Zine makers sentenced to decades under Trump antifa order
A leaked Florida police bulletin brands zines and a legal charity terrorism, months after a nurse and a jailed protester paid the price.
Daniel Sanchez Estrada is serving 30 years in prison for carrying a box of anti-fascist zines. He was not at the Texas protest police say he was tied to.
His sentence follows the deaths of two US citizens shot by federal agents this year. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot dead by Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis on 24 January while filming and shielding a woman agents had pushed to the ground. Renée Nicole Macklin Good, also 37, was shot dead in her car by an ICE agent during a raid called Operation Metro Surge on 7 January.
A document obtained by The Intercept shows how deep the machinery behind these prosecutions now runs. A confidential 28-page bulletin from the Southeast Florida Fusion Center, part of the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, treats Donald Trump’s executive order branding “antifa” a terrorist organisation as operational guidance for working police officers.
Zines, green hats and inflatable frogs
The bulletin, marked “for official use only,” reproduces Trump’s 22 September 2025 order in full and states that antifa’s goal is “the violent overthrow of the United States government.” It draws on posts from commentators Andy Ngo and Jack Posobiec and an account called Far Left Watch.
It lists profane language directed at officers, distributing zines and dressing in inflatable animal costumes, which it calls propaganda “to soften their image,” as warning signs. A full page is devoted to the National Lawyers Guild, the 89-year-old legal collective, which the bulletin names as antifa’s “legal representation” beside a photograph of its lime-green-hatted legal observers.
Xavier de Janon, the Guild’s director of mass defense, called the claim “laughable”: antifa “is not an organization… There is no retainer agreement with antifa.” He said the photograph of legal observers reads as “a call to target them.”
Built for terror, aimed at dissent
Fusion centres were set up after 11 September 2001 to share terrorism intelligence between federal and local police. Independent reviews have found they produce few tangible results. Since Trump signed NSPM-7, a memorandum ordering federal task forces to dismantle “left-linked networks,” that machinery has turned on protesters, zine distributors and lawyers.
An FBI report circulated in January lists anti-capitalist and anti-police graffiti as signs someone is mobilising toward violence. A Dallas fusion centre brief tied two pro-Palestine groups to an unrelated bomb plot with no evidence linking them to it. Brendan McQuade, who studies fusion centres at the University of Southern Maine, said the Florida bulletin reads “like opposition research… encouraging police to go hunting for a very broad profile of not even just dissent but sometimes aesthetic markers of dissenting behavior.”
What was actually proven
A guard at the Prairieland Detention Center was shot and wounded on 4 July 2025. Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist convicted over the shooting, was sentenced to 100 years, longer than any 6 January defendant received. Eight co-defendants got 30 to 70 years each for offences including moving zines and letting off fireworks on Independence Day. “This is mass punishment,” Song told the court. “Collective punishment. This is guilt by association. This is injustice.”
Fifteen more people, including a Macalester College professor accused of moderating organising meetings, are awaiting trial in Minneapolis on similar charges. Prosecutors have not alleged that anyone was harmed.
The White House says the dragnet targets “a vast network inciting violence.” The Miami-Dade bulletin says otherwise. It says inflatable frogs.
