On 23 June, a Texas district judge concluded the draconian sentencing of eight people in connection with the 4 July 2025 protests outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre in Alvarado, Texas. In total, the Prairieland defendants received a combined 450 years in prison. The alleged ‘leader’ of the protesters, Benjamin Hanil Song, received 100 years, while the other seven sentences range between 30 and 70 years which the judge ruled would be carried out consecutively where they were convicted on multiple charges. These extreme sentences are a stunning escalation of the Trump administration’s aggressive political repression campaign that has set out to target and criminalise anyone who engages in organised left-wing political activity.
The Prairieland protest took place during the upsurge of anti-ICE protests outside of immigration detention facilities across the US in 2025. Originally planned as a noise demo to show solidarity with the detained people caged inside, some protestors set off fireworks damaging a guard station and ICE vehicles in the process. When the police arrived, they pulled their weapons on the protesters, leading Benjamin Song to fire defensive shots wounding an officer.
It took nearly a year for the legal process to be concluded. The first attempt at a trial didn’t make it past jury selection when the judge declared a mistrial citing the defence attorney’s choice to wear a shirt which displayed images of civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. in honour of the death of Jesse Jackson the same day. The judge, clearly frustrated by the outspoken jury pool’s anti-ICE sentiments revealed during questioning, made his decision saying ‘Politics — as prevalent as they are, as divided as they are — don’t have any business here.’ When it becomes clear the state is losing an ideological battle, they will always try to strip political cases of any context to get their desired outcome.
In the end, seven of the eight defendants were convicted on riot charges, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and, as the most brutal expression of the US state’s heavy-handed crackdown, ‘providing material support to terrorists’. One defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who was not even present at the demonstration, was found guilty of ‘corruptly concealing a document’ and sentenced to 30 years in prison for the possession and transportation of a box of political pamphlets. This decision served as a test-case for the implementation of Trump’s recent designation of ‘antifa’ as a ‘domestic terrorist organisation’ in federal prosecution cases. The dangerous absurdity of this designation is two-fold. First, until now, the term ‘domestic terror group’ has never existed as a designation in the United States, and second, antifa is not an organisation, but a shorthand for anyone who is an antifascist. The judge himself stated that his aim was to ‘send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology’.
This case is the state’s direct response to the militant Minneapolis uprisings earlier this year and comes as part of a massive ideological war against the left to squash any kind of opposition to ICE terror as an arm of the racist US state (see above). Prior to this, dozens of organisers in Minneapolis were designated as ‘antifa’ and indicted for defending their neighbours from ICE operations, and three protestors in Spokane, Washington were found guilty of conspiracy in May this year for taking part in a demonstration outside an ICE facility.
As the US government cracks down on this opposition to state racism, ICE’s reign of terror wages on. With Washington demanding 2,000 arrests a day, ICE has expanded its street operations, systematically brutalising black and brown people in working class neighbourhoods. This recently culminated in yet another murder by ICE agents – that of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was on his way to work unarmed when he was shot through the abdomen. While activists face extreme prison sentences for opposing state violence, ICE agents are encouraged to shoot people dead without receiving even the slightest slap on the wrist. Any resistance to ICE must include a movement against its racist terror as well as a widespread defence of those facing the state’s heavy-handed repression.
Lucinda Jules
