Patrick Williams
Audio By Carbonatix
Last week, eight defendants became the first people convicted of terrorism charges as part of an alleged “antifa” cell in a Fort Worth federal courtroom.
The federal jury returned a mixed verdict Friday for the nine defendants standing trial over the July demonstration that ended in the non-fatal shooting of Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center. Eight of nine defendants were convicted of providing material support to terrorists, while only one — Benjamin Song, identified by federal attorneys as the group’s leader — was convicted on one count of attempted murder.
The ninth defendant, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was convicted of corruptly concealing documents and conspiracy to conceal documents for moving “insurrectionary” materials from his Garland residence to a location in Denton. He did so, prosecutors said, at the direction of his wife and co-defendant, Marciela Rueda.
Song had also been charged with additional counts of attempted murder due to reports of corrections officers being shot at, but jurors chose not to convict on those charges. Defense attorneys had previously suggested that the bullet Gross was hit by had ricocheted off the ground.
Additional counts defendants were convicted of include rioting, conspiracy to use, and the use of explosives. The explosives charges are tied to the fireworks launched outside the facility on July 4, which prosecutors have alleged were set off in an attempt to lure law enforcement into an “ambush.” Defendants have maintained that they were participating in a noise-making demonstration in solidarity with those detained at the facility.
Vehicles were damaged during the demonstration, and a guard shack was vandalized with anti-law-enforcement messaging, according to images from the Department of Justice.
Song now faces up to life in prison, while other defendants could be sentenced to anywhere from 10 to 60 years of incarceration. U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman is expected to begin sentencing in June. Six other cooperating witnesses who testified against the defendants with plea deals in place will also be charged at that time.
“Everything about this trial from beginning to end has proven what we have said all along: this is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top,” a support group for the defendants wrote in a statement following the verdict’s announcement. “The state never had a case. The state only has its intimidation, torture, and suppression. The federal government came out in force: using repression, terrorism charges, home raids, multi-million dollar bails, and torturous jail conditions.”
Terrorists or Protesters?
Over a nearly three-week period that included a mistrial, federal prosecutors painted the events of July 4 as a coordinated attack on law enforcement perpetrated by what acting U.S. Attorney Nancy E. Larson called “an anti-ICE, anti-law enforcement, anti-government, anarchist group” in a release announcing indictments in November. Prosecutors pointed to encrypted Signal chats, coordinated all-black outfits, body armor, “military grade” medical kits and firearms found at the scene as evidence of the group’s organization.
“Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities — not under President Trump,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”
Bondi’s statement reflects something legal experts and First Amendment groups have expressed concern about: that the case will be used as a stepping stone for further prosecutions against an organization some say isn’t a group at all, but rather a blanket term for left-wing ideologies.
In an previously-published statement to the Observer, Todd Sandler, an economist and expert on terrorism at the University of Texas at Dallas, described antifa as “an empty shell of an umbrella ‘group’ for left-wing organizations that are anti-racist and anti-fascist” and that “calling antifa a terrorist organization is akin to saying that holding anti-fascist and anti-racist [views] makes you a terrorist, which is against free speech.”
The government upgraded the charges facing the defendants to include terrorism in November. A few months earlier, Donald Trump designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization by executive order, which defined it as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” Trump’s designation of antifa as a terrorist group came shortly after the killing of right-wing activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk while speaking on a Utah university campus on Sept 10.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also announced plans to “infiltrate and uproot leftist terror cells” since Trump’s executive order.
Jenny Carroll, a professor at the Texas A&M School of Law and a former public defender who has written about issues in policing protests, said she didn’t think evidence pointed to an organized group effort to seriously attack law enforcement.
“You want to make sure that the people who you’re assigning this increased liability to actually are part of this group that poses this big danger, and that’s what I think was missing for me in this case,” Carroll said. “It just didn’t seem like there was this big connection among all these people to some broader organized group where they had agreed upon this type of action, or that it was foreseeable that someone would engage in this type of action.”
During the course of the trial, the defendants and their lawyers said they did not know about plans to ambush law enforcement and that firearms were brought to the protest for self-defense. Most of the 11 firearms reported were left in cars during the protest, defense lawyers said during the trial.
Four defendants — Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris and Rueda — were also charged with attempted murder, but jurors failed to convict on those counts. They had been charged under the doctrine of Pinkerton Liability, which holds that defendants can be held liable if they could reasonably foresee that a crime would occur.
According to a DOJ release, three of the defendants, Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, and Savanna Batten, were members of a book club that distributed “insurrectionary materials,” which included short, self-published booklets called zines. Prosecutors introduced the zines and other materials as evidence of a network of anti-government groups aligning under Song’s leadership to form a terrorist antifa “cell.”
From what she saw, Carroll said the materials produced certainly indicated a dislike of the current administration, but failed to suggest an organized terrorist cell.
“It can’t just be, ‘we’re agreeing, in theory, that there’s a problem with the U.S. government.’ It has to be, ‘we agree there is a problem with the U.S. government, and we want to commit criminal acts to overthrow or undermine U.S. policy.’ That, to me, seemed to be lacking,” Carroll said.
A Gray Area
Exactly what constitutes a domestic terrorist organization is a gray area under U.S. law. Unlike foreign terrorist organizations, there is no formally outlined procedure for designating a domestic terrorist organization, nor is there a list of such organizations.
“It’s not enough to just say I disagree with the government; it’s that they are actually taking acts that are going to undermine the government,” Carroll said. “And that’s an incredibly broad definition, and you have an executive branch that has the power to designate those organizations, and that’s the same branch of government that then has the power to prosecute them. And in this era, the executive is gaining a lot more power than they have previously had.”
She also said the terrorism charges likely persuaded the jurors to view defendants less favorably and that the government’s steps to label protesters as terrorists mirror a wider pattern of suppression that she said may have a “chilling” effect on protesters.
“We’re seeing this certainly in the pro-Palestinian protests,” Carroll said. “We’re seeing this, I think, now, in a lot of the anti-ICE protests. We’re seeing the federal government bring claims against people and try to argue that it’s part of this larger organizational effort to undermine the U.S. government, as opposed to individual citizens exercising individual rights collectively…”
“One of the reasons that’s so troubling to me — not just as a scholar, but as a citizen of the United States — is that one of the really fundamental things the founders understood when they created the country, in 1787, as they were writing what became the Constitution, adding the Bill of Rights, and constructing the First Amendment, is the power of citizen dissent.”
Jeffrey Addicott, a right-leaning Saint Mary’s School of Law professor and former head of its terrorism law center, said he was “gratified” by the convictions and said it was an issue of political violence, not free speech.
“This is a domestic terrorist organization. They have roots throughout the nation, and they’re very elusive,” Addicott said. “This will send a signal to other individuals that think they want to get involved in antifa. Hopefully, it’ll be a chilling message to them, that protest is obviously part of America, but using violence, engaging in violence, conspiring to engage in violence, will land you in jail where you belong.”
Addicott said while he thinks antifa fits the still-hypothetical definition of a domestic terrorist organization, the term remains ambiguous and could lead to First Amendment violations without formal action from lawmakers.
“If they designate that organization as a domestic terrorist organization, then the issue is, where does free speech stop and becoming involved in a quote-unquote terrorist organization begin? We convicted these individuals with criminal offenses that have been around for a very long time,” Addicott said. “And I think we should probably separate that victory from the issue of designating domestic terrorist organizations, because Congress needs to do that. They need to set the guardrails on them.”
