The future of protesting in the United States may have been decided in a cramped Depression-era courtroom in downtown Fort Worth on Friday of last week. Nine defendants, who federal prosecutors claimed were part of an “Antifa cell,” were found guilty of an array of charges, including providing “material support” for terrorism, for attending a demonstration outside an ICE facility that turned violent on July 4, 2025. The verdict is a clear victory for the Trump administration, which, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, has stretched the definition of “domestic terrorist organization” to include a staggeringly broad set of “terroristic activities,” such as “extremism on migration, race, and gender.” The Trump administration had already informally labeled its perceived enemies as radical terrorists, from Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by federal agents in January, to Marimar Martinez, who was shot several times by a Border Patrol agent last year. But last Friday, for the first time, the formal designation stuck in court.
What constitutes an Antifa terror cell? Apparently, a group of people that did not all know each other before being scooped up and charged as one. While some of the nine defendants who were convicted on Friday had met through self-defense classes, the Socialist Rifle Association, and an anarchist book club, loosely associating through Signal group chats, others didn’t know anyone—and only happened to be at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center last July 4 because they found the details for the demonstration online.
The events of that night lasted about half an hour: a handful of protesters arrived outside the facility around 10:37 p.m. wearing dark clothing—what prosecutors defined as “tactical gear” and “black bloc” attire—and set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with the detainees inside. Some brought weapons—11 firearms were recovered at the scene, many from inside cars or unassembled in backpacks—though group chat logs before the demonstration suggest they thought carrying them would act as a deterrent against violence from police or federal agents. At least two protesters broke off from the main group and spray-painted cars in the parking lot and an empty guard shack with anti-ICE slogans, slashing a van’s tires and breaking a security camera. It took approximately 15 minutes after the demonstration began for corrections officers to call 911. Two minutes later, a local police lieutenant, Thomas Gross, arrived at the scene and drew his weapon, aiming at the back of one of the alleged vandals.
An FBI official previously stated it was unclear who then shot first, but Gross was shot in the trapezius muscle, between his neck and shoulder, by a protester identified as Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist who was carrying an AR-15-style rifle. (Gross was airlifted to a nearby hospital and released a few hours later; Song was found guilty of one count of attempted murder on Friday.) There was enough ambiguity to the claim that Song fired out of malice that the federal judge—Mark Pittman, a Trump 1.0 appointee—had to rule that the defendants couldn’t claim self defense. Prosecutors had called self-defense theories in this case “legally insupportable” and compared the Prairieland case to precedent set against the Branch Davidians, members of the religious cult made famous during the 1993 siege in nearby Waco. In the Waco trial, determining who “shot first” was hotly contested, and the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals eventually ruled self-defense arguments were out of the question.
This wasn’t the only allusion to cults made during the trial. Indeed, the most consequential piece of the case against the Prairieland defendants is how prosecutors defined what counts as “conspiracy.” With the outcome of this trial potentially creating a new weapon with which the Trump administration can bludgeon its political opponents—sidestepping the First Amendment—prosecutors effectively concocted a “criminal enterprise” through innuendo and partial truths. Before the trial, the FBI described one defendant’s home as a “commune,” presumably because the group of friends living there together were pooling cash for the mortgage.
Meanwhile, prosecutors had to walk back their claim that there were multiple shooters, given evidence to the contrary, but still argued what happened that night was a “planned ambush.” They drew broadly from reading material found in protesters’ homes, including a review of the 2019 film Midsommar titled, “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real”—a scintillating header belying a more mundane dark art (literary criticism). They tapped Kyle Shideler, who works at the Center for Security Policy think tank—described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece”—as an “expert” witness. If his testimony was unconvincing, prosecutors also referred to protesters’ use of nicknames on Signal as evidence of their malevolent plot—names such as “Champagne,” “Jon ValJon,” and “Not Beating the Little Creature Allegations.”
But does the use of nicknames on messaging apps such as Discord or Signal automatically portend a malevolent conspiracy? Does carpooling? If someone else brings a gun to a protest, even in gun-friendly states like Texas, are you liable for what they do with it? Apparently, you are.
Although Song pulled the trigger, five were charged with attempted murder. Song was convicted, and the four others were acquitted of that charge, suggesting a slippage between what prosecutors argued and what jurors bought. Still, eight were convicted of rioting, providing “material support” to terrorists, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and the use of an explosive—the “explosives” being the fireworks, which the warden testified did no damage to the facility. Moreover, the use of fireworks at noise demonstrations is commonplace: After Renee Nicole Good was killed, Minneapolis protesters lit fireworks outside an ICE-occupied hotel, and during New Year’s Eve noise demonstrations last year, fireworks were used outside jails in Chicago, Detroit, Durham, and even in Austin. Were these ambushes too?
As Tom Brzozowski, former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Department of Justice, told KERA News—North Texas’s public radio affiliate—the broad definition of “antifa” employed by prosecutors “introduces a degree of ambiguity that is going to result in Americans choosing to not exercise their constitutional rights for fear of being swept up in some kind of dragnet.” The “Death-Cult” article was found in the home of Daniel Sanchez Estrada, the only defendant on the federal case who wasn’t even at the protest, but who was convicted of corruptly concealing documents and faces up to 40 years in prison for transporting a box of zines from one suburb of Dallas to another. Sanchez and his co-defendants at the federal level are—along with a handful of others who, like Sanchez, weren’t at the protest—on the hook for a state-level case yet to be announced.
“There will be an appeal,” Patrick McLain, defense attorney for defendant Zachary Evetts, wrote in a statement. He alluded to irregularities during the trial that had “raised many reasons” for doing so: the first and most obvious, that Judge Pittman declared a mistrial hours into the first day of jury selection, expanded the juror pool from around 75 to 130, and singlehandedly selected the jurors on the second go-around, using questions defense attorneys submitted to the court under seal. These moves were all legal, of course. Yet, multiple studies have shown jurors act differently when questioned by a judge versus by an attorney. An attorney close to the case, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals, described a “chilling effect” enacted through repeated orders against how the defense can argue their case. Amber Lowrey, older sister to Prairieland defendant Savannah Batten, noted that the first jury pool was more critical of ICE and the Trump administration. (The official reason for Pittman’s decision was a “politically charged” T-shirt featuring Civil Rights icons, underneath a defense attorney’s blazer, which he deemed prejudicial.) “He knew that the first jury was not going to convict these people,” she told me the night after the verdict.
The odds of a federal judge in Fort Worth, of all places, being some kind of peacenik were always slim, but the fact that the case is being overseen by Pittman, a founder of the Fort Worth-area Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, had already caused dissension. In 2023, Pittman was slammed—by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, no less—for “abuse of discretion” in his courtroom, ruling for at least the third time that he was too quick to sanction litigants, a pattern that has continued in the Prairieland case. And in the middle of the Prairieland trial, Pittman held a private meeting with former Attorney General William Barr, who in 2020 threatened to take “all action necessary” against “far left extremist groups and anarchic groups using Antifa-like tactics.”
Barr told the news site NOTUS he “knew of” the Antifa case but claimed he was just “getting a tour of the courtroom” and hadn’t discussed the trial with the judge. He was in town for a Fort Worth-area Federalist Society panel. Notably, the Prairieland case was for months overseen by Nancy Larson, also a Federalist Society member and the interim head of the Northern District of Texas’ U.S. Attorney’s office, who joined Barr’s boutique law firm, Torridon Law, as partner on February 6, days before jury selection began. Given just how broadly the word “conspiracy” has stretched during this trial, what should we call this?
Following the verdict, Lowrey and her mother sat in her car for an hour and a half, shaken. “I’m still processing everything,” she said the next day. “My sister feels like a ghost. Things that seemed so important a few days ago are just nothing now.”
Lowrey, a mother of three, has been advocating for her little sister from the beginning, making statements to the media when others feared reprisals, waking up at around 4 a.m. to sit through the trial every day, and returning from the courtroom after her kids had gone to bed. Last July, after the FBI raided Savannah’s home, she came by to coax her cat, traumatized by the flash grenade, into her car. With sentencing set for June, and an appeal sure to follow, she remains determined. “We’ll just keep taking care of her cat and loving on her and wait,” she said, “until her cat-mom gets home.”
