FORT WORTH — The prosecutor displayed photos on a courtroom television of evidence seized from the garage of defendants on trial for alleged involvement in a radical left-wing conspiracy:
Photocopiers, a bookbinding machine and leaflets called “zines.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith asked the FBI agent on the witness stand to identify the evidence. Special Agent Morris Boatner said he had found the items in a search for “mass production of propaganda.”
The defense was quick to object.
“Hasn’t it been part of American history to publish written material contrary to the government?” Miles Brissette, an attorney representing one of the accused, asked the FBI agent, citing Thomas Paine’s famous Revolutionary-era essay “Common Sense.”
“That’s not part of our training at the academy,” Boatner said.
District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of President Donald Trump, interjected his own question for the witness.
“There is a robust history going back to the Founding Fathers of folks printmaking contrary to the government,” he said, “and there’s nothing illegal about that, right?”
No, Boatner conceded.
The brief exchange in the second week of this closely watched federal case highlighted the challenges the government faces in its first attempt to prosecute an alleged group of antifa protesters as “domestic terrorists” who share an ideology bent on violence. The case stems from what the defendants call a “noise demonstration” last July 4 outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Center about 30 miles south in Alvarado, Texas, and ended with one of the protesters allegedly shooting and wounding a police officer called to the scene.
The nine defendants, including a middle school teacher, a college student, a mechanical engineer, a UPS worker and two transgender women, were indicted by a grand jury collectively on charges of attempted murder of a police officer and unarmed correctional officers, providing material support to terrorists, rioting, using weapons and explosives, and obstruction. All pleaded not guilty. If convicted on the multiple charges with enhancements, the accused could effectively receive life sentences.
Weeks before the indictments in November, Trump signed an executive order that federal law enforcement should take “investigatory and prosecutorial action” against those who financially support antifa and labeled it a domestic terrorist organization. Even though that designation isn’t part of existing U.S. law, the Prairieland case could become a playbook for prosecuting left-wing groups.
The case has been politically charged from the start, when Pittman called a mistrial during jury selection due to a defense attorney’s T-shirt that depicted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Shirley Chisholm and scenes from the civil rights movement. When the trial resumed, Pittman made the unusual decision to question and seat a new jury himself.
Last week, prosecutors walked jurors through the alleged attack: The group arrived at the facility late that night dressed in black — also known as “black bloc” to avoid being identified — and began spray-painting anti-police graffiti, slashing tires, destroying a surveillance camera and setting off fireworks. Officers inside the facility called local police.
When Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross arrived just before 11 p.m. and got out of his car, one of the protesters — former Marine reservist Benjamin Song, who the prosecutors argued was the group’s leader — allegedly yelled “Get to the rifles!” He then opened fire with his AR-15-style rifle with a modified trigger that increased the rate of fire, according to investigators.
The bullet passed through Gross’s shoulder and out the back of his neck, narrowly missing his spine. He testified last week that he believed he had walked into an ambush and pulled his gun.
Most of the accused were arrested near the scene, but Song evaded capture for 11 days and several people not at the demonstration were charged with allegedly aiding him with disguises, transportation and gear.
On Wednesday, Smith attempted to build a case against the rest of the defendants. He argued they were part of an armed antifa conspiracy to attack the officer even though investigators acknowledge at least one, Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada, was not at the ICE detention center. He’s accused of trying to hide a box of “anti-government propaganda” days later.
Several AR-style rifles were found at the scene, according to the criminal complaint, some defendants were armed, wearing body armor and carrying two-way radios. Prosecutors said 11 guns were recovered in total, with several found in defendants’ cars, disassembled in backpacks or near the detention center entrance. Investigators also recovered magazines from the scene containing ammunition, 12 sets of body armor, fireworks, a flag that said “Resist Fascism, Fight Oligarchy” and fliers that said “Fight ICE terror with class war.”
Smith displayed Signal messages exchanged by the accused: Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, and Elizabeth and Ines Soto. The prosecutor argued they planned and did “reconnaissance,” scoping out the area in advance.
He showed photos of fireworks found in a cooler at the scene, photos of the accused using rifles at a North Texas shooting range and attending the left-wing Emma Goldman Book Club.
Defense attorneys and even the judge repeatedly reminded jurors: All that was legal. “Us Texans have guns, right?” said Morris’s attorney, Warren St. John, while questioning an investigator.
Morris, who is transgender, brought two AR-style rifles, body armor and portable radios to the protest, which were seized from her van, Texas Ranger Tyler Williamson testified. But after the shooting, he said Morris told him she had never left the van and that “there really wasn’t a plan.”
“She said they bring rifles in case there is violence,” Williamson said, noting that at a previous protest someone had been struck by a car.
Morris later summoned investigators to the jail where Williamson said she cried as she told them she felt “disgust and betrayal” that a member of the group “shot someone in cold blood.”
“In all this conversation about planning, there’s no talk of hurting anyone, is there?” St. John asked an FBI agent who testified about interviewing Morris after the shooting. “If she was upset that a shooting occurred,” he added, “to me that would be the complete opposite of planning to harm someone with guns.”
Prosecutors have defined antifa as “a militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups, primarily ascribing to a revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology, which explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government, law enforcement authorities and the system of law.” Short for “anti-fascists,” antifa is a loosely knit movement of far-left activists who militantly oppose fascism and right-wing ideologies and who are often anti-capitalist or anti-state.
Defense lawyers sought to prevent the jury from hearing about their clients’ potential connections to antifa, arguing that the term was “highly prejudicial” and that prosecutors were using it to “smear” them. Pittman rejected their requests.
In addition to the nine on trial in Fort Worth, seven other people have pleaded guilty to federal charges of providing material support to terrorists in November and face up to 15 years in prison. As part of their pleas, several became “cooperating witnesses”; the first testified Wednesday.
Lynette Sharp took the stand wearing an orange-and-white striped jail uniform, her hands cuffed. Sharp, 57, of nearby Watauga, testified that she did not attend the ICE detention center protest, but helped shelter and transport Song afterward.
Instead of shoring up prosecutors’ case, she complicated it.
As she described meeting them at LGBTQ events and community centers, accompanying them to their homes, monthly Emma Goldman Book Club meetings and Socialist Rifle Association target practice, Sharp painted a picture of the group as a loose-knit social circle rather than an organized antifa cell.
They were legally armed, exchanged messages on encrypted Signal chats using nicknames, but had no clear leader, she said. Smith, the prosecutor, pressed: Did they oppose ICE? Yes, Sharp said vaguely. Did they believe the president was a Nazi, a fascist?
“It was a topic of conversation,” she said. “But I can’t say everyone joined in that conversation.”
Patrick McLain, an attorney representing Evetts, said prosecutors have struggled to prove the conspiracy.
“They really have to establish this terrorist organization,” said McLain, who served for years as a federal prosecutor and military judge, noting, “They can’t say much more than the chat that was seized from Morris’s phone. That they were talking and planned to go to the detention center to do a noise demonstration.”
“The government is trying to label them antifa, but what you really had was people passionate about political events,” said Chris Tolbert, an attorney representing Batten. Tolbert said it’s not clear if the other defendants will take the stand, but his client won’t.
“The real danger in this case is that when we go to a protest, like these protesters were gathered for a cause, we don’t know everyone there and we’re not responsible for what they do,” Tolbert said. “And that shouldn’t present a fear for me to participate and exercise my First Amendment rights.”
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