Federal prosecutors are making good on the Trump administration’s threat to treat antifa-related activity as terrorism.
On Thursday afternoon, prosecutors in Texas announced that terrorism charges had been filed against two people for alleged involvement in a shooting during a July 4 protest against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, in which a local police officer was injured.
This is the first time federal terrorism charges have been deployed in association with the “antifa” label, just a month after President Donald Trump announced that he was designating antifa a “major terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under law for domestic groups.
The Prairieland case is setting a chilling example for how the government will use so-called counterterrorism efforts to crush anti-fascist dissent. Neither of the people named in the indictment are accused of shooting the gun. Instead, Zachary Evetts and Autumn Hill are accused of “providing material support to terrorists” and having “aided and abetted” the alleged attempted murder of government officers.
“The framing of the case by the federal government should worry all of us.”
The federal indictment accuses Hill, who prosecutors dead-named, and Evetts as being part of an “antifa cell.”
The terrorism charges are an escalation of government efforts to criminalize protest movements by attempting to attribute collective guilt.
With tactics like using RICO laws built to combat organized crime, the government has made a habit of mass-prosecuting activists for individual, individuated crimes alleged to have taken place in the context of legal protest activity — even when there is no direct link between those charged and the alleged crimes. Though such charges frequently don’t stick, the lengthy prosecutions hamper protest movements and chill dissent.
“The framing of the case by the federal government should worry all of us,” a support committee for arrested protesters said in a statement on its website. “The glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative and the alarmist accusations are a clear attempt to bolster the Trump administration’s claims that the United States is on the verge of chaos, and to excuse a dramatic increase in militarized police action.”
“Investigation by Proclamation”
On the night of July 4, protesters from Dallas-Fort Worth held a noise demonstration and set off fireworks outside the ICE facility. Federal officers called local police to the scene. There was an exchange of gunfire between an Alvarado police officer and one other person, in which the officer was injured. The cop was taken to a hospital and released within a few hours.
In a lengthy preliminary federal hearing in September, an FBI official told the court that he could not say for certain whether or not the police officer shot first.
Nine people were arrested that night in the area, and numerous others were arrested in the days that followed, including during aggressive multiagency raids on homes and community spaces. Seventeen people in all now face a mixture of state and federal charges relating to the event, including state terrorism charges.
Neither of the two people now charged with federal material support for terrorism were arrested at the detention center. Members of a support committee for friends and loved ones of the arrestees fear that further federal terrorism and other hefty charges are in the pipeline.
While there is no such thing as a terrorism designation for domestic organizations, and while there is no centralized formal organization known as “antifa,” by associating the antifa label and anti-fascist activism with terrorism, Trump’s administration can marshal and direct vast law enforcement powers and resources into investigating and targeting networks of left-wing activists.
Even though there are no designated domestic terrorism organizations, only “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” there are domestic terrorist offenses under U.S. law. The government is attempting to portray the Prairieland Detention Center shooting as one such act.
The “terrorism” label has, after all, always been a tool for the government to categorize ideological enemies and deploy extraordinary resources to target them. At another preliminary hearing in July, prosecutors said that as many as 200 FBI agents were working on the Prairieland case — a massive overreach for a singular shooting incident leading to a minor injury in the context of a protest.
“This appears to be investigation by proclamation instead of investigation by sound intelligence,” Thomas Brzozowski, a former Justice Department lawyer working on domestic terrorism, told the New York Times on Thursday in reference to the government’s treatment of the Texas defendants as an “enterprise.”
“That’s what happens,” he said of Trump’s targeting of antifa, “when you open such a broad investigation into what is essentially an idea.”
Testing Ground for Repression
The Prairieland case has so far provided a convenient testing ground for state repression.
Gunshots were fired, and a police officer was injured. The government has pitched the activists as “heavily armed” even though, aside from a small number of guns found near the detention center, the guns found were in the cars or homes of the defendants — in Texas!
The case, however, has not been lifted up as a national cause célèbre against Trumpian overreach, possibly because a gun was indeed fired and acts of vandalism were reportedly carried out against ICE property.
Yet the Texas case reveals precisely the strategies the Trump administration will use, with the assistance of state forces, to target whole movements and communities with prosecutorial overreach and a logic of guilt by association. Government action here has been extreme in its treatment of an array of normal First Amendment-protected activity as evidence of terrorism; the blunt force effort to treat anti-fascism as terrorism should worry us all, even those who may want to distance themselves from any notion of protest militancy.
“What happened July 4th was a normal protest,” the support committee noted. “Regardless of what transpired that night, it’s clear that the scale and aggression of the police response is a fear tactic to send a message not only to DFW” — the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area — “but across the country of how this administration will treat anyone standing against their rising authoritarianism.”
During preliminary hearings, prosecutors have pointed to the flimsiest of grounds to describe organizers as a terroristic enterprise, including references to typical and legal activist activities like making zines and using encrypted messaging apps.
Thursday’s indictment explicitly cites the use of encrypted, disappearing messages — a practice that is common for activists and gossiping friend groups alike.
The prosecutors also note that activists discussed bringing firearms to the scene, which is completely legal in Texas. According to the indictment, one message described the plan to bring rifles to the protest as a way to have police “back off” — that is, a defensive tactic. According to the support committee, “the state has provided no evidence that there was coordination to fire at police.”
Draining Resources
Thus far, other significant efforts to collectively prosecute activists have failed. Overreaching RICO charges against 61 participants in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement charges were dismissed by a judge last month; the government’s efforts in Trump’s first term to mass prosecute over 200 “J20” protesters with hefty felony riot charges also fell apart.
As I’ve noted, both these recent examples of failed mass prosecutions illustrate that malicious cases don’t need to be successful to drain movement energies and resources, and spread fear. The Atlanta and J20 examples also highlighted the need for collective defense campaigns.
The same is true for the now grimly precedent-setting North Texas case.
