From the beginning, it was clear the federal government had no case against the Prairieland ICE detention center protestors, so they created a false narrative to justify outrageous charges. We joined organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, Immigration Legal Resource Center, Texas Civil Rights Project, Houston Leads, and Texas Jail Project in opposing the arrests of the Prairieland defendants. 

While this was the first time federal authorities have brought what they’ve publicly called an “anti-terrorism” case against “Antifa”, this tactic should be understood in the context of a long history of the government framing political activity as violent and a threat to national security. However, the Prairieland case is particularly alarming because of the active collusion between the Oval Office, the local federal prosecutor’s office, and the presiding judges, who all expressed an intent to send a political message by seeking the maximum penalty allowed. While Trump’s 2025 Executive Order that designates Antifa, an idea, as a terrorist threat and domestic terrorist organization, has no legal basis, it nonetheless encourages government actors to label anyone an Antifa supporter or affiliate to provide rhetorical cover for nakedly partisan and unjust attempts to silence and incarcerate them. 

This case could certainly have a chilling effect on protests and speech that speak truth to power. Organizations, grassroots movements, activists, and protestors need to stand up and oppose the extreme, unjust sentences given to the Prairieland activists of 30 to 100 years. Actively fighting state attacks against liberatory ideas, in this case anti-fascism, is not only essential to justice movements but to democracy itself. 

This administration is strategically laying new political terrain for the rapid intensification of its authoritarian and fascist agenda. Yet this is also an opportunity. The urgent necessity of our movements to play the long game and build a mainstream political consensus opposing authoritarianism and fascism cannot be overemphasized. 

And when, or if, a real people-centered politician is ever elected to the White House, or even a liberal/progressive politician, we will accept absolutely nothing less than the diminishing and dismantling of the FBI, DOJ and ICE so that a president can never use these institutions again to terrorize and repress the citizenry. To quote Grover Norquist, one of the champions of fiscal conservatives, “these agencies should be shrunk to a size small enough to drown it in a bathtub.”

—Robert Saleem Holbrook, ALC