Nine Protesters, 450 Years: Washington Turns Antifa Into a Sentencing Category

A federal judge in Fort Worth just handed Benjamin Song 100 years in prison. Seven of his co-defendants got 30 to 70 years apiece. Add it up and nine people who showed up outside the Prairieland ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas on the night of July 4, 2025 are now carrying a combined 450 years for what the government itself charged as vandalism, weapons offenses, and one act of gunfire that wounded but did not kill a police officer. Nobody died. The sentences describe a body count that didn't happen.

This is the first prosecution built on Trump's September 2025 executive order labeling Antifa a "domestic terrorist organization" — a designation that does not exist anywhere in U.S. federal law, because Congress has never created one. There is no statute called domestic terrorism. What the Justice Department did instead was take existing charges — material support, riot, attempted murder — and stack a political label on top loud enough to get sentences that a former federal prosecutor told PBS are normally reserved for murderers and people who stole millions of dollars. Five of the defendants testified under oath that the thing binding them together wasn't a cell, a leader, or a chain of command. It was a book club. The Emma Goldman Reading Society, named for a woman deported from this country in 1919 for the crime of opposing conscription.

Compare the sentences to the actual armed insurrection this country lived through five years ago. The longest sentence any January 6 defendant received, out of 1,500-plus prosecutions for storming the Capitol with the explicit goal of overturning a presidential election, was 22 years — handed to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was pardoned by Trump before he served a fraction of it. A protest outside an ICE facility, where the worst injury was a police officer shot in the neck and survived, now draws sentences up to four and a half times longer than an attempt to block the certification of a national election. That gap is not about violence. It's about who the violence was aimed at, and who is currently in the White House deciding which political tendency gets the terrorism label.

NSPM-7, the memo underlying this, doesn't stop at material support for armed confrontations. It defines the target ideology broadly enough to include "anti-capitalist views," positions on race, gender, and immigration, and dissent from "traditional teachings on marriage and the family." That is not a counterterrorism framework. It's a list of political beliefs the state has decided it can prosecute you for holding, dressed up in the language of public safety. The Alvarado case is the test run. If 450 years for a demonstration survives appeal, it becomes the floor, not the ceiling, for every future prosecution of anyone the government decides to call Antifa — a term with no leadership, no membership rolls, and, as of this ruling, no legal limit on the punishment attached to it.

The state has always needed an enemy broad enough to justify whatever apparatus it wants to build. Fascism doesn't need Antifa to be an organization for the label to work as a weapon — it only needs the label to stick to whoever the cops point a gun at next. Solidarity with everyone doing time in Alvarado. This won't be the last cell they invent to justify the sentence they already wanted to hand down.

Sources

U.S. Department of Justice press release, June 23, 2026
PBS NewsHour, "Anti-ICE protesters sentenced to decades in prison in latest crackdown on dissent"
Al Jazeera, "Seven more sentenced over Texas ICE detention centre shooting"
Wikipedia, 2025 Prairieland ICE detention center incident
NPR, "Ex-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio gets 22 years for Jan. 6 role"