July 4, 2025: Independence Day. Demonstrators host a nighttime protest outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of Dallas–Fort Worth. They gather and light fireworks, but not in celebration of America’s birthday. Instead, these explosions illuminate one of many centers nationwide where authorities are stripping people of their human rights. Some protestors immobilize government vans. Others tag personal vehicles identified as belonging to ICE employees while more disable surveillance cameras. Officers on duty inevitably order protestors to scatter, with at least one drawing his weapon from his holster. Afraid for her life, one demonstrator fires a rifle in his direction, grazing his shoulder. Police arrest nine people and charge them with acts of domestic terrorism; eight are convicted.
Clockwise from top left: Daniel Estrada-Sanchez; Champagne Song and Rowan Gibson; Autumn Hill and Lydia Koza; Savanna Batten; Dario Sanchez; Elizabeth & Ines Soto; Meagan Morris and Hill. Composite: Dallas-Fort Worth Support Committee.
The demonstrators are tried for such offenses as “providing material support to terrorists.” It takes just three weeks for a jury to reach a verdict—twice the clip of your average murder trial. Some have since initiated the convoluted process of appeal. Others are struggling to learn whether they’re even allowed to contest their Trumped-up convictions. All eight received staggering sentences of 30 to 100 years, the equivalent of life in prison.
As for the seditious contents of that “material support to terrorists?” Handcrafted paper zines. A type of independent literature once associated with broke art students, now identified by the FBI as “anarchist literature” in support of violence against police. Make no mistake—we’ve arrived at a boiling point in the evolution of American fascism.
Desperate for an enemy
The Prairieland defendants were tried and convicted under Trump’s new “counter-terrorism” rule, itself invented to target “antifa,” which means anti-fascist. Antifa is not an organized group but a decentralized ideological movement that seeks to dissolve fascism in the United States. It wasn’t too long ago the US boasted about having fought fascism in World War II. It seems we’ve walked that back in less time than it takes Uranus to orbit the Sun (84.099 Earth years, for you nerds). The federal government recognizes antifa as a “domestic terror organization,” and the Prairieland defendants as a “North Texas Antifa cell.” Their accusations veered into conjecture as they alleged the defendants were part of a plot to assassinate a police officer. The government insisted on their version of events despite many defendants being loosely connected, with some not knowing one another at all.
Zines and political literature were taken from the defendants’ homes, including common materials like “know your rights” and protest strategy guides. Source: Department of Justice via KERA.
Among the defendants are Ines and Elizabeth Soto. Elizabeth is being held at a facility in Wichita Falls, Texas; Ines is someplace similar a hundred miles away. Authorities charged the Sotos with crimes in connection to the terror plot being advanced in court. Their offense: owning a “printing press,” a printer/bookbinder the FBI linked to those seditious zines while raiding their home. One of the Sotos’ children reported that cops black-bagged Elizabeth and took them in separately to be interrogated. Another underwent interrogation at home. Nobody told Mrs. Soto that her children had been removed from their home and/or interrogated by police. Elizabeth learned what happened to her kids by way of an article published by anarchist collective Crimethinc, later made into a zine.
The shocking results of the Prairieland case has human rights and civil liberties experts worried. It appears Trump’s corrupted Department of Justice seeks to make an example of the convicted protestors to quell further uprisings. It’s not mere technicalities and loopholes being exploited in this witch hunt. These grossly unfair trials are plundering core principles of the United States Constitution. For instance, the First Amendment, which protects freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the government. The Fourth Amendment safeguards you from unlawful searches and seizures and demands valid warrants. The Fifth guarantees due process while the Sixth protects your right to a fair trial. The prosecution is in violation of at least half the Bill of Rights, yet the verdicts are being upheld.
“It’s not only an attempt at chilling speech,” Policy Director for advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent told the Guardian, “but an indication [the Trump administration] is going to continue going after protests extremely hard.”
The uncertain future of the Prairieland protestors
The federal government’s net for who is a domestic terrorist has never been cast so wide. Their definition of an extremist has gotten so impossibly broad, it encompasses basically all kinds of activists. It’s a sign of desperation, a Hail Mary from the losing team. The label gets misapplied time and again to anyone critical of Trump’s regime. This government implicates kids, veterans, queer people, climate scientists, performance artists, entire communities that band against ICE while providing mutual aid, and finally, those gosh darn vegans. Trump’s henchmen could count your granny among the insidious people’s militia known as antifa for supporting the arts. Antifa is not some secret club whose members blend with society and meet undercover; that would be the Ku Klux Klan.
Whether you’re cutting off a toxic parent or just trying to get by in the lamest era of fascism, the only people that’ll take issue with your boundaries are those who benefitted from their absence. That said, why is the United States government so threatened by our simple want for privacy? It is deeply foreboding that the FBI now sees precautions against cyberattacks, like Faraday bags or the popular encrypted message app Signal, as tokens and avenues of domestic terror. What kind of signal is the federal government broadcasting with this high-profile case?
The Prairieland case involves a total of 22 defendants, all charged in connection with last year’s protest. Five of them accepted plea deals. Five more are facing state-level charges. Last month, another three were indicted. The US government wants you to know the price of defiance is up; inflation affects the justice system, too.
Prosecutors said that Elizabeth and Ines Soto housed a printing press to produce and distribute anti-government zines. Like a bird struggling to build a good nest from garbage, they submitted the couple’s anarchist book club membership as evidence. The Sotos joined a book club named for admired 20th-century anarchist, Emma Goldman. The federal government arrested Goldman 99 years ago for conspiracy to organize against the First World War draft. Resisting corrupt rule through alternative literature, as James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton did in 1788 with the Federalist Papers, is among the oldest American traditions.
Source: Department of Justice via KERA.
In a safer, saner society, people would be educated about that, even lawyers. Then again, a safer, saner society wouldn’t sink to the abysmal lows where conditions for such ethical failings thrive. This administration seems determined to make an example out of the Prairieland defendants. Yet they don’t realize their extremism exposes their hopeless need for a boogeyman. Book clubs are rousing the hostilities and suspicions of paranoid agents of Trump’s cult of personality. Fucking book clubs. Federal(!) investigations come across so shallow, so compromised by Trump’s vision and uninformed by life outside it, that wherever they seek evidence confirming their beliefs, there it lies.
The Sotos were convicted of “providing material support to terrorists”. Among evidence presented by the federal government in the case was the Sotos tabling at zine fairs. Source: Department of Justice via KERA.
Emma Goldman Book Club participants read political zines that introduced them to topics like “a journal of materialist feminism” (Guardian) and, “a call for the eradication of artificial intelligence from the face of the earth.” No subject explored in the zines that were seized by the FBI is illegal, one agent testified in court. Investigators confiscated the zines regardless, as well as the Sotos’ printing press, a paper cutter and reportedly, a book of poetry about losing a sibling to cancer. You know, real radical stuff.
“Zines are a foundational first amendment document,” argued Director of Mass Defense for the National Lawyers Guild, Xavier de Janon. De Janon is also the attorney representing Mrs. Soto, giving her a fighting chance. “Zines discussing ideas of revolution, mutual aid, ideas of a world after capitalism should not be able to be criminalized in and of themselves,” Mr. de Janon said. “That’s just dangerous to all of us.”
