection of anti-government pamphlets at one of their residences – served as his evidence.

“These are some of the most serious felony federal charges against any alleged Antifa associates in American history so far,” Ngo wrote, later claiming the suspects to be members of “a north Texas Antifa terror cell.” 

In another post to X on Oct. 28, Ngo told his audience that the Democratic Socialists of America were the closest thing to a political arm for Antifa while reposting an anti-Zohran Mamdani video from Canary Mission. Canary Mission is an anonymously run organization dedicated to doxing anti-Zionist students and professors on college campuses around the United States.

Kyle Shideler, the director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, is one of the six experts chosen by the U.S. Attorney’s office to provide testimony during the trial. Shideler’s testimony will revolve around proving the attack was carried out by Antifa.

The Center for Security Policy is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group founded by Frank Gaffney, Jr. in 1988 after his tenure in the Reagan administration as the deputy secretary of defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy. In recent years, the organization has been peddling great replacement conspiracy theories, that Europe has been taken over by Muslims and that a similar demographic replacement is occurring in the United States.

On July 11, less than a week after the attack on the Prairieland ICE facility, Shideler wrote an article for The Federalist titled “Terrorist Attack in Texas Demands Federal Targeting of Antifa.” In the article, he claims to have studied Antifa for the past decade and suggests that “violent left-wing anti-ICE rhetoric” is to blame.

“As the Trump administration heads further into its four-year term, we can expect Antifa to continue to escalate,” Shideler writes. “The logic of trending violence is baked into its terrorist DNA.”

Before he was named by the prosecution for expert testimony, Shideler wrote an article for the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute on how the U.S. government can dismantle far-left extremist networks. In the article, Shideler writes that the government should form a presidential task force that unilaterally uses all executive agencies to pursue and uproot the far-left. To get to that point, he suggests finding and prosecuting test cases to build a foundation of case law that can support this mission.

“The president must direct the creation of the Far-Left Violent Extremist category and implement its immediate use across all departments and agencies,” Shideler writes. “It must explicitly include ‘anti-fascist’ (Antifa), anarchist, autonomous Marxist, socialist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and Communist extremists…”

He goes on to include single-issue groups on topics like environmentalism and abortion, which he alleges are often used to indoctrinate their activists into a revolutionary cause.

In response to the State Department’s announcement that they were designating four Antifa-associated groups as foreign terrorist organizations, Shideler posted to X to underscore the significance of the move.

“This gets our foot in the door to start collections on Antifa internationally and opens up the larger Antifa network to secondary sanctions, aimed at the groups that provide material support and bind the various action cells together,” Shideler wrote.

Following a few fights at a Turning Point USA event at the University of California, Berkeley, on Nov. 11, Attorney General Pam Bondi made a statement on her X account further escalating the rhetoric against anti-fascists.

“Antifa is an existential threat to our nation,” Bondi wrote.

The two Prairieland defendants facing material support for terrorism charges were set to go to trial on Nov. 24, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed for extra time to prepare the case due to its complexity on Nov. 3. Fifteen other defendants received plea offers from the government, which their support network claims would result in up to 15 years in federal prison for most.

On Nov. 15, five of the defendants pleaded guilty to the charges levied against them by the federal government. In doing so, they agreed to the set of facts as laid out by the prosecutors.

In the stipulated facts of the plea agreement, they agreed that those “who participated in the acts against Prairieland adhered to an anti-fascist, anti-I.C.E., anti-government ideology, which the government classifies as Antifa.”

“Trump does not distinguish between these defendants, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America, 50501, or anyone else standing against him,” the defendants’ support committee wrote on their website. “They are coming for undocumented migrants, they are coming for supporters of Palestine, they are coming for anyone who objects to ICE’s violence.”

Cover image contributed by L. Cam Anderson. Images via Niko Georgiades for Unicorn Riot unless otherwise noted.

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