On the night of July 4, 2025, Lt. Thomas Gross sent out an urgent distress call over his police radio. Gross had received a 911 report of a possible break-in at the Prairieland Detention Center, a sprawling federal immigration facility on the outskirts of Alvarado, Texas, and he responded. Local police officers were regularly dispatched to handle disturbances at the complex, where more than a thousand people were held awaiting deportation. Gross assumed that a worried family member was causing a ruckus, but driving toward the gates, he saw a figure dressed in black running away. He jumped out of his car, shouted for them to stop and drew his weapon. Then came a blast of gunfire. “Fuck, I’m hit!” Gross yelled.
Across Johnson County, a farming and ranching area south of Fort Worth, officers raced toward Prairieland, which lay at the end of an unlit road, ringed by concertina wire and a heavy metal gate. At the entrance, someone had scrawled on a guard shack: “Fuck you pigs.” Gross was found by a city fire marshal, conscious but bleeding from a neck wound. He told the marshal that someone in dark clothing and a neon green ski mask had opened fire on him with a military-style rifle. More shots had followed, from the woods or across the street — Gross wasn’t sure.
Police officers and sheriff’s deputies took off in pursuit. Within minutes, they rounded up several suspects. A woman in black clothing and a ballistic vest, with a knife on her hip, was found lying in the grass. A young man, also dressed in black, was hiding behind a grassy berm with a can of spray paint in his backpack. Five more black-clad figures were spotted walking down a quiet residential street. One officer, noticing that some were wearing body armor, mistook them at first for fellow cops. The police ordered them to sit down on the wet grass and open their packs. The group refused.
“I will not consent to a search,” one said.
“Open the goddamn packs,” an officer said.
“Do you have a warrant?”
“We don’t need a warrant.”
Another officer pried open a pack and began to rifle through the contents.
“Everyone, don’t say anything,” a member of the group told the others. “Don’t talk.”
An eighth suspect, 35-year-old Zachary Evetts, was spotted a few hours after the shooting walking unsteadily along the highway a few miles north, dressed in black and covered in mud and burrs, as if he’d been scrambling through the woods. The police also pulled over a red minivan as it was driving away from Prairieland. The driver, 41-year-old Meagan Morris, told them she’d taken some friends to a protest at the ICE facility, where they wanted to “make some noise.” Inside the van, officers found two Kevlar vests, a ballistic helmet, a walkie-talkie, trauma kits equipped with tourniquets for gunshot wounds, a loaded pistol and an AR-15-style rifle.
Within 24 hours, 10 people were in custody for what federal law enforcement was calling a planned attack on Prairieland. A statewide alert soon went out for an 11th suspect, Benjamin Song, a 32-year-old Dallas resident who authorities believed had shot Gross. F.B.I. tactical units raided homes across the metro region, bashing in doors with battering rams and throwing flash-bang grenades to stun residents, some of whom were taken into custody as accomplices. As the list expanded — 20 people would eventually be rounded up — the F.B.I. tracked Song to an apartment in North Dallas. On July 15, after an 11-day manhunt, a small army of officers broke down the door. Song was shackled and taken to the Johnson County Jail, where he joined the other suspects, many of whom were housed in solitary confinement, on bond originally set at $10 million to $15 million.
The Prairieland arrests were hailed by the government as a milestone event in the Trump administration’s war on “left-wing terrorism,” which Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and a homeland security adviser, has called an existential threat to America. At the trial this spring, prosecutors presented a sensational theory of the case: They claimed that the defendants were “operatives” of antifa, a loosely affiliated movement of left-wing activists that Trump has labeled a domestic terror group. They said the group had plotted to attack the Prairieland facility, setting off fireworks and vandalizing government property in order to lure out, and ostensibly kill, ICE and local law enforcement officers. The “operatives” had conspired to hide their identities, dressing in black clothing and masks, communicating through walkie-talkies or encrypted platforms like Signal, where the conspiracy was allegedly hatched.
A joint state and federal investigation turned up a cache of military-style gear, including ballistic plates, helmets, high-capacity magazines, steel ammunition cans and 50 firearms — many of which were recovered from Song’s apartment. Also found in suspects’ homes, cars or backpacks were fliers and zines promoting anti-police or anarchist views. “All Cops Are Bastards.” “Fight ICE Terror With Class War!” “Make America Not Exist Again.” From the government’s perspective, this material presented evidence of the activists’ violent intent. “Make no mistake, this was not a peaceful protest,” the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, Nancy Larson, said in a statement. “This was an ambush.” If convicted of all charges, which included rioting, attempted murder and material support for terrorism, the defendants faced decades in prison.
The charges provoked instant outrage from a broad coalition of civil liberties advocates, leftists and other critics of the Trump administration, who rejected the government’s argument as not only wrong but dangerous: a chilling attack on the free speech rights of every American. The families and supporters of those arrested maintained that they were nonviolent activists who’d gone to Prairieland to stage a demonstration that would show solidarity with the immigrants detained inside. The guns were for self-defense, in case right-wing agitators came to harass them. The rifles discovered at the scene had been purchased legally, in an open-carry state where many residents carry guns.
With the exception of Song, they noted, no one in the group had fired a weapon. Almost everyone else had stashed their guns in their vehicles, which were parked nearly a quarter-mile away. One defendant hadn’t even been at Prairieland that night, but was charged with the rest of the group because he later moved a box of leftist zines that the government regarded as evidence. These were normal Dallas residents, their supporters said: parents, students, a restaurant server, a tattoo artist, an engineer. Most had never been in trouble with the law. Now they were unlucky pawns in the Trump administration’s war on the left.
The reality of the Prairieland case is stranger and more complex than either narrative suggests. I pieced together the story over six months by covering the trial and conducting dozens of interviews with attorneys, former government officials and friends and family members of the accused, some of whom had never spoken publicly before. At its heart is a charismatic leftist, Benjamin Song, who gained influence over a group of committed but inexperienced activists and channeled their idealism — and their fear. “These weren’t revolutionaries,” said Corey Lyon, a 37-year-old photojournalist and former activist who knew the group. “But the road to radicalization is a lot slipperier than people think.”
Dallas didn’t see much in the way of left-wing activism before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. That summer, a diffuse community began to form on Signal and Discord: anarchists, queer activists, mutual aid workers, progressive gun rights advocates. They were united less by ideology than by a shared sense of isolation in a deep-red state that felt increasingly hostile and dangerous.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, stood onstage at the Capitol rally in Washington, boasting of his legal fight to overturn the election, and pledging to continue the fight. Nearly 10 percent of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were Texans — dozens from the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs alone. Swastika banners started appearing on local highway overpasses.
Then, a month later, a brutal February storm nearly collapsed the state’s independent power grid, plunging millions into darkness during one of the coldest winters on record. Texans found themselves trapped in homes with no insulation as the thermometer dipped — in some areas to below zero. Water pipes burst through walls and ceilings, flooding living rooms. Hundreds of people froze to death, wearing every item of clothing in their wardrobes. There had been no emergency warnings, nothing to advise Texans what to do or how to cope. One local activist told me that his neighbors had to chop up their furniture for firewood. (This activist and others spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because they feared backlash from Song’s supporters or the Trump administration.)
Zachary Evetts never lost power at his home in suburban Waxahachie, but he spent the days of the grid emergency glued to his computer, studying where the latest outages were, horrified by the state’s abdication of responsibility for public welfare. A tall, brawny Texan, he was employed as an engineer at a Dallas-area steel plant. Meticulous and safety-conscious by nature, he was prone to disaster-planning. “Zach is the kind of person who lives in worst-case scenario,” his wife told me.
Evetts began stocking their home with cases of bottled water and canned goods in anticipation of future calamity. He also bought a rifle. The grid failure, coupled with Jan. 6, led him to want to improve his marksmanship. “I felt civil war was on the way,” he would later tell a psychologist who interviewed him after his arrest. More than half of the country felt similarly, according to a University of California, Davis, survey around that time. Almost 19 million guns were sold in the United States in 2021, the second highest year on record. (In 2020, Americans bought close to 23 million.) The surge in gun sales was particularly pronounced among people of color, women and those on the political left.
Evetts, who grew up in a upper-middle-class suburb of Fort Worth, had volunteered for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and held left-wing political views he rarely discussed outside a small circle of friends. Since Jan. 6, there’d been a surge in hate crimes against nonwhite, gay and trans people in Texas, and Evetts became concerned “it could be like Hitler,” he later told the psychologist. He went online, looking for people he could connect and organize with. He threw himself into mutual aid, spending months driving around Dallas-Fort Worth, delivering cases of water or cords of firewood to homeless encampments and handing out sandwiches with the anarchist collective Food Not Bombs.
Evetts also joined the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, a small but growing national gun rights group that declared itself an alternative to the “toxic, right-wing, exclusionary firearms culture” of organizations like the N.R.A. Founded as a nonprofit in 2018, the S.R.A. promoted gun safety, as well as disaster relief, trauma medicine, homeless outreach, bail funding and community support. The group’s bylaws stated its goal as to “unify and strengthen communities against the hardships of life under capitalism.” The S.R.A.’s motto: “We Keep Us Safe.”
One of the Dallas chapter’s most prominent members was Ben Song, who went by the alias Bubble. The hard-core activists all used pseudonyms to protect themselves against snitches or spies or others who sought to harm the left. In Song’s case, almost no one involved in progressive organizing knew his real name, though he was one of the most ubiquitous activists in the city. He appeared on the scene in 2020, pushing himself to the front of the Black Lives Matter protests, and had since been everywhere: volunteering at homeless camps and marching for reproductive rights, for Palestinian rights, to defund the police.
Song had served a stint in the Marine Corps. Now, he drove a white Mercedes. “He had this sort of swagger about him,” said Lyon, the former activist, who met Song in 2020. Some S.R.A. members wondered how Song paid his rent. They heard he worked for his father’s law firm in some capacity, though he was always free to take part in demonstrations. “From what I could tell, he was a professional activist,” Lyon said. “He was always, always at a protest. And he was always armed.”
Like Evetts, Song came from the well-heeled suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth, the eldest son of conservative Asian American parents. He grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and was a leader of the College Republicans at the University of Texas in Arlington. But then Donald Trump ran for president in 2015, and Song, who’d always denied the G.O.P. was racist, decided he’d been kidding himself. For a few years, he was active in the Libertarian Party, but in 2019 he flew to Hong Kong to march with pro-democracy demonstrators and, as he told The South China Morning Post, “put my money where my mouth is.” When he got back to Dallas, he threw himself into the George Floyd protests.
By then, Song considered himself an anarchist, though he wasn’t particularly ideological. He liked action. He was skilled in tang soo do, a form of martial arts from Korea, and he began teaching self-defense techniques to activists. Classes were free to anyone in the community and held at a martial arts dojo in Arlington owned by Song’s mother. “It was Ben’s temple,” the local activist told me.
Evetts was a regular at the dojo, where in time he’d meet many of the activists that formed the core of what Song would later call his “affinity group.” There was Meagan Morris, a leader of the local S.R.A. chapter who had a four-bedroom home known affectionately as the Big Gay House, as most of the tenants were trans or nonbinary. There was Morris’s housemate Autumn Hill, an ethereal 30-year-old who moved into the Big Gay House with her wife, Lydia. Song’s longtime girlfriend, Joy Gibson, a redheaded vegan known as Rowan, was also a regular at the dojo, as was Lynette Sharp, a 57-year-old married mother of grown children who had been protesting since 2020 and wanted to learn how to protect herself.
Everyone looked up to Song. “He had this vibe: calm, controlled, authoritative, but not in a way that made it seem like he was trying to be the authority,” said Russell McKinley, a friend of Evetts’s. McKinley said he met Song only once, at the dojo, where Song told him about being in Hong Kong when the Chinese government crushed the pro-democracy movement, arresting and imprisoning thousands. He claimed to others that he was tear-gassed by the police, arrested and deported. To McKinley, it sounded impressive. “He had some worldly experience most activists don’t have,” he said. “Certainly no one in this group.”
Armed protest was becoming a fixture of American political life, much of it driven by right-wing opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights. In Dallas, Song began recruiting people, including Evetts, to join a hard-line spinoff of the S.R.A. called the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, named for the 19th-century militant abolitionist. Unlike the S.R.A., whose bylaws prohibited brandishing weapons in public, John Brown members were known for showing up in military gear with long guns at protests, drag shows and L.G.B.T.Q. events around Dallas-Fort Worth to act as a deterrent to the threat of violence from right-wing groups.
Like everyone else in the scene, Evetts adopted an alias — John White — and embraced black bloc, dressing in black clothing and covering his face with a mask to avoid being doxxed by right-wingers. At the steel plant, Evetts heard his colleagues joke about “shooting the libs” and worried that they would find out about his protest activities. He was sure he’d be fired.
Evetts avoided talking in detail to his wife and his friends about participating in armed protests, though he once told McKinley he felt a responsibility, as a relatively imposing-looking white man, to “make it count” by ensuring those who lacked his privilege were safe. Still, McKinley suspected the stress was wearing on him. “To be honest I think Zach hated doing them,” he said. At least twice, Evetts threw up before a demonstration. He once showed up at a drag event to find a mob of right-wing protesters, one of whom carried a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Panicked, he spent most of the day in his car. Afterward, he texted his wife: “I feel like a coward.”
Song, however, was energized by confrontation: In July 2022, he organized an armed protest at a homeless encampment slated for demolition, positioning himself and other activists in front of the bulldozers. After a few tense hours, the City of Dallas backed down. Though the victory was short-lived — the bulldozers simply returned the next day — Song reveled in the attention, talking up his success on podcasts and in Rolling Stone, where he was photographed in black bloc, hands gripping his rifle.
Around this time, Song began offering a new self-defense course he called “anarcho airsoft,” which combined martial arts with tactical drills using airsoft rifles, which look like AR-15s and shoot plastic pellets. This concerned some longstanding members of the armed left in Dallas, a number of whom were certified firearms instructors. Many of the people in Song’s training program were first-time gun owners who barely knew how to use a safety. “He was teaching them SEAL Team 6 [expletive],” said the local activist. “It was all this pseudotactical, close-quarter combat stuff: room clearing, stacking up against doors.”
Song claimed he was mimicking some of the tactics he saw activists use in Hong Kong, but experienced shooters were skeptical. “It really wasn’t uncommon to see Bubble walk through the dojo with his airsoft gun, pretending to be a commando,” the activist told me.
The irony, he said, was that Song was a fairly terrible shot, especially for a former Marine. Song had always been cagey about his time in the corps, but McKinley was under the impression he’d been on active duty and in combat. Song’s vagueness was part of his mystique. “He was like Achilles, walking through his camp while soldiers told stories about his exploits,” the local activist said. “He’s the baddest motherfucker out there. That was Bubble.”
The truth of Song’s time in uniform was far less impressive. He enlisted in the reserves after high school and was assigned the job of supply clerk. He spent the next five years reporting one weekend a month to Fort Hood, where he filed inventory requests and once or twice represented the Marines at Toys for Tots events.
In 2016, having only reached the rank of lance corporal, the third lowest in the corps, he received an other-than-honorable discharge. In an unpublished interview with The Washington Post, a transcript of which was shared with me, Song said he was cut from the Marines because of downsizing. Then he said he quit. He also said he didn’t respect his leaders and was frequently late for drills. “I was fed up,” he said. Song left the reserves and never graduated from college.
Five years later, he reinvented himself as a street activist. In August 2020, he was arrested during a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Austin, after a large group of protesters blocked an intersection and refused to comply with police orders to clear the road. Song had a military-style rifle slung across his chest and was carrying a .45 semiautomatic pistol and two loaded magazines. According to court records acquired by local media outlets, a police officer on a bike tried to grab him, causing Song to trip over the bike. Song stood up, raised his rifle into a firing position and pointed the gun at two uniformed officers as he backed away into the crowd.
Song was arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon of a police officer — a standard charge in Texas for threatening a cop with a gun, according to local prosecutors. He spent two weeks in jail before being released on $10,000 bond and was never indicted by a grand jury, which found the evidence insufficient. The police returned Song’s guns and ammunition.
Song plunged back into activism, eventually becoming the unofficial leader of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club. In April 2023, a member pepper-sprayed protesters from the Christian Nationalist New Columbia Movement outside a drag venue in Fort Worth, leading to a clash with the police. Three other members were arrested and charged with aggravated assault. Song, who claimed he wasn’t at the protest, was not criminally charged, though he was later named in a suit filed by the members of New Columbia, alleging a range of offenses including assault, battery, stalking and civil rights violations.
“That Fort Worth incident almost killed activism in Dallas, and I hold Ben responsible for that,” Lyon told me. The unofficial credo of the armed left was never to attack, only defend. “Even though Ben wasn’t there,” he said, “he created the climate for that sort of thing to happen. He was completely undisciplined in his training, he had an open-door policy about who he let in, and he never instilled any rules in terms of what you should and should not do, like walking across the street unprovoked and attacking a group of people with pepper spray.”
Saddled with legal fees and facing the threat of a prolonged discovery process that would have exposed its membership list and internal communications, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club shut down. Song was doxxed by a right-wing activist and his records were subpoenaed, but because the plaintiffs were unable to show he was at the protest, he was dropped from the suit.
Song deleted his social media and rebranded, adopting the new alias Champagne. He also switched his base of operations from his mother’s dojo to Finn’s Place, an L.G.B.T.Q. community center and organizing space in Fort Worth. In this new incarnation, he adopted “any/all” pronouns, hinting at a trans identity. If some members of the gun scene found this slightly dubious — “I always saw that as part of his overall grift,” Lyon said — it was accepted unquestioningly by the young, gender-fluid activists at Finn’s, who gathered around him.
Many of Song’s former allies had distanced themselves, considering him too reckless to associate with. One story circulating was that Song’s mother had kicked him out of the dojo after he neglected to secure a loaded pistol, which a student fired by mistake, assuming it was an airsoft gun. The local activist told me he cut ties with Song after learning that he took some of his students to a rural property in Oklahoma, sat them behind a dirt berm and shot live rounds over their heads to simulate what it sounded like to take incoming fire. “That was the most [expletive] crazy thing I ever heard in my life,” the activist said. “You put someone down range and shot at him?”
The incident worried him enough that he raised his concerns with people in the S.R.A., but they shut him down. “It was like a wall went up whenever you said anything negative about Bubble,” he said. “They all had these pithy, thought-killing aphorisms they’d fall back on, like, ‘Kill the cop in your brain.’”
By then, the S.R.A. had transformed. The pepper-spray incident was viewed by many longtime activists and organizers as a signal that it might be time to depart. Once made up mostly of white male gun owners, the S.R.A. now had a predominantly queer and female membership that was much less experienced with firearms. The “femme council,” a subgroup mainly led by women, wielded tremendous power inside the organization, policing its language and politics. This accelerated the exodus of longtime firearms trainers like Lyon, and Song himself, during his era as Bubble. As Champagne, he was welcomed back. “He was the only one they had left,” Lyon said. “They’d drained themselves of anyone confident with guns.”
Those who remained were generally younger and less socially confident people, many of whom were in transitory phases of their lives. Lynette Sharp, who went by the alias Candied Dynamite, had recently come out as gay and was feeling adrift after stints as a conservative Christian, a member of a motorcycle gang and a dabbler in QAnon conspiracies. Susan Kent, a 21-year-old college student, had just bought a gun with her 20-year-old boyfriend, Seth Sikes, for self-defense. Meagan Morris, a longtime associate of Song’s, was on disability after injuring her back loading boxes at UPS, and was so afraid of anti-trans harassment that she carried a handgun to walk her dog.
All of them were active in leftist Signal chats, where there was frequent talk of revolution. Many were also part of the Emma Goldman Book Club, a leftist reading group run by a local mechanic, Ines Soto, and his wife, Elizabeth, both well-known figures in the Latino activist community. Named after the early-20th-century anarchist-feminist writer and activist, the group met monthly to read aloud works by Karl Marx, Pyotor Kropotkin and, of course, Goldman herself.
Song was a regular at the book club and was skilled at tapping into the fears of those around him. The trans members of the group worried that Texas, which by 2024 had more proposed anti-trans legislation than any other state, might try to strip them of their citizenship if the name and gender on their drivers’ licenses didn’t match their birth certificates. When ICE began its sweeps in 2025, they thought they might be next. Song promoted tactical and firearms training as a solution. “Marginalized, fearful, uneducated and anxious people are chum for the sharks in this atmosphere,” the local activist said.
By that point, Zach Evetts was peripheral to this scene. Even before John Brown dissolved, he had quit armed protest, concerned it was moving in a violent new direction. He was furious after the pepper-spray incident in Fort Worth. “Direct conflict with right-wing people? I felt it was too risky,” he later told the psychologist. Evetts felt the same about confronting cops. “Sometimes you have to respect authority. They can end you.”
But Evetts remained ferociously loyal to Song, whom he didn’t seem to blame for the escalation. He still took self-defense class and attended the occasional book club meeting. After Trump was re-elected, Evetts joined a new Signal group Song created for organizing called Discussion and News. When he met up with Song, he rarely told his wife where he was going, even when she pushed. “He’d say it was better OPSEC if I didn’t know,” she said. Song was careful never to endorse violence, but he often reminded his followers that threats were everywhere: from white supremacists, active shooters, particularly cops. He never failed to point out that the police used violence all the time. He said he thought everyone in America should be armed and trained — even that the country itself would be safer if everyone had their own personal nuclear bomb.
Seth Sikes, one of Song’s trainees who was majoring in social work at U.T.-Arlington, would later recall Song talking about how guns could be used to intimidate law enforcement. Sikes was an Army brat who went everywhere with a concealed pistol (“because, Texas,” he said), but he felt uncomfortable with the idea of open-carrying an AR-15 to freak out the cops. “It sounded like a great way to horribly escalate a situation,” he said. But Sikes never pushed back, nor did anyone else Song trained. “Either they didn’t take it seriously or they agreed,” said the local activist. “But they knew who he was.”
Song was now doing most of his trainings at a rifle range in Ferris, Texas, where his students shot at targets of hooded Klansmen, or in the backyard of Meagan Morris’s house. There, on Thursday nights, he convened his inner circle for regular “gear checks” to run through maneuvers and watch YouTube videos of defensive tactics like laying down suppressive fire. “They were a LARP militia,” said the local activist, derisively.
It was at one of these Thursday night gear checks, on July 3, 2025, that the plan for the Prairieland protest came into focus. The group that evening included Morris and her housemate, Autumn Hill; Song’s girlfriend, Joy Gibson; and Sikes’s girlfriend, Susan Kent. Song had also invited Sikes and Evetts, but they were unable to come — Evetts was seeing “How to Train Your Dragon” with his wife instead.
Kent had never been to one of these meet-ups before. She brought a backpack with a gas mask, an emergency first aid kit, some shields for rubber bullets and a firearm. It was, she assumed, some sort of S.R.A. thing, and at an S.R.A. thing, you came prepared.
Song instructed everyone to leave their phones inside the house, so no one would be able to monitor their conversations, and brought them onto the patio. He wanted to talk about ICE.
Huge anti-ICE demonstrations had been taking place that summer in blue cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, but not in Dallas — yet. Song and several others, including Evetts, had created a private Signal group to talk about staging a protest the following evening at Prairieland. Built to house roughly 700 people, the place was known to be overcrowded, with detainees reportedly crammed into dimly lit, bug-infested dorms. The facility was remote but accessible, somewhere they could attract a sizable number of people without immediately drawing the attention of law enforcement.
Song showed the group at Morris’s house photos he’d downloaded of the building, which didn’t seem to have many security cameras. There was a guard shack that he said was never manned.
“This is going to be as easy as it gets,” he said.
“Easy for what?” Kent asked.
“We can take the place and free the people inside,” Song responded, calmly.
“What do you mean ’take the place,’” Kent later recalled another person asking. “Do you mean we’d, like, have to shoot people?”
“It’ll be suppressive fire,” Song said. The idea, he explained, was to shoot in the general direction of — not directly at — ICE officials to make them duck and take cover. After that, the group could break the detainees out of the facility. “Someone’s got to do something,” he said.
To Kent, who later recounted the scene in court, it sounded crazy. She assumed it was all hyperbole. Song often posed hypotheticals as thought experiments: What would they do if the grid went down again? How could they make sure the community had supplies? Would they rip off an Amazon fulfillment center? What about if a civil war broke out?
Kent was surprised that a few activists actually debated the idea of freeing detainees, but they quickly acknowledged it seemed impossible. Even if they somehow managed to open the doors and let everyone out, how would they move them? “It would be pretty easy to steal U-Hauls,” someone suggested. But they agreed they didn’t have time to steal U-Hauls as that required planning, and the protest was the next day.
So the group abandoned the idea and talked about other possibilities. In the private Signal chat earlier that day, Maricela Rueda, a local doula and poet, had brought up the idea of a nighttime noise demonstration. Noise demonstrations were becoming common in other cities, where activists staked out hotels full of ICE officers and kept them up all night by blowing horns and banging pots. Evetts had responded to her message by offering to buy fireworks, so they could set them off in front of the facility and have their own Fourth of July celebration. If nothing else, it would be a master stroke of symbolism: staging a raucous protest for imprisoned people on Independence Day.
Song raised the idea with the group on the patio. They agreed that a nighttime noise demonstration sounded good. They would post about it in Discussion and News to try to draw as many people as possible. Kent had to work on the Fourth and wouldn’t be able to go, but Hill, Morris and Gibson said they were in.
“So do we bring our guns?” Hill asked. She had never been to a protest, aside from a Pride march.
“Absolutely,” Song said.
He took his friends back inside and showed them a YouTube video of soldiers taking a building and clearing each room, things he said he learned to do as a Marine. “We aren’t going to do anything dangerous,” he said. “But let’s be clear, I’m not getting arrested.”
The night of the Fourth was moonless and misty as Evetts pulled his red Mazda onto the quiet side street a quarter-mile from the Prairieland facility, where the group had begun to gather. It was about 10 p.m., and sitting in the driver’s seat, he felt a rush of anxiety, the familiar turn of his stomach. That afternoon, he had made a point to ask if they were planning on bringing guns. “I don’t know that I can personally manage a rifle, kit and fireworks,” he wrote to the group on Signal.
Rueda was against the idea. “Rifles might make the situation more hot,” she wrote.
But Song insisted. “I think you’d be surprised,” he replied. “Cops are not trained or equipped for more than one rifle so it tends to make them back off.”
Evetts decided to leave his pistol and AR-15 in his trunk. His phone was shut off and tucked into a Faraday bag that blocked its signal. Spotting Morris’s car, he headed toward the group wearing a black balaclava.
Sikes had arrived around the same time as Evetts and had opted to bring his AR-15, broken down and stuffed in his backpack, along with a pistol holstered on his hip. Song had brought his favorite rifle, a tricked-out AR-15 with a binary trigger mechanism that released two shots every time it fired. He lugged a wagon with a black rifle bag slung over the top, while Evetts carried the fireworks in a cooler.
Four more people met the group at Prairieland: Ines and Elizabeth Soto, the husband-and-wife team who ran the Emma Goldman Book Club; their friend Savanna Batten; and Nathan Baumann, a 20-year-old none of them had met before, who learned about the protest from the large activist Signal chat. By 10:30, they were all standing on the grass facing the detention center. Sikes and Evetts lit the fireworks, which exploded into brilliant starbursts.
Rueda, who brought a bullhorn, shouted in Spanish as a cluster of detainees stood at a long window, cheering.
“Esperanza!” she shouted. Hope!
It was exactly what the group had discussed the previous evening. “I dunno if people have been to a noise demo before but they are pretty tame,” Ines Soto posted in Discussion and News earlier that day. They knew they might be trespassing on private property and violating a local ordinance against setting off fireworks within the city limits, but they were prepared to take those risks.
Then Baumann, who brought cans of spray paint, peeled off toward the employee parking lot where he started defacing vehicles and a guard shack with graffiti: “Bigot.” “ICE Pig.” “Traitor.” “Tyrant.” The tires on a van were slashed. A security camera was knocked over. Who was responsible for this was unclear: At first, Baumann said Sikes vandalized everything. Later, he admitted that he did the graffiti and identified Evetts as the other vandal. But everyone was wearing black and had their faces covered, and he didn’t know any of these people. Two other activists, known only by their aliases, Rose and Eagle, were also at Prairieland, and never caught.
The explosions got the attention of the facility’s staff. A corrections officer named Dekeithan Reedy went out to investigate with his sergeant, Cindy Harp. Spotting the figures in black, Harp ordered them to leave. Then the officers heard the sound of something shattering coming from the parking lot. Harp radioed the control center to phone the police, and a Prairieland staffer called 911. “I don’t know what’s going on outside,” the staffer said. “I think they’re doing fireworks.” Then she seemed to get another report. “Someone’s trying to get in,” she said.
By the time Officer Gross arrived a few minutes later, Sikes, Rueda, Batten, the Sotos and several other people in the group had fled. Baumann and the other vandal were still in the parking lot, and one of them, seeing the flashing lights of the police car, started to run away. As Gross drew his gun and gave chase, he suddenly saw Song nearby. Sikes, who had lagged a bit behind the others, heard Song shout, “Get to the rifles!” Then he heard gunfire. “It was the weird thook-thook of the binary trigger,” Sikes said.
Song had fired his AR-15. Gross was hit at the top of his left shoulder and fired three shots in response, one of which may have struck Song’s rifle. Song fired back — Gross heard a series of shots in rapid succession — but the gun jammed, and he took off. Racing to catch up to the others already making their way toward their cars, Sikes saw Song run past him with his backpack and rifle.
“What the [expletive] did you just do?” Sikes yelled after him.
Song ditched his backpack and rifle and continued running until he vanished into the dark.
Within an hour, those in Song’s circle who hadn’t gone to Prairieland began to worry. When Susan Kent came home from work shortly before midnight, she noticed that Song had changed his Signal handle to Delete. She hadn’t heard from Sikes since around 9, when he’d texted her to say he was going dark. Twenty minutes went by, then an hour. Around 1 a.m., Lynette Sharp decided to drive to Alvarado and see what she could find out, but it was impossible to get anywhere near the ICE facility because the police had set up a perimeter.
In the morning, word started to spread through the broader activist community that some of their friends had been arrested. Sharp and Kent drove to the Johnson County sheriff’s office. “I had bail money in my pocket — that’s how little we understood what was happening,” Sharp said.
No one heard from Song until early that afternoon, when Sharp received a message on Signal from Delete. “I am alive and uncaptured and I need to be picked up in a few hours or tonight,” it read.
Song was hiding in high grass a few hundred yards from Prairieland. He’d spent the night and part of that day lying face down in a field of sunflowers as drones whirred overhead, hoping the dense stalks would mask his thermal signature — an evasive tactic he learned from a YouTube video. “I am going to try to sneak over to the highway,” he wrote. He intended to crawl.
Sharp met up with Song’s roommate, a fellow S.R.A. member named John Thomas. The two drove to find Song, who’d made it to a fence line on Highway 67, about half a mile from Prairieland. “Thank you for saving my life,” he said.
Thomas and Sharp brought Song to a house where Thomas was pet-sitting, and Song told his friends what happened. He’d seen activists in the parking lot popping tires and vandalizing cars. Then the police car arrived, and an officer got out and ordered the vandals to put up their hands. “I shot him,” both Thomas and Sharp recalled Song saying. Song would later say that Gross pointed his gun at the back of a protester as they ran away, and terrified, he shot in Gross’s direction to defend his friend. When the gun jammed, he panicked. If he could turn himself in and ensure that no one else got in trouble, he told Sharp, he would. But they were already in trouble. He had no intention of turning himself in.
On July 7, as the F.B.I. manhunt got underway, Thomas drove Song, wearing a blonde wig, to a Home Depot, where he was picked up by 24-year-old Rebecca Morgan, a friend from the mutual-aid world who agreed to hide him in her apartment in North Dallas until it was safe to move again.
Instead, he and Morgan were arrested eight days later.
Last November, the government unsealed a sweeping indictment against nine people associated with the Prairieland protest, claiming they were members of an antifa cell. Song was charged with three counts of attempted murder and three related weapons counts. Four of the activists who were involved in the planning chat or attended the gear check — Evetts, Hill, Morris and Rueda — were also charged with these crimes, under a theory that Song’s actions would have been “reasonably foreseeable” to them. Three other defendants who were at Prairieland — Ines and Elizabeth Soto and Savanna Batten — were considered co-conspirators in what was depicted as a wider “antifa” plot. This group of eight was also charged with one count of rioting and two counts related to the fireworks, which were considered explosives.
Rueda’s husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not at Prairieland and only learned about it after the fact, was charged with conspiracy to conceal documents because he later transported a box of leftist zines that the government regarded as evidence. Except for Sanchez Estrada, all the defendants were charged with material support for terrorism — the most serious of the charges.
The material support law, written in the mid-1990s, was intended to go after the funders and supporters of foreign terrorism, and has been only sparingly used in a domestic context, generally in cases involving what most people would consider ‘terrorism” — plots to blow up critical infrastructure, for example. The Justice Department had never charged American protesters as terrorists, even when those protests ended in violence or property damage. Until now.
To do this, the government relied on a part of the law that prohibits support of a “terrorist act,” which need not be in service of any specific organization at all. There are more than 50 federal crimes the government considers terroristic, and the Prairieland defendants were accused of three: attempting to kill someone assisting a federal officer, vandalizing government property and using explosives — in this case, fireworks — to damage government property. To gain a conviction, all the prosecutors needed to do was to show that the defendants had provided support — by buying fireworks, organizing car pools, planning the protest on Signal — with the knowledge or intention that one of those three crimes would be committed. Whether any of the accused knew that vandalizing an ICE vehicle or setting off fireworks outside a federal facility qualified as terrorist acts was immaterial.
“It is a completely subjective decision whether these acts are charged as ordinary crimes or crimes that qualify as terrorist acts,” said Kimberly Paschall, a former Justice Department prosecutor assigned to the Jan. 6 cases. Not a single one of the Jan. 6 defendants, she noted, was charged with material support, which Paschall said was intentional, as their cases could be charged just as easily under other statutes. “What you don’t want to do is create bad precedent,” she said.
The initial charges faced by the Prairieland defendants did not mention terrorism. The decision to add material support was made by Nancy Larson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District who, according to one former federal prosecutor in Dallas, was “singularly focused on doing whatever she could to impress the Trump administration.”
Trump had long spoken of his loathing for antifa, a boogeyman in right-wing politics. Following the murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September 2025, Trump issued an executive order designating antifa a terrorist organization, fulfilling a longstanding promise. There is no legal framework for designating domestic terror groups, and the president lacks the authority to unilaterally make even foreign designations, which are handled by the State and Treasury departments. “When the president issues an executive order designating antifa as a terrorist organization, it doesn’t mean anything legally,” says Tom Brzozowski, a former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Justice Department. “But most folks don’t really understand that.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s executive order, the White House released a national security memo known as NSPM-7, directing federal law enforcement to aggressively pursue domestic terrorism investigations into people associated with “anti-Americanism,” “anticapitalism,” “anti-Christianity” and extremism on immigration, race and gender. The memo specifically called on prosecutors to seek the highest penalties available.
Though the government cannot prosecute someone for their ideology, a person’s beliefs can be introduced in criminal cases as indicators of motive or intent. The Prairieland case, with its trove of antigovernment materials, presented just this sort of opportunity for Larson, the former Dallas prosecutor said. “I think she saw that executive order on antifa, and they were like, Oh, man, this is it.”
When the new charges were announced in November, the reaction among the defendants and their families was disbelief. “I fell to the floor,” Robin Evetts, Zach’s mother, told me. “Not my Zach. He’s the last person you would ever dream — it’s just unbelievable.” Evetts was advised by his lawyers not to talk about the case, even with his family, but Meagan Morris, who never got out of her car at Prairieland, publicly denied the allegations. “I’m not a member of a terror cell,” she said in a recent interview with a progressive news site. “I’m a middle-aged housewife.”
A number of former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials I spoke with raised concerns about the way the case was brought. Because of the severity of the material support charge, government lawyers seeking to bring such a case would typically need the approval of the national security division at headquarters. “I’m convinced this case didn’t follow the normal path through the Department of Justice,” Jeff Breinholt, a former terrorism lawyer there, told me. There was no mention of the national security division on any of the department’s news releases announcing the case, which former prosecutors say is highly unusual. “What that tells me is the guardrail is gone,” Brzozowski said.
Seven other defendants — Sikes, Gibson, Sharp, Morgan, Thomas, Kent and Baumann — pleaded guilty and were never indicted by a grand jury. Instead, the government offered them a pre-emptive deal: plead to a single count of material support for terrorism, which carried a maximum 15-year sentence, and every other charge would be waived. As part of the plea, they were required to either acknowledge that they held an “antifa” ideology or were associated with the “antifa cell” that planned the Prairieland protest. Baumann insisted he’d been unaware of his co-defendants’ ideology before meeting them at Prairieland, but otherwise agreed to the plea. There wasn’t much choice,” his attorney, Ben Florey, told me. “It was to plead to material support or no deal.” Baumann and four others — Sikes, Kent, Sharp and Thomas — also agreed to testify at trial in exchange for the chance of a reduced sentence.
The trial would take place in Fort Worth, one of the most favorable districts in the country for the government. “The city is conservative and staunchly pro law enforcement,” said Marlo Cadeddu, a federal criminal defense attorney who has defended numerous clients charged with terrorism-related offenses in the Northern District. “Both federal judges there are former federal prosecutors and they’re backed up by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the country. Being able to bring that case in Fort Worth was like winning the lottery for the government.”
The Justice Department billed the Prairieland trial as the first ever prosecution of “antifa terrorists.” It was also a crucial test case for whether terrorism statutes can be massaged, as Brzozowski put it, to “rearrange the machinery of government and exercise that latent power that’s always existed in a manner that allows them to silence dissent.”
The trial began in February in the courtroom of Judge Mark Pittman, a founding member of the Fort Worth branch of the Federalist Society. On the first day of jury selection, Pittman declared a mistrial after noticing that one of the defense lawyers was wearing a T-shirt under her blazer featuring the faces of civil rights leaders, including Shirley Chisholm and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Pittman said the shirt sent a politically charged message, and compared it to a prosecutor’s wearing an ICE pin. Pittman quickly became an object of ridicule for supporters of the defendants, who gathered in a public park across the street, one of whom animated a black-robed puppet with reptilian slit pupils meant to represent the judge.
The key facts of the trial were not in dispute: Song shot in Gross’s direction with his AR-15. The other activists set off commercial fireworks that were purchased, legally, at a nearby fireworks stand. Some of the activists also vandalized vehicles, a guard shack and a security camera in the parking lot. Some were members of the S.R.A. Most were either regular or occasional members of the Emma Goldman Book Club. Everyone had some form of leftist politics, had attended protests and harbored an abiding distaste, and fear, of ICE, the Trump administration and law enforcement.
These latter facts had no legal bearing — the government didn’t need to prove that the defendants identified as antifa or were part of an organized “cell” of any kind for the charges to stick. In fact, the F.B.I. agents who testified at trial seemed ill prepared to make that case. The F.B.I. had been investigating the Prairieland case as a standard criminal matter until mid-September. Then, two days before Trump announced on Truth Social that he had designated antifa a terrorist organization, a U.S. District Court judge signed a federal search warrant for the home of Ines and Elizabeth Soto, the husband-and-wife team behind the Emma Goldman Book Club.
The Sotos ran a small left-wing publishing outfit from their garage, printing zines on topics like “insurrectionary anarchy” and surviving the death of a loved one from brain cancer. Agents had already searched their home in July, but the new warrant specified a search for evidence of mass production of propaganda. Morris Boatner, a 22-year veteran of the bureau, discovered a diagonally bisected red-and-black flag in the Sotos’ garage — an anarcho-communist symbol carried by antifascist regiments during the Spanish Civil War. Boatner, who testified at trial, acknowledged he was unfamiliar with the term “anarcho-communism” and was unsure of what the symbol represented. He did a “quick Google search,” he said, and concluded that the flag was likely “antifa.”
Boatner’s lack of knowledge was unsurprising. “Prior to Jan. 20, 2025, I never met a single person within F.B.I. leadership who thought that antifa was anything resembling an organized terrorist organization,” said Michael Feinberg, a former assistant F.B.I. special agent in charge in Norfolk, Va.
In its indictment of the Prairieland defendants, the government defines 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,” and whose adherents have “espoused insurrection and advocated violence to affect the policy and conduct of the U.S. government by intimidation and coercion.”
The author of this definition testified at trial: Kyle Shideler, a former fellow at the Claremont Institute and a director at the Center for Security Policy, a far-right, Islamophobic think-tank that has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Though little-known outside of right-wing circles, Shideler has given congressional testimony about antifa several times since 2020. Last September, he published an essay in Claremont’s online magazine The American Mind, titled “How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks,” described as a “road map” for countering radical left ideologies and organizations. That included many progressive nonprofits “whose true objective,” Shideler wrote, “is revolution.” Among the road map’s recommendations was for the Justice Department to bring seditious conspiracy and material support for terrorism charges.
Five days after Shideler’s road map was published, Trump signed the executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. The executive order described antifa as a shadowy enterprise that “employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives” and “conceal its funding sources,” and it directed agencies to target “those who fund such operations” — language that closely tracked Shideler’s recommendations, which included going after progressive nonprofits, mutual-aid groups, and crowdfunding efforts. Echoes of the road map could also be found in NSPM-7, which specifically cited antifascism as an animating force behind political violence.
Shideler acknowledged on the stand that there was nothing inherently illegal in engaging with antifascist ideas, but he argued that membership in groups like the John Brown Gun Club, the Emma Goldman Book Club or even the Socialist Rifle Association indicated an openness to engaging in militant behavior. Though there was nothing in the defendants’ Signal chats to suggest they had planned to harm people or damage property at Prairieland, he said this was to be expected. “It would be inconsistent with security culture to discuss that over an encrypted channel.”
The defense rested without calling a single witness. “There was no need,” Patrick McLain, Evetts’s lead counsel and a Marine, told me. The consensus among the 18 defense attorneys was that not even a conservative Texas jury would believe the defendants had done anything more than organize a noise protest that went horribly wrong when someone fired a gun. Yes, there was some vandalism, but the fireworks did not cause any damage. No one responded to Song’s cry, “Get to the rifles!” — everyone other than Song and Sikes had stashed their weapons in their vehicles, which, as McLain repeatedly pointed out, were parked the equivalent of five football fields away. Elizabeth and Ines Soto and Savanna Batten, whose connection with the Emma Goldman Book Club made them, in the government’s narrative, part of the “recruitment” arm of the cell, had arrived late, without weapons, and later maintained they were unaware that anyone had brought guns. Most of the group was already on its way back to their cars when the shots were fired.
Pittman told the jury to examine only the evidence related to the crimes of which the defendants were accused. Any other question, such as whether or not they were antifa or members of any other group, was immaterial. The only thing that mattered was whether the defendants had committed the acts for which they were charged. After less than two days, the jury concluded they had.
Song was found guilty of attempted murder and the weapons charges, and was sentenced to 100 years in prison. The jury rejected the argument that Evetts, Hill, Morris and Rueda were equally culpable for the shooting, but everyone was convicted of the other charges they faced, including material support for terrorism. Evetts received a 50‑year sentence, as did most of his co‑defendants. Maricela Rueda, who had argued against bringing guns to Prairieland, worrying they would “make the situation more hot,” was given 70 years. Her husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, whose only crime was transporting a box of zines, was sentenced to 30 years.
The staggering length of the Prairieland sentences was without precedent. The punishments exceeded those given to supporters of international terrorist organizations: Since the early 2010s, ISIS recruits prosecuted for material support have often received less than 10 years. The sentences were also significantly higher than those received by the Jan. 6 rioters, all of whom have since been pardoned by Trump. The longest sentence handed down to an insurrectionist went to Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, who received 22 years.
Though the Prairieland jury was prohibited from taking ideology into account when deciding guilt or innocence, it was clearly a factor in sentencing. The sentences were determined by Pittman and another federal judge in Fort Worth, Reed O’Connor. “The defendants’ violence and terrorism is an assault on democracy,” O’Connor said. According to observers in the courtroom, he explained that he was handing down the maximum possible sentences to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”
For other activists on the left — and on the right — the Prairieland case has set a dangerous precedent. Cadeddu, the federal defense attorney, told me that the most worrying of all the “terrorist acts” was vandalism. There is no dollar amount set on what sort of damage might qualify as an act of terror. Even throwing a snowball at an ICE vehicle during a protest and scratching the paint or damaging a taillight might qualify. “In theory, if you happen to be on a Signal chat with some people planning a protest, and one of the people at that protest — you don’t even have to know them — throws that snowball, you could be implicated in material support for terrorism, simply for helping to organize,” she says. “That’s the meaning of the case.”
The shooting made it the perfect test case to extend this law to protesters. “Terrorism lawyers look at a case like Prairieland as a case with bad facts,” she says. “And bad facts make bad law.” Brian Bouffard, one of Evetts’s attorneys, agreed. “Song shot a cop,” he said. “It was a clear opportunity for the Trump D.O.J. to overreach on everyone else who wasn’t Song. That is the story of this case. And it was ridiculous, until it became unspeakable.” The defendants are appealing their convictions, but they also face state terrorism charges, which, according to their lawyers, have begun to move forward.
Much of the activist community in Dallas continues to support Song, who they maintain never shot at Gross directly, but at his feet, a bullet that ricocheted and hit him by accident. “If he didn’t shoot him intentionally, then it’s not attempted murder,” said one organizer with the Prairieland Defendants Support Committee, a group for family and friends of the defendants. One image making the rounds among the defendants’ supporters reads: “Song Did Nothing Wrong!”
But in an F.B.I. interview days after her arrest, Meagan Morris appeared to feel differently. A transcript of her interview was introduced at trial. (The two sides agreed her statements could be prejudicial, so the F.B.I. agent who read them in court changed Song’s name to “a person.”) “I mean, a person [expletive] shot someone in cold blood,” Morris had said. “My suspicion is a person wanted to do this the whole time, shoot someone,” she continued. “I don’t think it was an accident. A person set things up to have a bunch of people there to have cover while he gets the [expletive] away. I felt disgust and betrayal.”
After the judge delivered his sentence, Song gave a statement explaining that his conduct was motivated by fear of law enforcement. “I did not want to hurt anyone. I never had the intent to hurt anyone,” he said. “Now, 22 people have been arrested, have been persecuted, have been tortured, for what? For nothing. None of these people really did anything. And none of these people have anything to do with what happened with me.”
The statement hit a nerve with some of his former friends. “I have little sympathy tbh,” the local activist texted me. “A whole lot of lack of acknowledgment of getting people into harm’s way.”
“I see he conveniently underplays how he [expletive] up his comrades’ lives,” another activist said.
“I don’t think I know how I feel about him at this moment,” said Shelby Donahue, who still lives at the Big Gay House, along with several others who opted not to go to Prairieland that evening.
“You’ve got to judge people by the effect of their actions,” she said. “I don’t know what the long‑term effect is going to be, but the short‑term effect is that I’m going to be apart from my loved ones for a very long time, and they’re going to be suffering a whole long time. And ultimately, if we’d all just kind of stayed at home like I did, nothing would have happened.”
Janet Reitman is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts,” a book of nonfiction to be published on Oct. 6.
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