Federal prosecutors on Thursday unsealed terrorism charges against two men accused of attacking an immigration detention center outside Dallas this summer as part of what was described as a heavily-armed “cell” of the far-left movement known as antifa.
The indictment brought against the men — Cameron Arnold and Zachary Evetts — appeared to be the first time that terrorism charges had been filed against anyone said to be associated with antifa, which the Trump administration has repeatedly vowed to crack down on in recent weeks.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the charges, which were filed in Federal District Court in Fort Worth, in a brief social media post.
“As @POTUS has made clear,” Ms. Bondi wrote, “Antifa is a left-wing terrorist organization. They will be prosecuted as such.”
A separate shooting at an immigration facility in Dallas last month left two detainees dead. The gunman, Joshua Jahn, shot and killed himself.
Last month, President Trump signed an executive order targeting antifa, which takes its name from its antifascist political alignment. The order threatened to undertake “investigatory and prosecutorial action” against those who financially support the leftist movement, and also said that Mr. Trump was declaring antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” a designation that does not actually exist under U.S. law.
The 12-page indictment accused Mr. Arnold and Mr. Evetts of providing material support to terrorists, and of attempted murder and firearms offenses after taking part in the armed assault on July 4 against the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. The indictment said that the two men were part of a group of at least 11 masked suspects clad in black who shot fireworks and ultimately rifles at the facility, striking a police officer working there in the neck before they fled into the darkness.
Even though antifa has not been designated as a terrorist organization, the material support statute has been used against other extremist groups — especially on the right — that were also not formally singled out as terrorists.
While Mr. Trump and some of his top aides have spoken at times of antifa as though it were a clear-cut extremist organization, like the far-right Proud Boys, with a knowable membership and hierarchy, the movement is in fact a decentralized collection of loosely affiliated groups with similar but not always identical objectives.
The indictment defined antifa somewhat more precisely, calling it a “militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups, primarily ascribing to a revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology.” The enterprise, the indictment added, explicitly calls for “the overthrow of the United States government, law enforcement authorities and the system of law.”
The use of the term “enterprise” suggested that the F.B.I. might have opened a powerful and sweeping form of inquiry into antifa known as an enterprise investigation, said Thomas E. Brzozowski, the former counsel for domestic terrorism in the Justice Department’s national security division. Enterprise investigations allow the federal authorities to deeply scrutinize the structure, finances, membership and goals of targeted groups or organizations.
Mr. Brzozowski expressed concern that the Trump administration was using a somewhat vague definition of antifa that offered no clear evidence of connections between targeted people or groups other than their leftist ideology. Given the potent nature of an enterprise investigation, he said, the inquiry could end up focusing not only on those accused of committing actual violence, but on others adjacent to them who believe in similar ideas but have not acted violently.
“That’s what happens when you open such a broad investigation into what is essentially an idea,” he said. “This appears to be investigation by proclamation instead of investigation by sound intelligence.”
The Justice Department at Mr. Trump’s urging has already asked federal prosecutors to investigate the financier George Soros, citing a report by a conservative watchdog group that accused the liberal megadonor of financing groups “tied to terrorism or extremist violence.”
More recently, Vice President JD Vance said “left-wing political violence” was such “a big problem” that the Trump administration intended “to train the investigatory and law enforcement powers of the government to focus” on it.
According to the indictment unsealed on Thursday, the leader of the so-called antifa cell in Texas trained subordinates in “firearms and close-quarters combat.” The cell was armed with more than 50 weapons purchased in the Fort Worth area, it added, and used an encrypted messaging app to communicate.
Before the attack on the detention center, some members of the cell gathered at a nearby house to prepare. They exchanged a map of the facility, the indictment said, and planned to bring rifles, medical equipment and fireworks.
“Cops are not trained or equipped for more than one rifle,” the indictment quoted the cell’s leader as saying, “so it tends to make them back off.”
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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