The Prairieland ICE Detention Center trial ended today with convictions for all eight defendants. This is a big deal because it’s the first time antifa goons have been treated like a group of conspirators in court. Had they been cleared, it would have been seen by antifa as a green light to continue their activities. Now, probably not so much.
Eight defendants were found guilty Friday of providing material support to terrorists for their roles in the antifa attack on the Prairieland ICE detention center in 2025, marking one of the most sweeping terrorism-related convictions in the case to date…
Alvarado Police Chief Teddy May welcomed the guilty verdicts, noting that Lt. Gross – the officer shot in the neck during the attack – has fully recovered…
“I don’t believe any reasonable person could believe the suspects didn’t know what they were doing,” May said.
Some reports are describing this as a “mixed verdict” which is accurate because the jury could have convicted all of the members of the group of attempted murder but instead they only convicted Benjamin Song, the person who fired the shots at a police officer, of attempted murder. However, all of the members were convicted on count 1 (rioting), on count 2 (providing material support to terrorists) and on count 3 (explosive consipracy).
As I described here last week, the defense in this case was arguing that antifa is an ideology not a group, and if so you can’t prosecute people for holding opinions. Members of the group claimed they believed they were merely holding a noise protest with some vandalism. Despite having multiple guns and body armor at the scene and despite Benjamin Song shouting “get to the rifles” when he attacked a police officer, they wanted a jury to believe they were just bystanders.
Obviously the jury didn’t buy it. Prosecutors made the case that this was a group of conspirators who acted together toward a unified (illegal) goal.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith argued during closing arguments that the defendants, led by Song, plotted the attack by arming themselves, wearing all black clothing known as “black bloc” to conceal their identities and hiding their phones in bags that prevent police from tracking them — all “antifa tactics,” he said.
“What’s at issue here is using legal things to do illegal things,” Smith said. “Why wear black bloc? Why pay cash for otherwise legal fireworks? Why put your phone in a Faraday bag? The answer is: You know what you’re doing is illegal.”
As the jury watched, Smith displayed slides on a flat-screen TV and said that even though only Song was specifically accused of shooting the officer, the group members “are liable because they know or should have known what Song was going to do” and they “helped him cover it up … because of antifa.” Smith said that after the shooting, the group began deleting messages and hiding “anarchist hate-the-government material.”
The Intercept is of course unhappy about the outcome but they at least seem to grasp the significance of it.
The widely watched trial could serve as a bellwether as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to crack down on left-wing groups — and the convictions could encourage prosecutors to bring more such charges. A top FBI official said in December that the agency is now treating “antifa” as a major domestic terror threat…
In a significant victory for the government, jurors convicted eight defendants on material support for terrorism charges for wearing black clothes to the late-night demonstration. That use of “black bloc” clothing was an antifa tactic that assisted in the shooting of the officer, prosecutors said during their closing arguments.
The use of black bloc clothing is an antifa tactic and it is specifically designed to protect individuals from being held responsible for illegal acts. Everyone who wears it to a protest knows this. You carry out vandalism or punch someone in the face and then you blend back into the group of identically dressed people. So long as none of the conspirators talk, it becomes much more difficult to identify the individual responsible. It’s absurd that the Intercept is pretending like they don’t know this.
In this case, several of the conspirators did talk in exchange for a plea deal. At least one of them testified in the trial that Benjamin Song had later admitted privately that he fired the shot that nearly killed the police officer.
Hopefully, this is just the first of many similar trials. Antifa might have gotten away with this in Oregon or California, but not in Texas.
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