450 Years for a Noise Demo: Washington Just Told You What NSPM-7 Is For

On June 23, 2026, two federal judges in Fort Worth, Texas sentenced eight people to a combined 450 years in prison. Their crime was gathering outside the Prairieland immigration detention center in Alvarado on July 4, 2025, setting off fireworks, and — in the case of one defendant, Benjamin Song — firing a rifle during a confrontation with police that wounded an officer. The other seven were convicted of "providing material support for terrorism" for acts prosecutors described as wearing black clothing, using encrypted messaging apps, and being present. Maricela Rueda got 70 years. Five others got 50 each. A man who wasn't even at the protest, convicted only of moving a box of zines, got 30.

The law that makes this possible didn't exist when the protest happened. NSPM-7, "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence," was signed by Trump on September 25, 2025 — eleven weeks after Prairieland — and it does something no prior domestic terrorism framework has done: it names a political tendency, "anti-fascism," as the organizing threat, and directs the FBI and DOJ to treat opposition to ICE, capitalism, and "traditional American" gender and family norms as indicators of a conspiracy to commit terrorism. Three days earlier, an executive order had already designated Antifa itself a domestic terrorist organization — a category that, unlike foreign terrorist designations, has no statutory basis at all. Attorney General Pam Bondi's December memo then instructed prosecutors to build financial and network cases against "extremist groups," turning intelligence-gathering into a hunting license retroactively pointed at people already in custody.

This is the sequence that matters more than any individual sentence: state violence happens, the law criminalizing resistance to it gets written afterward, and then it's applied backward onto people who had no way of knowing the rules had changed. That's not law enforcement. It's the state deciding what verdict it wants and manufacturing the statute to justify it. The "material support for terrorism" charge — designed for people funding armed groups abroad — was pointed at a Signal group chat and a printer. A trial with 46 witnesses and 210 exhibits produced convictions built partly on cooperating co-defendants testifying against each other, the oldest trick in every grand jury playbook for manufacturing conspiracies where none existed.

None of this is contained to Texas or to Antifa as a label. The same week these sentences landed, London police arrested 107 people — several in their 80s — for holding signs supporting a banned direct-action group, after a court had already ruled the ban itself unlawful. U.S. appeals courts have overturned lower-court releases of pro-Palestinian students and scholars facing deportation for their speech. The pattern is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: expand the definition of terrorism to include political affiliation, apply it selectively to the left, and let the sentencing math do the intimidating. A rifle shot that didn't kill anyone becomes the pretext for locking up seven other people for the crime of showing up.

The message to anyone who protests ICE, or anything else the state has decided is off-limits, is explicit: we will write the law after your arrest and apply it anyway. That's worth naming clearly, because the alternative — treating this as a one-off case about "the Prairieland Nine" — lets the actual mechanism, NSPM-7 itself, keep operating quietly on the next case, and the one after that.

Sources

NSPM-7 full text
Standing Record: Prairieland sentencing record
The Conversation: NSPM-7 constitutional alarms
Anadolu: 107 arrested outside Woolwich Crown Court
Al Jazeera: US courts and pro-Palestine deportation cases