Solidarity with the Prairieland Defendants

E.W. Ramsey

Posted June 24, 2026

A brief accounting of the beginning of the new Red Scare

Eight of the nine Prairieland defendants, convicted in March of terrorism, were sentenced on June 23, 2026 to 30-100 years. Seven — Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Benjamin Hanil Song and Elizabeth Soto — had been convicted of rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to use an explosive and use of an explosive device (fireworks!). The eighth, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was convicted of concealing a document — political literature — and, along with Rueda, conspiracy to conceal documents.

One of the most telling details of the entire affair is the case of Sanchez Estrada, who was not even present at the demonstration in Alvarado, but still received 30 years in prison for his “conspiring.” The state’s evidence for this claim? Even after the sentencing, all they’ve given us is an allusionary shrug. Sanchez Estrada’s lawyer Christopher J. Weinbel states that “[T]he Government’s own admissions highlight that the object of the offense was unknown, leaving the jury to speculate about what constituted the alleged evidence.”

Song, who received the 100-year sentence, had been convicted of attempted murder of an officer and discharging a firearm in furtherance of a crime. He is a firearms instructor and United States Marine Corps veteran. In response to his sentencing, the statement he read reflects both his humanity and his innocence.

The ninth defendant, Ines Soto, will be sentenced on July 1, along with Joy “Rowan” Gibson and Rebecca Morgan, who took non-cooperating plea deals, and five who took cooperating plea deals.

Sentencing Judge Reed O’Connor stated from the bench that he is giving maximum sentences to the Prairieland defendants because “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”

Before the sentencing, Judge Mark Pittman dismissed various motions, including asking for a new trial or, alternatively, an acquittal based on the government’s failure to produce evidence that supported a conviction on the alleged charges.

The DFW Support Committee, a group of family and friends of the defendants who have tirelessly funded, reported on, and otherwise supported them in their struggle for exoneration and freedom, along with other organizers and concerned citizens, pack hearings whenever they occur and host press conferences afterwards. Their work continues.

Background

On Independence Day, 2025, a “noise demonstration” outside of the Prairieland ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas turned sour after Lieutenant Thomas Gross, an officer of the Alvarado Police Department, showed up and drew his weapon on two unarmed protesters. They were part of a small group that remained after the majority left. Shots were fired and the government claimed Benjamin Song shot Lt. Gross “in the neck.”

What followed these tumultuous moments cannot be described as anything but a domestic terror operation, raiding more than 20 homes and one business, twenty-two people were arrested in what Fox News called a coordinated “ambush.” Former U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi dubbed the protesters terrorists, and vowed that this case will “not be the last as the Trump Administration systematically dismantles Antifa … ”

Bond was set for many of the defendants at $15 million and only one of the 22 has been released after his bond was reduced. While awaiting trial, they were in solitary confinement for extended periods and were pressured by government attorneys to accept plea deals. They were subject to regular strip searches. Authorities also withheld gender-affirming care, prescription medicine, and meals that met dietary restrictions. Before the end of the year, 10 took plea deals offered by the federal government.

When the trial began eight months later, Judge Mark Pittman quickly declared a mistrial, ostensibly over a defense attorney’s shirt, which depicted a collage of civil rights leaders. The attorney, Marquetta Clayton, apparently wore it to honor Jesse Jackson, who had died earlier that morning.

In reality, Pittman’s act was a thinly veiled excuse to wipe out the jury pool, who seemed largely sympathetic to anti-ICE activism. Pittman then curated a more administration-friendly group of jurors.

During the trial, media broadcasts were not allowed in the courtroom; public access was extremely limited. The overflow seating area was thirty miles away in a separate courthouse, with the proceedings being livestreamed. Elizabeth Soto’s attorney, Xavier T. de Janon, stated “I have never been in a situation where I might be prohibited from being present at a hearing of my own client.” The livestream regularly suffered lags and cut-outs, causing major information losses for press and observers alike.

The prosecution’s argument hinged on convincing the jury that the exchange of fire was part of “a planned ambush ‘designed’ to draw ICE personnel outside — an elaborately coordinated plot rather than the reactive and volatile eruption that it seems to have been.”

Testimony from cooperating government witnesses undercut the narrative that there was a plan to do anything more than demonstrate. While some defendants were members of the Emma Goldman Book Club, they were not a unified group. Video evidence proves Song intentionally fired eight bullets at the concrete, not at the officers. While the government asserted that Lt. Gross sustained minor injuries, he was released from the hospital shortly afterwards and no hospital records were introduced at the trial. Furthermore, multiple testimony of one witness revealed that the group only “brought guns in case there was a situation where self defense or defense of another person was necessary”

On March 13, 2026, the trial ended with each of the nine being convicted on at least two charges. The charges varied from rioting to “providing material support to terrorists” (stunningly premised on protesters wearing black clothing and the possession of anarchist literature), to attempted murder of officers and employees of the United States, as well as conspiracy to use and carry an “explosive” (read: fireworks on the fourth of July!). It was the first time that the federal government has used the charge of material support for terrorism against alleged “Antifa” members.

The prosecution presented the shooting as a coordinated act of terror by the mysterious “Antifa,” the Trump administration’s imaginary scapegoat — the symbolic representation of all the right despises. While it worked on the jury, cross-examination revealed contradictory findings that undermined the charges, and thus the verdict. Their expert witness was Kyle Shideler, who testified about how he had defined Antifa for the government. Shideler works for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at Center for Security Policy, a think tank designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Cui bona?

The guilty verdict represents a victory for Trump as the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) explicitly cites the Alvarado incident as “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence.” It criminalizes formerly considered protected activities in an attempt to silence and smash resistance to ever-encroaching reaction. The right to protest, the right to bear arms and defend oneself, even the right to possess politically unsavory literature are on the chopping block. This is what happens when ever-declining American imperialism turns its terrible eyes inward, this is the face of the new red scare.

The creative utilization of the charge of “material support for terrorists” reveals the ambitions of the reactionary Trump regime: this is the first step to formalize mass political persecution. We see it in the arrest of the Michigan Eight, seven of whom were indicted for their opposition to genocide in Gaza after year-long surveillance by the University of Michigan police and FBI. As in the case of the Prairieland defendants, the charges are laughable — but coupled with incredibly dangerous rhetoric emphasizing the accused’s ”ties to terrorism“ (based off of Signal chats and supposed personal conversations). The charges are designed to build a paramilitaristic system based on absolute coercion.

What now?

The sentencing will not and cannot stop the activists of the DFW Support Committee and their friends and comrades in the community from fighting for justice for the Prairieland Defendants. But the incredibly harsh sentences, along with keeping people in jail under horrendous conditions, will undoubtedly be a shadow over others arrested, who are facing more minor charges. It is also obvious that it will be a cautionary stick over all who might think about protesting injustice.

• Defend the Prairieland defendants by publicizing their innocence and exposing the government’s attempt to frame them! Support their defense politically and financially!
• Denounce the use of bail as a weapon to intimidate defendants!
• Understand how this case, and others such as the Minneapolis 25 and the Michigan 8, are being used to label all protesters as terrorists.
• Oppose the real criminals, ICE, the Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, and call for their abolition.

And as socialists, we see how the attempt to criminalize protest is aimed to terrorize people from resisting and overthrowing the inequality imposed by the capitalist system.

A personal note

On a winter afternoon in early 2025 I joined a couple of comrades to attend the Emma Goldman Book Club for a session on Wretched of the Earth at a small community venue in Fort Worth, Texas. When we arrived, slightly late, phones and books in hand, we entered a room full of seats in a circle, with walls lined with cramped books of all sorts. Tranquil and cozy, the building was a warm refuge on an otherwise dim and drearily waning day.

Eight or nine of us sat in a circle on couches and chairs discussing philosophy, imperialism, and colonial violence. That was the first and only time I met Savanna Batten, and Ines and Elizabeth Soto. Savanna brought her beloved cat along with her. It stalked around the room charmingly and naturally lit up our diverse faces with varied levels of interest and joy. Ines was the most talkative of the group, I remember him as thoughtful, evidently astute, and truly passionate.

Through my mutual aid work in the Tarrant County area, I also met Maricela Rueda, one of the most dedicated activists in the Fort Worth organizing scene. Together, we and our comrades served our community on many occasions, providing them with reading materials, clothing, menstrual hygiene products, narcan, hot food, and quite delicious aguas frescas (a staple of our group’s activities at the time).

We faced police harassment on numerous occasions for simply assisting and serving the working people of North Texas. We shared meals with those people, we laughed with them, and we felt the pain in their cries, together. That is the person that Maricela is. These are the types of people that this vile, cowardly, and contemptible capitalist administration wants to convince you are the agents of evil.

The truth is, naturally, the opposite, and this wonder-working is fascist reaction’s only recourse.

For it to maintain its grip, an organization must be created, an “Antifa,” which in reality has never existed as an organized force, but as a living, breathing idea, as the scream of the oppressed and the galvanized. One recalls Nikolai Bukharin’s description of the NKVD as a group of “unprincipled, dissolute, well-kept functionaries” when ICE comes to mind. What these gentlemen of today’s reaction forget, however, is that “history does not tolerate the witnesses to dirty deeds.” They shall not win.

[Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938) was a leading Old Bolshevik and Soviet statesman. When Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin took power and began massive political persecutions against party members and citizens alike in the Great Terror through the NKVD, a secret police and security organization, Bukharin took center stage as a leader of the fictitious “Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites,’” and was the main subject of the third and last major Stalinist show trial held in Moscow, 1938.]

[Both quotations are from Bukharin, “To a Future Generation of Party Leaders,” from Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget, page 344. The NKVD relied heavily on torture, both psychological and physical, and various forms of coercion to obtain false confessions in order to serve as justification for prison sentences, executions, and further repressions.]

To my great regret, I met most of these fine comrades only once or a few times, but I will certainly never forget their names and faces. They stand out sharply in my mind, not only as friends of the movement for social justice (damn it, socialism!) and against fascist violence, but as that movement’s ill-fated martyrs. Then again, I don’t believe in fate.

Links

https://prairielanddefendants.com/get-involved/
https://www.givesendgo.com/supportDFWprotestors
https://www.givesendgo.com/supportDFWprotestors
https://www.gofundme.com/f/get-artist-des-revol-an-immigration-attorney
https://x.com/DFWSupCommittee https://www.tiktok.com/@dfwsupportcommitt
https://bsky.app/profile/dfwsupportcommitt.bsky.social
https://mas.to/@dfwsupportcommittee/

E.W. Ramsey is a co-secretary of DSA Fort Worth and a member of Solidarity and the Mountain Caucus of DSA. He also co-runs Terror Calendar, a blog in remembrance of Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union. Find him on X at @tupacisoverit.