Demonstrators in support of the Prairieland defendants outside a federal courthouse in Fort Worth, Texas, March 13, 2026.Kevin Krause/Dallas Morning News/Getty
On Tuesday, eight protesters who the Justice Department accused of having connections to antifa were sentenced to decades in federal prison over a shooting outside a Texas immigration detention center that left one police officer wounded.
The demonstrator who was convicted of shooting and wounded the officer, former US Marine Corps reservist Benjamin Song, was convicted of attempted murder in March and received a 100-year prison term. Seven other protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 70 years.
US District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush nominee, said the defendants in what has become known as the Prairieland trial, didn’t participate in a protest but “an assault on democracy.”
Justice Department prosecutors under the Trump administration have made extensive use of wide-ranging conspiracy charges in cases like Prairieland, where some of the defendants who received decades-long sentences were not involved with the planning of the protest in question and left when guards at the facility asked them to.
As my colleague Schuyler Mitchell wrote in September, the Trump administration signed a September 22 executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization and a memo three days later, known as NSPM-7, assigning federal agencies to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” protesters engaging in “anti-capitalism,” “anti-fascism,” and “anti-Americanism.” The Prairieland trial was one of the first tests of the White House’s ability to make such claims stick.
The defendants, who were protesting the Prairieland immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas, denied that they were affiliated with antifa, a decentralized term for various left-wing activists and anti-fascist groups, and were demonstrating in support of immigrants being detained at the facility.
In November, seven other defendants who were present at Prairieland pleaded guilty to federal charges of providing material support for terrorism or damaging property.
The Trump administration has deployed allegations of terrorism against protesters at an unprecedented scale. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz pointed out, the Justice Department charged 15 Minneapolis-area residents last week with felony “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers,” and secured a conviction on the same charges against three Spokane, Washington, protesters. Both groups protested ICE facilities.
