The Government Is Building Antifa in Court

A violent Texas case is becoming the foundation for a domestic terrorism system Congress never authorized, and the label is already traveling to Minnesota.

Jun 25, 2026

The Arrest Comes Before the Verdict

Before a Minnesota jury heard a witness, examined a message, or weighed a single piece of evidence, the federal government had already named the enemy. A federal indictment charges fifteen people associated with Direct Action Minnesota in a case arising from anti-ICE activity. Prosecutors allege blockades, monitoring, and following of federal vehicles, encrypted communications, threats, assaults, property damage, and a coordinated effort to impede immigration enforcement. Eleven defendants are charged only with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers. Four face conspiracy counts plus additional charges tied to specific alleged conduct.

Those are serious allegations. Threats, assault, stalking, property destruction, obstruction, and genuine criminal agreements can be prosecuted. Political purpose does not turn violence into protected speech, but the administration is not presenting Minnesota as an ordinary criminal case.

The DOJ has placed the defendants inside a national story about Antifa, domestic terrorism, and organized political violence. It says the prosecution is part of a White House-directed NSPM-7 initiative led by Joint Task Force Vanguard, an investigative and prosecutorial effort integrating federal, state, and local authorities.

In Texas, federal prosecutors recently secured convictions arising from an armed attack on the Prairieland immigration detention facility. According to the DOJ’s account of the trial evidence, participants brought firearms and body armor, threw fireworks treated in the case as explosives, vandalized the facility, and wounded an Alvarado police officer when Benjamin Song opened fire. A jury convicted Song of attempted murder and convicted other defendants of serious offenses involving rioting, explosives, and material support.

The government had every right to prosecute that violence, but the DOJ did not stop with the shooting. It described the defendants as a “North Texas Antifa Cell” connected to a “larger militant enterprise,” and its sentencing announcement expressly presented the case as the first Antifa-affiliated sentencing after President Trump’s September 2025 order declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.

Now the same political label surrounds a different prosecution involving different people, evidence, and alleged conduct.

A shooting becomes evidence of a cell. The cell becomes evidence of an organization. The label receives an executive designation, a national task force, and a place inside the next courtroom. Eventually, the label begins doing work that prosecutors should still be required to do with evidence.

The government may prove a conspiracy, but may not declare the opposition itself to be one.

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What the Government Must Prove

The Minnesota indictment alleges that participants organized blockades, tracked federal vehicles, followed officers, communicated through Signal chats, interfered with government operations, and, in several instances, threatened officers, assaulted them, or damaged federal property. If prosecutors prove those allegations beyond a reasonable doubt, political motivation will not erase criminal responsibility.

However, the indictment does not accuse every defendant of doing the same thing. Eleven of the fifteen are charged only with the overarching conspiracy count. For them, liability will depend on whether prosecutors can prove that they knowingly joined an agreement to impede or injure federal officers, not merely that they participated in the same movement, attended the same demonstrations, or communicated with some of the same people. That isn’t a technical distinction. It is the case.

Conspiracy law is necessary when people divide responsibilities or conceal plans. It is also dangerous when wrapped around a political movement. The wider the government draws the circle, the easier it becomes to fit different people, messages, and incidents into a single story. Speech can reveal intent, planning, or a criminal threat. Political anger, slogans, encryption, and association do not automatically establish criminal intent.

The government must prove the bridge between expression and unlawful conduct. It must establish what each defendant knew, what each agreed to, and what each intentionally did or assisted.

The government is entitled to present its evidence, but not to let the label decide what the evidence means.

The Terrorist Organization Without an Organization

The administration’s theory depends on more than proving what these defendants did. It also depends on persuading the public that “Antifa” names a coherent national enemy.

The Congressional Research Service has described Antifa as a decentralized movement and warns that treating it as a singular organization may be difficult and may implicate First Amendment protections. DOJ’s own Minnesota announcement similarly says that many self-described Antifa groups operate locally in small “affinity groups.” Local groups may organize, and separate groups may coordinate. None of that automatically establishes one nationwide enterprise.

If prosecutors allege that members of Direct Action Minnesota entered a conspiracy, they must prove it with evidence specific to those people. Shared ideology does not establish shared command. Similar tactics do not establish common leadership. Two groups using the same slogans do not necessarily belong to the same organization.

The government may prove coordination, financing, leadership, or an operational relationship, but it may not treat the political label as that proof. Otherwise, a local group becomes a cell, a donor becomes a financier, a shared message becomes a directive, and a protest network becomes a command structure.

The organization begins to appear real because the government has already named it. Yet, a government label cannot create the organization the government is supposed to prove.

The Government Is Building the Category in Court

The Texas case shows how the label can harden. The Prairieland attack occurred on July 4, 2025. The DOJ says that at least eleven participants arrived at the facility at night, brought eleven firearms and body armor, threw fireworks at the property, and vandalized vehicles and a guard structure. When officers responded, Song opened fire and struck an Alvarado police officer in the neck. The jury convicted Song of attempted murder and a firearm offense. Eight defendants were convicted of riot, material support, and explosives counts. A ninth was convicted of evidence concealment.

Prosecutors described the defendants as a North Texas Antifa cell. A government expert told the jury that Antifa’s coordinated efforts involved organized riots, assaults, and armed confrontations. The DOJ’s post-verdict and sentencing announcements described the group as part of a larger militant enterprise and pledged to dismantle Antifa and its funding networks nationwide.

The attack occurred more than two months before Trump’s September 22 order declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. The DOJ’s sentencing release explicitly linked the case to the later order and called it the first sentencing of Antifa-affiliated defendants after that declaration.

The process risks becoming circular. The president declares an organization. Prosecutors place defendants inside a cell. A government witness describes a larger enterprise. Jurors convict crimes involving real violence. DOJ then points to those convictions as confirmation of the organization declared by the president.

The phrase “providing material support to terrorists” makes the leap especially easy to miss. Section 2339A prohibits providing material support while knowing or intending that it will be used to prepare for or carry out specified crimes. It does not require proof that the recipient is an officially designated organization. Section 2339B, by contrast, criminalizes material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations.

A person can violate §2339A by knowingly supporting a listed offense without supporting a formally designated organization. The Texas verdicts may establish support for specified crimes, but they do not establish Antifa’s nationwide structure or statutory legal status.

Support for a crime becomes support for Antifa, Antifa becomes a terrorist organization, and the organization becomes the reason future defendants should be viewed with suspicion.

A single jury verdict does not create a binding national precedent, but a disputed assumption can harden through indictments, expert testimony, evidentiary rulings, sentencing arguments, and repetition in subsequent prosecutions.

The government had every right to prosecute the Texas attack. It did not acquire the right to manufacture a national organization, punish an ideology, or spread one person’s bullet across everyone placed beneath the same political label.

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A President Cannot Invent Domestic Terrorism Law

Federal law defines “domestic terrorism,” but the definition does not create a general, standalone offense bearing that name. Prosecutors must charge existing crimes such as murder, assault, arson, bombing, threats, obstruction, weapons offenses, or conspiracy.

Congress has also created a detailed statutory process for designating foreign terrorist organizations. That system requires findings by the Secretary of State and provides procedures governing designation, review, revocation, and legal consequences. Importantly, Congress has not enacted an equivalent regime for domestic political movements.

Trump’s September order declares Antifa a domestic terrorist organization and directs agencies to investigate and disrupt unlawful operations associated with it. However, a presidential order cannot create the domestic equivalent of the foreign terrorist organization statute.

It also cannot make political association a federal crime. It cannot convert support for a domestic movement into §2339B liability. It cannot, by itself, establish who legally belongs to Antifa, what constitutes membership, or when contact with an activist amounts to participation in a terrorist enterprise.

If the United States is to create a domestic designation system, Congress would have to answer difficult questions in public. What qualifies as an organization? What evidence permits designation? Can the organization challenge the decision? How is independent advocacy separated from criminal support? What prevents a president from designating political opponents?

Congress might decide existing laws are sufficient or that a domestic designation system creates unacceptable First Amendment dangers. Either way, the decision belongs to the people’s branch.

Congress did not create a law on domestic terrorist organizations, and the executive branch should not be permitted to build it one indictment, one expert witness, and one verdict at a time.

The White House Defined the Enemy and Built the Machinery

The administration did not begin with the Minnesota defendants. It first defined the political threat it wanted federal law enforcement to pursue. Three days after the Antifa order, Trump issued NSPM-7, directing a national strategy against domestic terrorism and organized political violence. The memorandum listed what it called “common threads” animating violent conduct under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for overthrowing the government, extremism concerning migration, race and gender, and hostility toward traditional views of family, religion and morality.

While ideology can help establish motive after the government identifies a crime, it cannot become the reason the government assumes a crime is waiting to be found. Anti-capitalism is not a criminal offense. Opposition to immigration enforcement is not terrorism. Criticism of Christianity is protected speech. Opinions are not crimes.

The danger is that those ideas appear at the beginning of a national investigative strategy. Instead of starting with an assault and following evidence toward those responsible, investigators can begin with disfavored beliefs and search outward for conduct that justifies treating their holders as dangerous.

NSPM-7 directs federal law enforcement to investigate organizations, networks, funding sources, and other participants behind political violence, using violent and organized crime strategies to disrupt entire networks. It also says implementation must remain consistent with the law.

The administration has built an enforcement structure around that framework. The DOJ says the Minnesota prosecution is part of the nationwide NSPM-7 initiative led by Joint Task Force Vanguard and integrating federal, state, and local partners. Political violence should be investigated regardless of ideology. The problem is the framework governing that cooperation.

A label created in Washington can travel through task-force briefings, intelligence products, databases, financial investigations, local partnerships, and charging recommendations. Language developed in Texas can become the starting assumption in Minnesota.

Once Antifa is entered into the system as a national threat, investigators may stop asking whether two groups are connected and begin asking how. Shared contacts, donations, encrypted chats, or attendance at the same demonstrations can be arranged to form a suspicious network, since the government has already decided in advance what the network represents.

A political label becomes more dangerous when the government builds a national task force to decide who belongs beneath it.

The Label Can Shape the Case and the Sentence

The DOJ eventually states what the Constitution requires: an indictment contains allegations, and every defendant remains presumed innocent unless proven guilty. However, that disclaimer arrives after the department has already described Direct Action Minnesota’s structure, ideology, methods, relationships, and alleged Antifa ties in declarative language, connected the prosecution to a national initiative, and quoted officials calling the defendants rioters before trial.

The government may explain charges, but federal labels carry authority. A person described as connected to a terrorist movement may lose employment, housing, relationships, and public standing before trial, and the label can follow a defendant into sentencing.

On June 23, the DOJ announced sentences totaling 450 years for eight Texas defendants: 100 years for Song; 70 years for Maricela Rueda; 50 years each for Cameron Arnold, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris, and Elizabeth Soto; and 30 years for Daniel Sanchez-Estrada.

Song’s case stands apart because the jury convicted him of attempted murder and discharging a firearm. However, conspiracy and group liability should not erase every distinction in culpability. Sanchez-Estrada was convicted of concealing records and conspiring to conceal evidence—not attempted murder, rioting, material support, or the explosives counts—yet received 30 years.

That does not prove his sentence was unlawful. A responsible judgment requires the sentencing record. However, the punishment demands scrutiny. Did the courts distinguish carefully among the shooter, those who knowingly prepared for violence, participants in the riot, and those convicted of concealing evidence? Did the government’s terrorist-cell framing influence how each defendant’s conduct was understood?

The most serious act committed by one person cannot become the lens through which everyone else is judged. A conspiracy may establish shared criminal responsibility. It should not turn every participant into the shooter.

Minnesota Is the Test Case, Not the Limit

Texas and Minnesota are not the same case. Texas involved an armed attack, explosives, a wounded officer, and evidence a jury found sufficient for serious convictions. Minnesota involves different people, organizations, events, and evidence that has not been tested at trial.

A Texas conviction cannot establish what a Minnesota defendant knew. An expert’s description of a Texas cell cannot prove that Direct Action Minnesota belonged to the same enterprise. Similar slogans, beliefs, or opposition to ICE cannot establish a common command structure across state lines.

Texas may prove what happened in Texas, but it cannot establish what fifteen different people intended in Minnesota. However, once separate cases are placed beneath the same label, the strongest facts from one prosecution can influence how ambiguous facts are understood in another. A rifle fired in Texas can make a Minnesota message sound more threatening. In one case, explosives can make protest supplies in another appear more sinister. The label carries the violence across the distance.

That machinery will not remain ideologically loyal. A future administration could apply the same method to gun-rights organizations after one armed faction commits violence, anti-abortion networks after an attack on a clinic, religious groups after one extremist’s crime, labor organizers after property destruction, or antiwar activists after a confrontation. Those movements are not identical, but the machinery does not care. A database built for Antifa does not erase itself when another party wins. A task force trained to map one political network does not forget how. A legal theory accepted against one movement remains available when prosecutors choose another.

You do not protect constitutional limits because you trust the first target. You protect them because you do not know who the government will name next.

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Congress Cannot Be a Comment Section

Congress should not wait for courts to discover the limits of a system Congress never authorized. It should demand the legal analysis supporting Trump’s Antifa order, along with the directives, training materials, and classification standards governing Joint Task Force Vanguard. It should determine who decides whether a person, organization, or prosecution is Antifa-linked, and what evidence is required before the label is added to an investigative file.

The public deserves to know whether agencies are mapping lawful organizations, collecting information about donors, journalists, lawyers, or uncharged people, entering protected beliefs into databases, or sharing records with local authorities.

Congress should ask whether the Texas prosecution is shaping Minnesota. Are the same experts being used? Are Texas descriptions of Antifa appearing in Minnesota reports or charging discussions? Are prosecutors treating local groups as cells of a broader enterprise before proving an operational connection?

It should also ask whether prosecutors seek harsher punishment because defendants are labeled members of a terrorist cell and whether the same standards apply across ideologies.

Courts can determine whether particular evidence is admissible and whether an individual defendant’s rights were violated. They cannot conduct the national accounting Congress can demand.

Republicans should not surrender Congress’s power because they despise the current target. Democrats should not mistake press conferences, fundraising emails, and social-media outrage for oversight. Lawmakers should force hearings, demand documents, question officials under oath, and put legislation on the floor.

Congress should make clear that presidents may prioritize enforcement of existing crimes, but may not create the legal equivalent of a domestic terrorist organization through executive declaration. It should protect lawful speech, ideology, association, legal representation, and journalism from being treated as evidence of membership in a government-defined enemy network.

When Congress gives up responsibility, the executive branch does not leave the space empty. It fills it. Congress cannot complain about executive overreach from the same chairs in which it surrendered the power to stop it.

The First Amendment Is Not a Conspiracy

The government may hold the Texas defendants accountable for every crime proved against them. It may seek convictions in Minnesota for every threat, assault, obstruction, destructive act, or unlawful agreement it proves beyond a reasonable doubt. What it may not do is use the term “Antifa” to carry the weight of evidence.

A political label cannot prove that fifteen people shared one criminal objective. A presidential declaration cannot create the statutory domestic terrorism regime that Congress never authorized. A task force cannot turn a lawful association into membership. A Texas verdict cannot decide what different defendants intended hundreds of miles away.

That burden is not weakness. It is the constitutional discipline separating law enforcement from political enforcement.

The First Amendment does not protect attempted murder, credible threats, arson, assault, or knowing participation in a criminal agreement. It protects the right to organize, associate, criticize government, oppose immigration enforcement, condemn capitalism, challenge religion, and hold views a president finds offensive.

Those freedoms do not disappear because someone else who used similar language committed a crime.

The country does not need a more efficient method for declaring domestic enemies. It needs prosecutors who prove individual crimes, judges who refuse ideological shortcuts, and a people’s branch willing to protect its lawmaking power.

Violence is not speech. Association is not agreement. Opposition is not terrorism.

The government may prove a conspiracy. It may not declare the opposition itself to be one.

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Sources:

Berris, Peter G., Michael A. Foster, and Jonathan M. Gaffney. “Domestic Terrorism: Overview of Federal Criminal Law and Constitutional Issues.” Congressional Research Service, July 2, 2021.
Sacco, Lisa N. “Are Antifa Members Domestic Terrorists? Background on Antifa and Federal Classification of Their Actions.” Congressional Research Service, updated June 9, 2020.
Trump, Donald J. “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. The White House, September 25, 2025.
Trump, Donald J. “Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization.” Executive order. The White House, September 22, 2025.
United States Department of Justice. “15 Members of Direct Action Minnesota, a Minneapolis-Based Direct Action Group with Antifa Ties, Indicted.” Office of Public Affairs, June 16, 2026.
United States Department of Justice. “Antifa Cell Members Convicted in Prairieland ICE Detention Center Shooting.” Office of Public Affairs, March 13, 2026.
United States Department of Justice. “Leader of Antifa Cell Members in North Texas Sentenced to 100 Years in Prison for Terrorist Attack on ICE Facility.” Office of Public Affairs, June 23, 2026.
United States Department of Justice. “Sant et al. Indictment—MN.” Case No. 0:26-cr-00115-KMM-DTS, filed June 11, 2026, U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota.
United States House of Representatives, Office of the Law Revision Counsel. “8 U.S.C. § 1189: Designation of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” United States Code.
United States House of Representatives, Office of the Law Revision Counsel. “18 U.S.C. § 2331: Definitions.” United States Code.
United States House of Representatives, Office of the Law Revision Counsel. “18 U.S.C. § 2339A: Providing Material Support to Terrorists.” United States Code.
United States House of Representatives, Office of the Law Revision Counsel. “18 U.S.C. § 2339B: Providing Material Support or Resources to Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” United States Code.