Last
summer, Bruno was in a Chinese class when he found out that three of
his close friends—Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, and Savanna Battan—were among those
arrested after a noise demonstration the day before, outside an ICE detention
camp in Alvarado, Texas. While Bruno was working to locate his friends in the jail
system, federal prosecutors were telling the public that the demonstration was “a planned ambush.” When Bruno
found the Sotos and Battan in a county jail database, he was able to read the charges himself: attempted murder of a
federal officer. “I saw the charges and was just shocked,” he told me. “What
the hell happened at the protest?” Lurid details provided by prosecutors began to
spread through otherwise slight news reports: Investigators reportedly found flyers
reading “Fight ICE Terror With Class War,” and seized masks, “tactical gloves,”
a “cache of weapons,” and “insurrectionist material” from the home of one
“suspect.” Officers were descending on the residences not just of those
arrested, but those of friends and families, too. Bruno worried he could be next. “I couldn’t sleep for days,” he remembered, “and would just stay up all night, mentally preparing myself.” 

What
had happened? Some of that is still up for debate, and some trials are
pending, but a few important
facts are generally accepted. On the night of July 4, 2025, around a dozen people
converged on the immigrant detention camp known as Prairieland. They had
planned a noise demonstration, gathering near enough so that those inside could
hear them as they chanted supportive slogans through bullhorns, waved
flashlights, and set off fireworks. One person vandalized a few cars in the
parking lot. Some security cameras were damaged. The camp’s officers told the
demonstrators to leave, and most of them did. A local police officer arrived
and saw, at a distance, someone wearing a neon-green neck gaiter and carrying a
rifle. The officer drew his weapon. The person in green fired, striking and
wounding the officer. More law enforcement swarmed the scene and arrested
everyone they could find.

In
the ensuing days, law enforcement sought anyone they thought was involved. There
were raids, more arrests, and a hunt for Benjamin Song, who fired the rifle. On
July 8, federal prosecutors announced the first round of arrests and
charged 10 people with attempted murder of a federal officer. A few months
later, after the president declared war on what he called “Antifa,” federal prosecutors began
describing those arrested as an “Antifa cell.” Then they charged them with
“providing material support to terrorists.” In the end, some 22 people were
swept up in this case, facing a range of federal and state charges. This June
and July, 15 people were sentenced by federal judges to prison sentences
spanning 30, 50, and 100 years.

Beyond
the shooting, beyond the demonstration, the political activities prosecutors pointed
at to justify charging these activists were utterly ordinary. The government deemed
the protests defendants organized, the zines they made, and their shared interests
in antifascism and anarchism the incriminating features of a (nonexistent) antifa terror
cell. Importantly, some of the people who were first to come to the defendants’ aid were engaged in those political acts, too. They shared those
political interests. This meant that from the beginning, supporters faced the reality
that their actions could also be characterized as criminal. They
knew that the Trump administration was not interested in merely prosecuting
individual acts of violence or even vandalism, but rather in casting a group of
people as a threat to the nation. 

The boundaries of that group extended beyond
the July 4 noise demonstration. Prosecutors got indictments for people who
weren’t even there: someone who moderated a group chat on Discord, someone who gave a defendant a Faraday bag (meant to block a phone signal) that
she had crafted herself, and someone who moved a box zines from a home he’d shared with a defendant (who
was also his wife). If the government was already going this far to target
activists in its crackdown on dissent, was there any kind of organizing that could
be considered safe? 

“It’s
obvious to me that the prosecution optimized for the headline,” said Lydia
Koza, whose wife, Autumn Hill, was sentenced to 50 years. “They optimized for
the shock and awe.” We spoke just after the anniversaries of the noise
demonstration and the raid on her home with Hill. For months after the arrests,
Koza explained, the defendants remained in detention, unindicted, some in
“administrative segregation”—solitary confinement—“while the
Justice Department scrambled to try and put together a theory of the case that
served their ends.” 

What
the case was supposedly about—the purpose and nature of a noise demonstration—was
something that could be easily mischaracterized, a fact the government’s case arguably
benefited from. Noise demonstrations, recalled Autumn Hill in a recent rare
interview she gave from prison, are “a pretty typical form of protest”:
“Fireworks and megaphones and bells and whistles and all that are extremely
common.” While a noise demo is one form of protest, it can also be an
expression of care and connection. “My goal,” Hill said, “was to let the people
inside, the detainees, know, ‘Hey, we’re here, we know that you are there, you
haven’t been forgotten, and we understand that what is happening to you is
unjust.’” In that sense, a noise demo has more in common with sending a
letter to a person in prison than it does with a march or a rally. It’s not
merely a symbolic action; it’s a way of showing those incarcerated that people
on the outside are looking out for them and paying attention to what
happens to them. Showing up and connecting with others is the point.

The
day after the noise demonstration, on July 5, Autumn Hill was arrested in a
raid on the Dallas home she shared with Koza. “They tried to present this house
as being like a commune, or a compound,” Koza told me. In the government’s telling,
the house was linked to what prosecutors called “the attack.” At a pretrial
hearing, FBI Special Agent Joseph Clark Wiethorn, testifying for the government,
was asked what the house meant to “the group.” “It’s been referred to as
different things,” Wiethorn replied. “I’ve heard the term as a commune for
multiple individuals.” As he put it, “This place was used for holding meetings,
for organizing.” Then he called the house “a staging location” that had been “used
for pre-attack planning.” It was if by being the scene of an organizing
meeting, the house they shared was something sinister in disguise. “You know,
we’re living together for fundamentally economic reasons, because this economy
is brutal, and because sharing a house is literally the only way to get by,”
Koza explained. “This is not as weird as the prosecution wants to make this
sound.” 

Meanwhile,
the “planning” the government offered as evidence of conspiracy appeared to
involve discussions of the necessary and complex logistics of organizing a
demonstration in the midst of ICE raids. People at anti-ICE protests were
facing violence from police as well as political repression through wildly
reaching criminal charges brought by federal prosecutors (many of which, across
the country, have since been thrown out, from the cases involving DC Sandwich Guy and labor leaders to the Broadview 6). This escalation in criminal
charges was a pattern already becoming clear in mid-2025, and it was directed
from the top. 

About
two weeks before the Prairieland arrests, the Justice Department had issued a directive to all U.S. attorneys
to step up cases against anti-ICE demonstrators. Federal prosecutors, a memo
from Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh stated, should prioritize
investigations to do with alleged “rioting, looting, arson, destruction of
property, assaults on officers (federal, state, and local), and obstruction of
federal immigration enforcement efforts,” and should publicize their efforts.
“Push out press releases whenever you file charges in these matters,”
Singh instructed.

That
July, after the arrests, as federal prosecutors rolled out their case against
the Prairieland defendants to the media and the defendants sat in jail, their supporters
were at work just trying to find each other. These efforts were the beginnings
of what became the DFW Support Committee, a
group started, Bruno
explained, “to connect everyone who’s part of this wider and pretty small
radical community in the DFW metroplex area.” It wasn’t easy, he said, because people had typically tried to remain “as anonymous and disconnected from each
other as possible.” The size of their community, compared to the local
opposition, along with the opposition’s increasing access to mainstream
political power, had already led people to isolate themselves and take
precautions, even before the more punitive climate took hold. The political
repression driving the case could give them more reasons to disconnect from
one another. It
was difficult to verify the names and dates of birth for the defendants, information
that was necessary in order to locate them in jail and communicate with them there.
Some people may have deleted the Signal app off their phone, Bruno said, or
changed their usernames. It could take weeks or months before participants connected
names they knew on a screen to faces they knew from an organizing meeting. 

Those kinds of meetings, tying this somewhat diffuse community together, were also made suspect in the government’s case. Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, and Savanna Battan—Bruno’s friends—were the driving force behind the Emma Goldman Book Club, which Bruno had been attending as far back as 2016, “not when it started, but damn near close,” he told me. “Emma Goldman Book Club. It sounds very innocuous,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith. “It’s camouflage for what it is.” Prosecutors put anarchist books and zines that might be read in the club—or at least, their covers—in press materials.

Alexandra Edwards first went to the book club in 2023, she told me, when she was new to the DFW activist scene. “Ines made room for me,” she wrote in a recent essay on the case. Edwards, a writer and academic who teaches about anarchism and researches fascist movements and networks, was at the time working to support the Stop Cop City defendants, who had been organizing against a planned $90 million police megafacility in Atlanta. The Georgia attorney general charged more than 60 people with racketeering for their involvement, and more than a dozen with domestic terrorism. (These defendants were characterized by prosecutors as “militant anarchists.”)  “I wanted to host a letter-writing night for the Cop City defendants—people then reading their mail in jail,” Edwards wrote, and when she brought this idea to the book club, “Ines folded it into the evening.” Three years later, Ines Soto was among those jailed for participating in the noise demo, and the book club was demonized in the government’s case.

The government was convinced, or at least wanted the jury to be convinced, that the book club was a front for plotting insurrection. “Emma Goldman is a known anarchist. And in these book clubs, this is a place for people to come together and share and spread this type of literature, this anarchist material,” testified FBI Special Agent Joseph Clark Wiethorn at one pretrial hearing. “And where they read, they set up what’s called tabling events. And it’s a place for these people to come together to discuss these ideas.” In other words, it was an ordinary a book club, with one distinguishing characteristic: the nature of the ideas under discussion. “All right,” replied Assistant U.S. Attorney Smith. “And these are really kind of violent, overthrow-the-government-type things?” The FBI agent answered simply, “Correct.”

The
noise demo itself, meant to express solidarity with people locked away in an
immigrant camp, has resulted in a bitter symmetry. The demonstrators who organized
to show support for detainees are now imprisoned, and others are now organizing
and demonstrating to support them. 

On days when the trial was in session,
members of the support committee staffed a table at the courthouse; people shared zines
and pamphlets about the case. Bruno told me that he gave essays about the
case to anarchists in Greece and South Korea. The types of networks that had
been made to sound suspicious in the government’s arguments were put to use raising
money for lawyers and supporting defendants’ family members. It is the kind of
network that could grow, as Bruno and others have put it, the mass movement that
it would take to free the Prairieland defendants—broad and strong enough to put
the necessary pressure on a future president to pardon and release them.

Early
on, Bruno said, the government’s aggressive roundups and violent raids had
unfortunately been “pretty successful in scattering everyone.” It took
concerted effort to get them back together, he explained, “and understand that
these are battles that have to be fought in community, have to be fought
collectively, instead of trying to hide.” The risks they face remain very real.
But for Bruno, there’s a deeper lesson here, one for the future: “Repression is
harder when we’re all together—when we all stick together, when we are all in
community with each other—than when we’re separate.”