https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/us/antifa-protesters-terrorism.html

A group of young protesters accused of being members of the radical left-wing movement antifa were convicted on Friday of an array of charges, including supporting terrorism, after taking part in an armed assault last summer on an immigration facility in Alvarado, Texas.

The guilty verdicts, which came after a three-week trial in Federal District Court in Fort Worth, were in many ways a victory for the Justice Department. It was the first time that terrorism charges had been successfully brought against purported members of antifa.

The jury returned the verdicts on its second day of deliberations, convicting eight of the nine defendants of providing material support to terrorists, riot and conspiracy to use an explosive. The jury acquitted most of the defendants on charges of attempted murder.

The episode in Alvarado at the heart of the trial unfolded after nightfall on Independence Day last year, when a group of about a dozen people arrived at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, the Prairieland Detention Center, dressed in black. Some began to vandalize the property, spray-painting graffiti on a guard shed and car, and damaging a surveillance camera, prosecutors said. Others set off fireworks in what they later described as a “noise demonstration,” hoping that the immigrants detained inside the facility would be encouraged by the spectacle.

All the while, one member of the group, Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist, stood guard at a distance armed with an AR-15-style rifle. And when Lt. Thomas Gross of the Alvarado Police Department responded to a call for help at the facility, Mr. Song yelled, “Get to the rifles!” and opened fire, prosecutors said. Lieutenant Gross was struck by a bullet above his collarbone as the rest of the group fled.

Two months after the attack, Mr. Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” a label that does not actually exist under U.S. law. He also issued a sweeping directive known as National Security Presidential Memo 7, which ordered a whole-of-government approach to going after antifascist groups.

The memo greatly expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include a list of political beliefs traditionally protected by the First Amendment — among them, “anti-capitalism,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and even “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”