Prairieland, Proportionality, and What Happens When the Government Gets to Define Terrorism
Let’s establish what is not in dispute first, because this essay requires that the ground be clear before we argue about what’s built on it.
On the night of July 4, 2025, a group of people went to the Prairieland ICE detention center near Dallas to protest. One of them, Benjamin Song, a Marine Corps reservist, shot and wounded an Alvarado police officer in the neck. Lieutenant Thomas Gross was not involved in enforcing immigration law. He responded to a 911 call and was shot while issuing commands. Earthjustice
Benjamin Song should be in prison. Shooting a police officer who is responding to a call is a serious violent crime. Song has been convicted of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer. A long prison sentence for Song is not controversial. What is controversial — what is worth writing about — is everything else about what happened at Prairieland and what has followed.
The Sentences
Benjamin Song was hit with the longest prison sentence: 100 years. Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years. Autumn Hill was sentenced to 50 years, along with Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto. Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years. E&E News
Together, the Prairieland defendants received a combined sentence of 450 years in prison. Earthjustice
One police officer was shot. He survived. He recovered. He testified at trial. No one died.
450 years in prison.
Let us compare. The median federal sentence for murder in the United States is approximately 22 years. The median sentence for sexual abuse is 11 years. A man who beats his wife to death typically serves less time than Autumn Hill will serve for attending a fireworks protest at an ICE facility on Independence Day.
“I am livid,” said Lydia Koza, whose wife, Autumn Hill, was sentenced to 50 years. “The government wants to take her entire life away because she attended a protest. Nobody died.” Christian Post
The Terrorism Label and What It Does
The prosecution of the Prairieland defendants was the first federal terrorism case associated with antifa since President Trump designated “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization. That designation is the engine that drove everything that followed, and it deserves scrutiny. The American Prospect
Antifa is not an organization. It has no membership list, no hierarchy, no dues, no leadership structure, no address, no bank accounts. It is a political identity — a shorthand for anti-fascism — that some activists claim and others reject. Trump signed an executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization even though there is no domestic equivalent to the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations. You cannot designate an idea as a terrorist organization. But you can designate people who hold that idea as terrorists. Which is precisely what has happened. CSMonitor.com
The defendants deny any affiliation with antifa and maintain they attended the demonstration in support of detained immigrants. The charge of providing material support to terrorism, was not necessarily related to antifa or any set of beliefs. It was applied because the government said antifa is a terrorist organization, and these defendants were allegedly linked to antifa, therefore anything they did in connection with each other constitutes material support to terrorism. Christian PostThe American Prospect
This is legal reasoning that can swallow almost anything. It is the same logic that has been used to prosecute people for decades in the war on foreign terror, to results that civil liberties advocates have spent those same decades documenting and criticizing. Applied domestically, to American citizens, at a protest that was planned as a noise demonstration with fireworks, it produces a 30-year sentence for a man whose lawyer says was not at Prairieland on the night of the shooting, was not involved in planning, and was convicted only of concealing documents — specifically, moving a box of his own belongings of artwork, poetry, journals and zines after the shooting. Nothing in the box was illegal. Christian Post
Thirty years for moving a box.
What I Get Right
My framing is exactly right. Benjamin Song shot a police officer. That is not protest. That is violence against a person, and it is appropriately a serious crime that carries a serious sentence.
But the distinction between Song and the other defendants is the distinction the law was supposed to maintain and that these sentences obliterate. A prosecutor who tells a judge that “people with that kind of extremist beliefs need extra time in prison” is not making a legal argument. He is making a political one. Beliefs are not crimes. The First Amendment exists to protect exactly the beliefs that the government most wants to suppress.
“These defendants are not militant monsters out to kill,” a defense attorney wrote. “They are everyday people who saw our country literally interning people in concentration camps and decided to show up at Prairieland Detention Center to let those incarcerated there know that they mattered.” The American Prospect
You can disagree with that framing. You can think the protesters were wrong, that their tactics were counterproductive, that showing up at an ICE facility at night with fireworks was a bad idea that ended badly. All of that is available to you. What is not available — what the law has never been supposed to permit — is the government locking people away for 50 years because they were at a protest where someone else did something violent.
The Mirror
Here is the part of this essay that will make some people uncomfortable.
On January 6, 2021, a mob attacked the United States Capitol. They assaulted police officers. They broke windows, destroyed property, and chanted about hanging the Vice President. 140 officers were injured. One died of strokes in the days following. Several others died by suicide in the aftermath.
The most serious sentences handed down for January 6th have been in the range of 20 years for the most violent offenders. The Trump administration pardoned virtually all of them on his first day back in office.
The people who attacked the Capitol on behalf of Donald Trump got pardoned. The people who attended a fireworks protest at an immigration detention facility on behalf of detained immigrants got 450 combined years.
The asymmetry is not a coincidence. It is a policy. It is a statement about whose violence the government considers terrorism and whose it considers patriotism. And it answers a larger question before I even ask it explicitly:
When the definition of terrorism is controlled by the executive branch, and when the executive branch has the power to designate political movements as terrorist organizations, the definition of terrorism is always going to follow the politics of whoever holds that power.
Trump called antifa terrorists and prosecuted protesters accordingly.
The next Democratic administration will have exactly the same power. The tools built by this administration to prosecute left-wing dissent do not disappear when the administration changes. They remain available, waiting for whoever wins next.
January 6th defendants were pardoned in bulk by the president who benefited from their actions. If a future Democratic administration chose to use the same terrorism framework — material support, conspiracy, the whole architecture — against the organizations that planned and funded and executed January 6th, it would be using tools this administration built and precedents this administration set.
That is worth thinking about. Not as a threat. As a consequence. The legal frameworks we build to use against our enemies do not stay pointed in only one direction. They follow the power. They always have.
Benjamin Song should be in prison. The people who moved boxes of their own belongings should not be serving more time than most murderers. And the administration that is cheering 450 years of sentences for protesters should remember that the instrument they are playing will eventually be in other hands.