Sometimes, the value of a criminal indictment is the headlines it can get, not the charges that can stick. On Tuesday afternoon, a federal prosecutor in Minnesota, U.S. attorney Daniel N. Rosen, held a press conference about what he characterized as an indictment of more than a dozen people allegedly associated with “antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state.” The legal document he was referring to had been made available to the public 15 minutes before. Admitting that reporters present may not have had time yet to read it, Rosen replied to multiple questions with variations of “You’ll find the answer in the indictment.” Indeed, the U.S. attorney’s most honest response may have been this one: “We’re showing what we think is necessary in order to get the story out.”
The gulf between what Rosen, alongside Homeland Security Investigations agent Michael McCarthy, said about the alleged conspiracists’ conduct and what the criminal indictment says about it is vast. A press conference is an opportunity for the government, as Rosen stated, “to get the story out,” and the story is meant for us, not (or not only) the courts. But considering how many federal indictments for protest activity against Trump’s mass deportations have fallen apart, stories may now take precedence over securing convictions. Last year, Trump assembled a bevy of far-right influencers at the White House for an anti-antifa roundtable; this particular story could have been ghostwritten by any one of them.
The indictment, filed under seal in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota on June 11 and unsealed on June 16, concerns alleged conduct over the course of quite a long time period, from January 2026 through June 2026. Each defendant is identified by at least one alias, meaning someone had to type the words “a.k.a. Kaos” and “a.k.a. D. Munny Big Dog Orf Orf,” among other purported nommes de guerre, which may simply have been people’s nicknames on Signal at the time the federal government acquired a copy of their messages. All defendants are identified as “members and associates of Twin Cities Direct Action (‘TCDA’), which later changed its name to Direct Action Minnesota (‘DAMN’).” In total, 15 people are named. Twelve were arrested by federal law enforcement early Tuesday morning and were granted release later that day under certain conditions, such as being prohibited from protesting on federal property and from communicating with other defendants, except through their attorneys.
The primary charge is that each “did knowingly conspire, with other persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to prevent by force, intimidation, and threats officers and employees of the United States Department of Homeland Security”—including ICE—“from discharging the duties of their officers.” Among the “manner and means” of this alleged conspiracy include “advocating and promoting direct action against ICE.” Throughout, “direct action” is used interchangeably to describe everything from standing in the way of federal law enforcement, using vehicles to slow down or obstruct federal law enforcement vehicles, or using a shield to protect oneself from law enforcement.
Federal prosecutors do not actually allege that any specific person harmed or injured any federal officer—unless you count one having allegedly “approached one of the agents and knocked the agent’s notes out of his hand” (this was charged as “Assault on a Federal Officer”) or allegedly causing damage to an agent’s vehicle. The majority of the actions attributed to individuals involved in the alleged conspiracy are routine organizing activities, such as moderating a meeting, sharing a fundraising link, or posting to social media. Many, many times, the action is merely “sent a message” to a Signal group. These alleged elements of the conspiracy are all breathtakingly ordinary actions people have taken and continue to take every day in an effort to resist ICE and defend their communities. That is the point.
“A conspiracy is a fascinating legal animal,” said Maura Meltzer-Cohen, a movement attorney who teaches at CUNY School of Law, on the podcast It Could Happen Here. What makes a conspiracy charge so attractive, Meltzer-Cohen explained, “is that it makes it possible for prosecutors to criminalize garden-variety lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior, and whole communities of people who are engaged in those behaviors, by making the claim that all of those things, and all of those associations, and all of those beliefs, and all of those otherwise protected activities are in the service of a larger agreement to do something illegal.”
In some of the only substantive background offered by the government on Tuesday, Rosen explicitly tied the case to Trump directives issued in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing in September 2025, one of which claimed to designate what it called “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” (There is no such designation for a domestic group.) The other, known as NSPM-7, Rosen said, “directed the Department of Justice to prioritize politically motivated violence.” As a result, he said, “Joint Task Force Vanguard” was formed by the deputy attorney general in order “to enforce a national security strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.” Whether this indictment was the result of that task force was not made explicit. Nothing that followed, however, offered evidence of a national security threat or a successful investigation uncovering political violence, only evidence that federal prosecutors are following the administration’s orders. After invoking NSPM-7, Rosen referred to defendants’ actions as “un-American,” and told reporters, “They’ll be met with swift justice.”
The story told at the press conference bore little resemblance to the indictment’s 90-plus pages detailing who made what Signal post when. In the indictment, political violence is rendered invisible. The document offers a kind of bleak counter-history of the first five months of 2026, in which the federal agents’ violent repression of people engaged in community defense is completely absent. Missing, too, is any alleged violence from the defendants the government described at the press conference as “antifa.”
Curiously, although antifa is discussed in the indictment (awkwardly), the term the government associates with the defendants far more frequently is anarchist. “It is absolutely clear that the potential anarchist identity of some of the organizers is a large part of the case,” noted author Margaret Killjoy, who reported from Minneapolis during some of the events described. “Of course, it’s not illegal to be an anarchist.” For this very reason, the prosecution may not be able to deliver the story the administration seeks; the whole indictment could collapse, too, just as in previous cases against protestors. But the government is hoping that the rest of us will associate anarchists with criminal acts, with terrorism, even if the courts do not.
For their part, the reporters who asked questions at the press conference did not appear to take the federal government’s claims of a criminal conspiracy at face value. They asked why federal prosecutors thought these charges might fare better than the numerous federal cases brought against those involved in challenging Operation Metro Surge, Trump’s mass deportation mission in the Twin Cities, when more than half of such cases have fallen apart. They asked how the courts and the public could be assured, given issues such as those exposed in the failed prosecution of the former Broadview Six, over which federal prosecutors in Chicago are now facing possible discipline themselves, that the indictment was truthful. They asked the feds when, in their quest to hold people accountable for violence related to ICE’s presence in the Twin Cities, they would be bringing charges against the federal officers who shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026.
Crucially, in a few different ways, the DOJ and DHS officials present were asked: Do you have evidence that any federal officers were injured or harmed in these alleged attacks? In response, Rosen offered, “I can’t elaborate. I don’t think I used the word ‘attacks,’ but if I did, I stand by it.” Reporters were repeatedly told to wait for the case to “roll out” for specifics. “I would dare say,” Rosen said, a bit ruffled towards the press conference’s end, “we just cannot have in this country people getting together engaging in all of these violent acts and then simply saying, Well, you know, nobody got hurt, so how bad could it have been?”
Of course, once you do read the indictment, the idea that it describes people coming together to engage in violence does not hold. Instead, it describes—or tries to describe—the politics held by a group of people. “Antifa groups frequently blend anarchist and communist views,” prosecutors state. Anarchists are mentioned on 17 of the indictment’s 94 pages. In the list of acts allegedly part of the conspiracy is someone who “wrote an article” for an “anarchist blog,” the long-running website CrimethInc. (For what it is worth: CrimethInc. has featured one of my stories for TNR in its “Resistance Reader.”) Multiple alleged co-conspirators are described as having “took part in” an “Anarchist Speaking Tour” in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Seattle. The tour, called “Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota,” was publicly advertised.
Those are the kinds of acts that form the backbone of the indictment, an accounting of political activity, and to be fair, they do conform with the red-scare-inflected portrait Rosen painted for reporters at the press conference. But to the extent that the indictment concerns political violence, as Rosen claimed Tuesday, it is the violence from law enforcement, which people have been resisting all year in the Twin Cities and which has made them targets of government surveillance, as evident in the indictment’s 94 pages. At one point, prosecutors quote from what appeared to be participants in a Signal group chat discussing the White House Counterterrorism Strategy released this May. An “unindicted coconspirator” allegedly said, “The White house just declared us terrorists…” while one alleged co-conspirator replied, “My new bio: anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” One can imagine it being said in the kind of kidding-not-kidding tone of countless people who are being targeted by their own government. It’s just that most of them rarely get a readout of their gallows humor in a federal indictment.
Today, gallows humor offers only momentary relief from the reality of what these charges mean: the further criminalization of activities that dissent from the Trump administration and MAGA world at large. As this case unfolds, people may be asking themselves if they ought to stand up for these defendants, if they should defend anyone involved in resisting mass deportations. As one prosecutor implored, read the indictment: The government has worked diligently to hand us what it thinks are reasons to abandon that fight.
