The federal case claiming ICE protesters are ‘Antifa terrorists’ rests on group chats, protest tactics, and angry videos. Not one agent was hurt. And the prosecutor who brought it couldn’t explain who ‘Antifa’ is.
Last week, federal prosecutors in Minnesota unsealed a 94-page indictment charging 15 people with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer — the most aggressive legal strike yet against people who protested ICE in the Twin Cities.
The defendants are described as members and associates of a local activist coalition called Direct Action Minnesota, which the government says is tied to “Antifa.”
Each faces up to six years in federal prison, and the White House folded the arrests into what it called another “crushing blow to the Antifa terrorist network.”
(Take a moment to feel both nauseous and embarrassed after reading that statement.)
Here is the problem at the center of the case: at his own press conference, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen could not say what “Antifa” actually is.
(Here ya go, Dan. 👇🏼)
Asked directly, he said the question went “beyond the scope” of the indictment and suggested reporters go ask the defendants themselves.
He also could not say whether a single federal officer had been physically harmed. As Talking Points Memo reported, Rosen told the room that whether anyone “caused bodily harm is not the measure” of whether they committed a serious federal crime. Huh?
In plain terms: the government is prosecuting people as terrorists for belonging to a movement it cannot define, for harm it cannot point to.
What the Protesters Actually Did
To understand this case, you have to understand what brought these agents to Minnesota in the first place.
Beginning in late 2025, the Trump administration flooded the Twin Cities with thousands of federal immigration agents in an operation it called Operation Metro Surge — described by DHS as the largest such operation in its history.
Agents rolled through neighborhoods in unmarked SUVs, many of them masked.
Two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were shot and killed by agents during the crackdown. No agent has been charged in either death.
Neighbors responded the way communities do when armed, masked men start pulling people off the street.
They set up Signal chats to track where ICE was operating.
They used car horns and whistles to alert people to abductuons as they happened.
They handed out shields and trained volunteers to observe arrests.
The indictment treats this organizing — the meetings, the planning messages, the fundraising — as the building blocks of a criminal conspiracy.
Rosen insisted the defendants were “charged not for what they said, but for what they did.”
Yet the most vivid piece of evidence he offered reporters was a video of one defendant, Kyle Wagner, using violent rhetoric — which is, of course, speech. (Wagner had already been charged separately in February over online threats.)
Stripped down, the conspiracy the government describes looks an awful lot like protest, mutual aid, and a little bit of civil disobedience.
A Pattern of Cases That Fall Apart
If this were the government’s first attempt, it might be easier to take at face value.
It’s not.
In January, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that ICE had survived “an attempted murder,” describing officers ambushed and beaten with snow shovels and broom handles.
Then the surveillance video surfaced. It showed a scuffle of about 12 seconds, with a shovel lying untouched on the ground the entire time.
The “attackers” turned out to be two Venezuelan DoorDash drivers with no violent records.
Prosecutors had the footage within hours — but didn’t watch it until weeks after charging the men.
Rosen’s own office moved to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it can never be refiled.
Two agents were placed on leave for apparently lying under oath. Minneapolis’s police chief said the agents “hung themselves.” The Hennepin County AG charged one of the officers for lying under oath. He was arrested. A rare occurrence — an ICE agent being held accountable.
That was no one-off. The CBS affiliate in Minneapolis combed through court filings and found at least 18 Minnesotans whose assault-on-an-officer cases were dropped, with a judge dismissing charges for 15 of them.
The sworn affidavits of a single federal agent showed up in roughly ten of those collapsed cases.
One man said federal agents shackled him to a hospital bed for days without access to his phone.
Of the 36 people charged in the first wave of Metro Surge cases, about a third have been dismissed — in a system where the federal government normally wins more than 90 percent of its cases.
The failures aren’t confined to Minnesota.
In Chicago, the “Broadview Six” — a group that included a congressional candidate — watched their conspiracy case thrown out after a judge found prosecutorial misconduct, including the dismissal of grand jurors who didn’t agree with the government.
In Washington, D.C., a jury acquitted a man who threw a sandwich at an agent.
In Los Angeles, the government has lost every such case that reached trial.
Why This Should Worry You
What makes this indictment different — and more dangerous — is the legal machinery behind it.
This is one of the first cases the Justice Department has explicitly tied to NSPM-7, a directive Trump signed in September 2025, three days after he declared “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization.
It created Joint Task Force Vanguard as the enforcement arm, and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation memo was pointedly titled “Ending Political Violence Against ICE.”
NSPM-7 instructs the government to disrupt networks “animated” by certain beliefs.
The list is breathtakingly broad: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” and hostility toward “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
As the ACLU has warned, those labels sweep in First Amendment–protected views held by millions of ordinary Americans.
The Brennan Center called the order ungrounded in fact and law.
More than 30 members of Congress sent Trump a letter warning the directive could be used to crack down on dissent.
This is “pre-crime” logic — the idea that the government can go after people not for what they have done, but for what they might do, based on what they believe.
Defense attorney Jordan Kushner, who has practiced for 35 years and represents one of the indicted activists, told reporters the prosecutions are political weapons meant to punish dissent.
The people now facing prison are, by their own attorneys’ accounts, teachers, professors, union members, and neighbors — among them a special-education teacher and a college professor.
They watched masked agents assault their neighbors and saw two fellow citizens killed, and they decided to do something about it.
For that, the government has labeled them terrorists.
When “national security” can be stretched to mean almost anything a government dislikes, the line between a protester and a terrorist becomes whatever a prosecutor decides it is that morning.
That should frighten all of us — not just the people in Minnesota.
