Tattooist gets 30 years for anarchist zines
A US court has sentenced 15 anti-ICE protesters to 556 years combined, using terrorism law to punish pamphlets, printing presses and Signal chats.
Daniel Sanchez Estrada was not at the protest. He was not accused of firing a weapon, throwing anything, or confronting a single officer. On 1 July, a federal court in Fort Worth sentenced the tattoo artist to 30 years in prison for helping move a box of years-old anarchist zines that belonged to his wife.
That sentence sits inside a much larger one. Across two hearings, on 23 June and 1 July, 15 defendants connected to a July 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention centre in Alvarado, Texas, were sentenced to a combined 556 years and two months. The charges: material support for terrorism, the first time the US government has used that statute against people it labels “antifa.”
The protest and the shooting
The facts of the night itself are not seriously in dispute. Around a dozen people gathered outside the LaSalle Corrections-run facility at 10:30pm, dressed in black, letting off fireworks. Some were lawfully carrying guns, legal under Texas open-carry law. Police arrived. Lieutenant Thomas Gross was shot in the shoulder, released within 24 hours. Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist, fled and was the subject of a multi-day manhunt before his arrest.
Song was sentenced to 100 years. His case is the government’s strongest card, and we report it straight: a police officer was shot, and Song’s supporters’ account of suppressive fire changes nothing about the fact that a person was hurt. But Song is one person. He is not the story of the other 14, and he is not the story of the sentencing project the Department of Justice has built on top of his case.
From zines to 30 years
Maricela Rueda, who left the protest before the shooting, got 70 years. Part of the evidence against her husband, Sanchez Estrada, was that she asked him to move a box of zines. The zines, according to the Intercept’s reporting on the case, said nothing about the protest or the shooting. Owning them is not a crime. Moving them, prosecutors successfully argued, was.
Ines Soto ran a book club named after Emma Goldman and printed pamphlets from his home. He got 50 years. His wife Elizabeth Soto got 50 years too, partly on the basis of owning the printing press. Joy Gibson, Song’s partner, and Rebecca Morgan got 15 years each after pleading guilty to material support without cooperating. Cameron Arnold, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris and Savannah Batten each got 50 years on 23 June. Four defendants who cooperated and testified against the others, Lynette Sharp, John Thomas, Seth Sikes and Nathan Baumann, received far lighter terms, from 22 months to six years.
At trial, prosecutors told the jury that wearing all black and using the Signal messaging app were evidence of material support for terrorism. Judge Reed O’Connor, sentencing Sanchez Estrada, said he wanted to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.” Attorney General Pam Bondi called the case proof that “antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities,” and promised the verdict “will not be the last.”
The machinery behind the charges
The Prairieland prosecutions did not emerge from nowhere. On 22 September 2025, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organisation, the first such designation in US history against a domestic movement. No statute authorises it. Three days later, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 ordered federal agencies to dismantle “anti-fascist” networks. Both moves followed the killing of Charlie Kirk. The Department of Justice upgraded the Prairieland charges after NSPM-7 landed.
Former FBI director Chris Wray and the Congressional Research Service have both said what the historian Mark Bray put more bluntly to the Intercept: antifa is not an organisation. It is a decentralised, loosely affiliated tendency, not a corporate body with membership rolls, and treating it as one lets prosecutors fold a tattoo artist, a book club and a couple who own a printing press into the same “cell” as a man who fired a gun.
The government’s own paper trail undercuts its case. Type Investigations obtained FBI records from a 2018 investigation into the same Dallas-area antifascist groups. That investigation found no potential criminal violations and no priority threat to national security. Those exculpatory files were withheld from the defence, a fact that raises a live Brady violation question the appeals will have to answer.
The terrorism sentencing enhancement that pushed these sentences toward the maximum was available in the January 6 Capitol cases and mostly went unused. It has been used freely here, against a group whose most serious weapon-related act was committed by one of its 15 members.
Whose war on terror
This is the shape Bray is naming when he says antifa is functioning today the way “Communist” functioned in the McCarthy period: a label elastic enough to swallow anyone standing near the thing the state has decided to fear. The apparatus built after 2001 to prosecute foreign terrorism networks, material-support statutes, sentencing enhancements, surveillance powers, has been turned inward on people who wear black to a protest and use an encrypted chat app.
The Home Office would recognise the mechanism, because Britain built its own version of it. A government does not need a real organisation to prosecute one. It needs a name, a memo, and a jury willing to accept that a box of pamphlets is a weapon.
What comes next
The Department of Justice has already signalled the next front. Fifteen Minneapolis residents now face federal conspiracy charges over anti-ICE protests, echoing the Prairieland model. In November, the State Department designated four European “antifa-linked” groups as foreign terrorist organisations, the first such designations of their kind. Bondi’s promise that Prairieland “will not be the last” was not rhetoric. It was a description of a programme, and it is being carried out.
Daniel Sanchez Estrada will serve 30 years for a box he never opened, in a case built to make an example of him. That is the sentence that should sit in the reader’s mind when the next “antifa cell” indictment lands.
