We must do everything we can to push back against this criminalization of dissent before we no longer have the ability to do it. This is getting serious. 50-years in prison for protesting ICE is not a joke.
I’ll admit that I was under the impression that even if the Trump administration arrested and prosecuted protesters, the courts would throw out the cases or at the very least, they would be found “not guilty.”
This article first appeared on Truthout.
In March of this year, in Fort Worth, Texas, nine demonstrators were convicted on a variety of different charges that ranged from providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy, and attempted murder, to obstruction of justice, as a Trump-appointed judge permitted the prosecutors to argue a completely fallacious theory — that the defendants were part of an “antifa” terrorist cell when they participated in a noise demonstration on July 4, 2025, in front of the Prairieland ICE facility.
On June 24, eight were sentenced to shockingly long and disproportionate sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years.
The 30-year sentence was imposed on a defendant who didn’t even attend the protest, and whose “crime” was moving a box full of antifascist zines during the investigation. The 100-year sentence was doled out to a former Marine reservist standing guard in the woods who was convicted of wounding a local police officer about to shoot an unarmed fleeing protestor. One demonstrator received a 70-year sentence and five others received 50-year sentences.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche celebrated the conviction of the “Prairieland Terrorists”:
The sentences handed down today make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice. Their violent extremism has no place in our country, and the Department of Justice will continue to aggressively investigate, disrupt, and prosecute those who threaten law enforcement officers or undermine the rule of law.”
FBI Director Kash Patel sounded a similar warning:
Today’s sentencings show the FBI remains committed to identifying, locating, and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country. Acts of violence against our law enforcement partners will not be tolerated, and we continue our work to protect communities across the country from domestic terrorism.”
The Prairieland defendants are just one example among the many activists illegally targeted in the Trump administration’s vicious crackdown on dissent.
Trump Declares War on “Domestic Terrorism” “Antifa” and the Left
In the wake of the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump issued his illegal National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on September of 25, 2025. Ominously entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the directive essentially paints anyone who doesn’t support Trump’s agenda as a “domestic terrorist.”
Target ideologies specifically listed in the memorandum include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
This broad designation includes individuals, their organizations, and funders, and encompasses anti-fascist, pro-Palestinian, anti-ICE, and other leftist demonstrators in its net.
The NSPM-7 openly calls for “investigative” tactics designed to “disrupt” and “dismantle” these groups.
The language of the memo harkened back to the days of the government’s illegal and racist war against the Black liberation and New Left movements of 1960s, and of tactics that the FBI used to violently attack similar movements and leaders under its secret COINTELPRO program.
The Trump administration memo also rallied the government’s politically motivated lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington and in U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country to join the effort by using myriad federal statutes to vindictively and wrongfully charge and prosecute those who actively opposed the government and its violent and genocidal actions.
This too mirrored the DOJ blueprint of the late 1960s and early 1970s that was aggressively pursued under the leadership of Attorney General John Mitchell.
The Broadview Case
At the time Trump issued NSPM-7, his ICE and Border Patrol troopers had met massive resistance to their unconstitutional and violent invasion of greater Los Angeles, and they were confronted with an even more remarkable neighborhood-to-neighborhood fight against the blatantly racist “Operation Midway” that was mounting in Chicago in early September.
Trump’s forces were dragging the Brown immigrants they had indiscriminately arrested during their terror raids to the ICE jail in neighboring Broadview.
Resistance was swift, and a Customs and Border Protection agent fatally shot one undocumented man (Silverio Villegas González) who was fleeing from them, while peaceful demonstrators at Broadview, some of whom were practicing civil disobedience, were met with violent barrages of pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and physical brutality.
As public opinion turned decidedly against the invaders, in early October, the Chicago U.S. attorneys’ office (no doubt at the direction of Washington) sought conspiracy indictments against six of the most publicly vocal demonstrators, most of whom had connections to the progressive wing of the local Democratic Party.
Employing an infrequently used federal conspiracy law that was passed during Reconstruction to protect federal officers from the Ku Klux Klan, an experienced assistant U.S. attorney, Sheri Mecklenburg, was met with a reluctant grand jury that raised numerous questions and initially refused her exhortations to indict.
One juror called the case a “crock of shit,” and he and several others who questioned the case were shown the door by an angry Mecklenburg.
Finally, after presenting additional testimony from an agent, the jury was visited by U.S. attorney Andrew Boutros, who, in a highly irregular lecture, sought to identify any remaining jurors who did not buy the government’s case, while making a thinly veiled threat that they had “a different procedure” for dealing with such jurors.
Not surprisingly, none of the remaining jurors raised their hands.
In late October, Boutros and Mecklenburg finally got the government’s hopelessly tarnished indictments — charging the “Broadview Six” with conspiring to “impede a federal officer” when they allegedly joined a large group of demonstrators who attempted to block an ICE vehicle that was driving into the facility and slightly damaged it.
During pre-trial discovery, lawyers for the six sought the secret grand jury transcripts, and the prosecutors first produced copies with the blatant misconduct deleted, then dismissed the felony charges while proceeding on the companion misdemeanor charges; in doing so, they hoped to avoid producing the unredacted transcripts.
The trial judge, April Perry, herself a former assistant U.S. attorney, was not deceived.
The damning transcripts, complete this time with the prosecutorial misconduct, were produced and later publicly released, Boutros was compelled to dismiss the entire case, and he came, hat in hand, to apologize to the judge.
There have been numerous calls for Boutros’s resignation; Judge Perry is considering taking further action against the prosecutors, more than 100 former assistant U.S. attorneys have publicly condemned Boutros and his assistants’ conduct in the Broadview case, and a broader investigation of Mecklenburg’s conduct before other grand juries has, to date, led to the dismissal of at least two unrelated cases.
Convictions in the Spokane 3 Case
On July 15, 2025, the acting U.S. attorney in Spokane, Washington, announced the conspiracy indictments of nine demonstrators who, a month earlier, were among a crowd of hundreds who had attempted to block the transport of two Venezualan immigrants who were seeking asylum to an ICE jail.
Former acting U.S. Attorney Richard Barker had resigned rather than signing the indictments, which were brought under the same anti-Klan statute that was later used in Chicago, because, he said, “none of the agents were hurt and none of the protesters were hurt.”
Six of the nine, including a former city council president who had called for the protest, avoided jail time by pleading to lesser charges, and the remaining three — all of whom are people of color and two of whom are nonbinary, one a recent law school graduate, one a member of the Spokane Human Rights Commission, and one a decorated veteran whose father is running for Congress — went to trial in May in front of a conservative Eastern Washington jury.
During the trial, it was revealed that a prosecution witness had authored social media posts that called Black politicians “lying ghetto garbage,” transgender people “mentally ill,” and had boosted a post showing ICE arresting a pregnant woman at gunpoint that called her a “pregnant invader.”
Nonetheless, the three were convicted, and face possible six-year sentences.
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown called the convictions “politically motivated” and designed to discourage political dissent, while former U.S. Attorney Barker said, “I really do question whether justice was truly served.”
“Michigan 8” Indictments
In the early morning hours of June 10, 2026, the FBI conducted SWAT team raids as part of a multi-state operation that included FBI field offices in Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee, as well as 12 local law enforcement agencies.
The heavily armed agents arrested seven former University of Michigan student activists, handcuffed them, put them in armored cars and transported them into federal custody pursuant to a 10-count federal conspiracy indictment.
Together with an eighth activist, who was out of the country, they were charged with conspiring, at the height of campus protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, to orchestrate a campaign of threats and intimidation that targeted, homes, businesses, organizations, and individuals connected to the University trustees, and the Israeli war effort.
Their alleged acts centered around spray painting, noxious “stink bombs,” fake corpses, and “mark[ing] their victims with threatening symbols used by Hamas, including red inverted triangles and red handprints,” coupled with demands to divest, and militant communications and conversations.
Additionally, two of the protesters were charged with attempting to intimidate a federal witness.
Announcing the indictments, U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon Jr., a Trump loyalist, said, “In America, we rule by law not by fear. These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American.
We will counter intimidation with justice.”
Despite the “domestic terrorist” saber-rattling of the federal prosecutors, the “Michigan 8” were released on bond by federal magistrates. Detroit’s Sugar Law Center condemned the indictments:
The actions of law enforcement appear to be a new low in the criminalization of student opposition to the human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide in Gaza. Based on evidence that the government appears to have had for more than a year and for actions occurring nearly two years ago, the federal government is seeking to bring federal charges for acts traditionally reserved for local prosecutors. It must be asked why and why now.
15 Targeted in Minneapolis
On June 16, federal prosecutors in Minneapolis announced the conspiracy indictment of 15 ICE observers and anti-ICE demonstrators under the same anti-Klan statute that was used in Chicago and Spokane, this time also charging some of the defendants with interstate stalking, solicitation, destruction of property, and assault.
The Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s Office, whose lawyers had already lost half of the individual cases they had previously brought against activists who had participated in the mass resistance to ICE’s murderous invasion of their city, cobbled together claims that the demonstrators allegedly used debris, vehicles and other objects to obstruct roads used by federal agents, utilized homemade shields to resist officers on foot, and utilized group chats that monitored and tracked vehicles going to and from the building that served as the hub for ICE agents, as the basis for the conspiracy charges.
Announcing the indictments, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, asserting that the defendants were members of two Minneapolis-based leftist groups connected with “antifa,” further proclaimed, “Today’s charges and arrests reflect a broad federal effort to address organized lawless behavior, which seeks to disrupt the execution of federal law, endanger law enforcement, and importantly endanger the very communities that these defendants falsely claim to be protecting.”
A demonstration gathered at the courtroom during the bond hearing, officers deployed pepper spray and flash bangs, and one protester was treated by paramedics.
The defendants were released on bond, and one of their lawyers, Bruce Nestor, called the charges “an act of political oppression. It’s designed to punish and intimidate.”
Resisting Repression
Defeated on the streets by enraged demonstrators who have successfully resisted Trump’s storm troopers everywhere that they have invaded, and stymied when they have brought individual cases against the protesters, the government has now resorted, with mixed success, to broad disruptive conspiracy prosecutions that harken back to the Smith Act prosecutions of alleged Communists in the 1950s and the prosecutions of the New Left and the Black Panthers in the late 1960s.
This escalating attack against the left and the First Amendment, criminalizing free speech and militant protests, must continue to be resisted both in the courts and on the streets.
As the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center in Detroit has so aptly stated: “All of us need to resist this latest effort to not only disrupt and destroy the lives of young people of conscience but also to intimidate a generation whose imaginations and moral sensibilities are precious to all of us.”
This article first appeared on Truthout and was republished here under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license.
