This piece appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
Independence Day was unusually quiet for Darío Sánchez last year. The middle school computer science teacher didn’t know it at the time, but the lull in the normally festive season turned out to be the last bit of peace he’d experience for a long time.
That evening, Sánchez stayed in, played video games, and crashed early at his home outside of Dallas, Texas. “It was a pretty quiet night for July Fourth, you know, there’s usually a decent amount of illegal fireworks going off,” Sánchez told me in a phone interview in early November. “But people just weren’t feeling it this year, for a variety of reasons.”
The mood shifted the next morning, when his group chats were flooded with texts about arrests the previous night. Sánchez, who has been involved in local organizing for about five years, initially assumed there must have been some kind of conflict with police at the Prairieland Detention Center southwest of the city.
What’s taking place in Texas is a test case in the Trump administration’s bid to concentrate political power by weaponizing the criminal legal system to quell activism and discourage critical speech.
It had been a year since a group of local activists began organizing regular noise demonstrations outside Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities in north Texas. Sánchez said he knew about the noise demo that was to take place that day, but had not been involved in any of the organizing. “It very quickly turned out that this was not your usual, you know, protest-arrest sort of thing, and that something particularly out of the ordinary happened,” said Sánchez.
It remains unclear exactly what took place outside the Prairieland ICE facility in Alvarado that day. What is known is that a local police officer arrived near the end of the demonstration and was injured by gunfire (he was hospitalized Friday night and released the same weekend).
Ten people were arrested that night and another eight over the following weeks, including Sánchez, who would go on to spend 40 days in solitary confinement. He was strip-searched by guards every day, and accused of evidence tampering for removing someone from a group chat on the Signal messaging app.
Family members and advocates say the severity of the charges reflects a broader federal strategy to target dissent. “As the Prairieland case progresses, it looks more and more like a protest case involving people expressing solidarity with detained immigrants,” said Amber Lowrey, sister of defendant Savanna Batten, in a press release. “The federal government is trying to reframe protest activity as terrorism, and we’re seeing this attempted across the country, from Chicago to Portland, and now here in Dallas-Fort Worth.”
There are 18 people still detained; Sánchez was the only one to be released on bond. The bonds for most of those still imprisoned are set at $10 million. Nine of the defendants have pleaded not-guilty, and seven have pleaded guilty.
What’s taking place in Texas is a test case in the Trump administration’s bid to concentrate political power by weaponizing the criminal legal system to quell activism and discourage critical speech. The aim is not only punishment, but deterrence.
The killing of Renée Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, followed the same logic. “We had whistles, they had guns,” Good’s wife Becca wrote in a statement following the killing, which prompted widespread street protests against ICE. Her murder was followed by the shooting of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents in the same city on January 24. Pretti’s killing fueled nationwide protests and widespread demands for an end to state terror.
As this issue goes to print, militarization and intimidation by ICE agents in U.S. cities are being met with open confrontation, and diffuse and varied political networks engaged in ongoing resistance have organized to support demonstrations across the country.
Casting Dissent as Terrorism
The case against organizers in Texas is the first in which Antifa-linked terrorism charges have been applied in the United States, placing it at the leading edge of a campaign to criminalize critical speech and local dissent across the country. It recasts a group of mostly young people who made zines, wore patches, and held protests against ICE as a threat to national security, and serves as a dissuasive warning against anyone considering taking action—however symbolic—against the Trump regime.
On September 22, 2025, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, even though Antifa isn’t an organization, and there is no legal basis for the domestic terror label under U.S. law. Short for Antifaschistische Aktion, Antifa was founded in Germany in 1932 to fight against the Nazis. The name was revived in the 1980s by anarchists seeking to confront the far right, and today is used to refer to militant anti-fascism more generally. The July noise demo in Alvarado, Texas appeared first on a list of alleged leftist and Antifa crimes released by the White House the same day, situating the local protest within a quickly evolving national security narrative.
Three days after the anti-Antifa executive order was signed, the White House issued the National Security Presidential Memorandum Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, known as NSPM-7. The memo doesn’t change the existing legal framework, but it does direct various federal agencies—including the Departments of State, Treasury, and Homeland Security, as well as the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force—to investigate groups considered leftist or critical of the government.
Among the viewpoints to be pursued for investigation, according to the memo, are: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
One of the stated goals of NSPM-7 is to “intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.” In other words, to police those who are perceived to express the views listed in the memo and discourage collective action or criticism of capitalism, immigration policy, or the state itself. “I don’t want to sound hyperbolic but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda,” writes journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Critics see the memo as a kind of return to COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program that between 1956 and 1971 surveilled, investigated, and terrorized activists and unions, especially those led by Black, Indigenous and latinx folks. “NSPM-7 is a deliberate attempt to sow fear and intimidate and silence opposition to the president’s abuses,” writes Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union. The broad conception of “domestic terrorism” advanced in NSPM-7 laid the rhetorical framework for Justice Department officials to label Renée Good as a terrorist for engaging in peaceful protest against ICE operations in her city.
For the defendants in Texas, the impacts of NSPM-7 were immediate. “As soon as that happened, the narrative shifted to be one of terrorism by way of Antifa,” said Sánchez. In October, two of the defendants were indicted on charges of providing material support for terrorism. FBI head Kash Patel went on to call what took place outside the Prairieland prison “a planned and coordinated terrorist attack.”
Sánchez, whose main organizing work prior to July 4 was through the Dallas Fort Worth Chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, is unequivocal in describing the arrests as political persecution. “It’s 100 percent political,” he said, referring to the group being targeted for a protest at an ICE prison. “They arrested a bunch of people who had no idea what was going on, and tried to put together this narrative that it was some kind of planned attack to shoot a police officer.”
Fascists on the March, This Time in Uniform
Since last year, the Trump administration has declared an emergency at the southern border, handed control of land there to the Army, and deployed the Armed Forces to the border as well as to cities around the country. These efforts expand the use of violent bordering processes and drive them into cities and towns in ways that initially target the most vulnerable and produce a climate of fear. This provides the scaffolding through which militarization is normalized and ramped up, and potentially turned on society as a whole.
At the same time, U.S. national intelligence officials have edited and rewritten juiced up assessments of narcotics trafficking and terrorism to justify detentions, disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and even initiatives for military action abroad, including the January 3 bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
The administration’s new terror declaration against Antifa seeks to chill speech and snuff out autonomous action against authoritarianism and white supremacy. The extreme penalties the Justice Department is pursuing in the Prairieland case are intended not only to deter direct action against ICE, but to quell the possibility of broader uprisings against systems of impoverishment, discipline, and social control.
Gord Hill, a Kwakwaka’wakw artist and author of The Antifa Comic Book: 100 Years of Fascism and Antifa Movements, points out that as administration officials pump up Antifa as an “existential threat,” white supremacist and pro-fascist organizing has moved from the shadows into positions of real power.
“In the first Trump administration, the fascists were still rallying, organizing in the streets, predominantly the Proud Boys,” said Hill during a video call in November. “We had all these clashes, and Antifa was active in the streets. This time, that’s not really happening.”
Hill noted that sporadic, small-scale white supremacist rallies continue to take place in the United States. “But you just don’t see the street mobilizing, and I think it’s been replaced by ICE,” he said. “I bet a lot of those Proud Boys and these other neo-Nazis have just joined ICE, and now they’re carrying out their fantasy but as an official government agency.” ICE recruiting regularly features white nationalist images, and the agency is offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000 to those who join.
Against Revanchism
Throughout the United States, people are seeking justice, dignity, and equality by mobilizing within their own communities and networks in ways often understood as disparate and spontaneous. Yet direct action, refusal, and resistance are rarely isolated phenomena; they are informed by transnational genealogies of struggle. Wiping the slate of social progress clear is a key facet of the coercive and criminalizing strategies deployed by the far right wherever it has reared its head.
Argentine philosopher Verónica Gago suggests rising fascism in Latin America should be understood as a response to gains made by vibrant and expansive feminist organizing over the past decade.
In recent years—and with increasing intensity since Trump took office last year—we’ve witnessed rollbacks of reforms and legal protections introduced in the wake of massive protests following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and reversals of gains made through sustained organizing by trans, queer, and feminist movements for reproductive freedom and gender rights. Participants in the vast constellation of protest against Israel’s genocide in Palestine have been detained, deported, and threatened. The administration has pushed to dismantle sanctuary cities, environmental protections, and worker rights, while criminalizing drug user organizing and harm reduction. These efforts to undo rights won through collective struggle make patent the revanchist nature of the current political moment.
When I interviewed Sánchez in November, he described some of the organizing taking place in the Dallas-Fort Worth area around migrant rights, gun violence prevention, and notably, support for people experiencing homelessness. “Just prior to this, some of [these organizers] got some pretty significant grants from some of the local municipalities to expand and do more of that work,” he told me.
Like President Javier Milei in Argentina, the Trump administration has been explicit about seeking to reverse even the most tenuous, temporary, and symbolic gains that came out of social struggle. Argentine philosopher Verónica Gago suggests rising fascism in Latin America should be understood as a response to gains made by vibrant and expansive feminist organizing over the past decade. “The fascism that we are seeing as a Latin American and global scenario is fueled by a reactionary response to the force deployed by the transnational feminist movement,” writes Gago in her book Feminist International.
Though there are vast differences between the nature of social struggle in the United States and Argentina, Gago’s intervention is crucial for understanding that the violence of the current moment is also reactive—a response to gains made through grassroots action and mass struggle, as well as through capillary forms of resistance and refusal that are woven into the very fabric of social reproduction.
The Work Ahead
Tracing the connections between the emerging national security paradigm, the construction of a criminal legal infrastructure capable of bringing terrorism charges against people protesting ICE, and the escalating attacks on migrants and their supporters in the streets is part of the task before us. Another is to build grassroots internationalism and deepen our understanding of how the United States has long advanced an agenda of violence and ecological, social, and political crisis all over the world.
It remains crucial to continue coming together in ways that protect the most vulnerable while meaningfully challenging the march of the far right. Zohran Mamdani’s inspiring rise in the New York City mayoral race created a swell of hope precisely because he worked outside and around the Democratic party in order to secure the nomination, campaign with tens of thousands of volunteers and, ultimately, win the election.
“Since the Mamdani victory, we definitely have more space for working class politics and solidarity in the country,” said Joshua Martínez, a 26-year-old scholar and activist based in Los Angeles, in a phone interview. “We started from zero. And the Mamdani victory shows that we’re getting somewhere.”
Refusing to lose sight of the horizons of our individual and collective desires—what can and could be possible—is fundamental. Doing so requires immense bravery, exemplified by the people of Minneapolis who have come out in droves against ICE, by the Prairieland defendants who have refused to stop speaking out, by criminalized pro-Palestine protestors who won’t stand down, and by feminists and other organizers who use collective action to subvert patriarchy and capitalism. As long as our horizons remain open and we continue to weave struggles and learn with one another, another future is possible.
Dawn Marie Paley is a journalist and the publisher of Ojala.mx. Her third book, Generals at the Gates: Military Power and Social Change in México, will be out in September 2026. This article was produced with support from the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience.