They Say They’re Protesters. The DOJ Says They’re Terrorists.
In another life, Dario Sanchez taught computer science at a Dallas-area middle school. Now, he stays offline as much as possible, for fear that his court-mandated spyware may perceive some activity—a YouTube thumbnail, a Google search—as “violent,” thus breaking his bond agreement. He’s subject to random alcohol and drug tests, though he doesn’t even drink coffee. He wears long socks to dull the chafe from his ankle monitor.
Sanchez is one of 18 defendants in a vast government case surrounding a July 4 protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, Texas, a small city near Fort Worth. A police officer was shot at the protest. But, like more than a third of the other defendants, Sanchez wasn’t even there. Participants and supporters say that the event was intended as a noise demonstration, and that they lit fireworks to show solidarity with the facility’s 1,000-plus detainees. The indictments have so far claimed that the protesters “provided material support” for terrorism, categorizing the fireworks as “explosives.” Five are charged with multiple counts of attempted murder.
This case is the first of its kind since President Donald Trump, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, signed a new national security presidential memorandum, NSPM-7, that instructs federal law enforcement to investigate “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” a staggeringly broad set of “motivations” justifying police action to “disrupt” and “disband” left-wing groups before a crime occurs. After the Alvarado protest, federal officials were unusually quick to circulate mug shots and term the protest a “planned ambush,” levying the defendants’ ties to an anarchist book club and a local chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, a nonprofit gun club, to claim that they belong to an antifa cell and pull more and more people into the investigation’s dragnet.
To Xavier T. de Janon, the director of mass defense for the National Lawyers Guild, the implications of this case are alarming. If you attend a demonstration that becomes volatile due to an action taken by someone in the crowd—or, for that matter, someone in law enforcement—you could now find yourself on trial for something you had little to do with. Even if you aren’t present, as was the case with Sanchez, you run the risk of facing potentially life-ruining federal charges. If Prairieland sets the precedent, de Janon said, “the state could just accuse you of anything and say you ‘conspired’ to do [it].” The trial, in other words, could shape the future of protest under the second Trump administration—and the future of American civil liberties.
Federal prosecutors describe the July 4 demonstration not as a protest but as a deliberate terroristic “attack” carried out by antifa cell members in “black bloc” clothing: black pants and tops with face coverings and hats used to obscure their identities. Their case hinges on protesters’ use of encrypted messaging apps and the presence of firearms and first aid kits to paint the events as a broad anti-government conspiracy. Court documents and hours of CCTV and body cam footage, part of roughly six terabytes of materials that the prosecution has provided to the defense, reviewed by The New Republic, tell a much murkier story.
At approximately 10:37 p.m., a group of 11 people, faces covered, approached the Prairieland Detention Center from an overgrown tree line to the building’s west. One broke the camera on the guard shack at the property’s entrance and spray-painted “Fuck You Pigs” on it, then headed to the parking lot, where they tagged “ICE Pig” on a white Toyota Prius. At least five followed the razor wire fence north, fanning out and splitting into smaller teams of two to three. One group remained close to the facility entrance, keeping watch.
Before arriving that night, a few protesters had allegedly staked out the facility; indeed, prosecutors have pointed to defendants’ “coordinated” actions, including their use of encrypted messaging apps and nicknames—such as “Champagne,” “Jon ValJon,” and “Not Beating the Little Creature Allegations”—as indicators of a malevolent plot. But using nicknames in a group chat and planning a protest in advance are hardly evidence of violent intent. When Lydia Koza—whose wife, Autumn Hill, is among the 11 protesters—heard Hill’s “Little Creature” moniker in court, she said, “I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.”
Group chat logs in the lead-up to the protest show some back-and-forth about whether it was necessary to bring guns. Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist and the alleged shooter, argued in favor. They would act as a deterrent in case the confrontation turned hostile. “Cops are not trained or equipped for more than one rifle,” he allegedly wrote, “so it tends to make them back off.” The group arrived at the facility with 11 firearms but left many in their cars, backpacks, or a wagon near the entrance shortly after arriving.
The fireworks at the center of the federal government’s case were small and anticlimactic by Fourth of July standards, especially in Texas: pops of pink, red, and green, reaching just above the trees. A few were lobbed toward the razor wire, bursting on the ground—enough for prosecutors to allege “injury to the property” and “use [of] an explosive to commit a felony.” Evidently, the fireworks weren’t damaging enough to draw an immediate response; at roughly 10:56 p.m., around 15 minutes after protesters began shooting them off, corrections officers called 911.
Two minutes later, two officers exited the building to confront the protesters. One of the protesters appeared to signal to the others with a flashlight; at least two then fled the parking lot, away from the officers. At around 10:59, Thomas Gross, an Alvarado police lieutenant, pulled up to the scene, engine revving. The protesters scattered. “Hey, stop!” he yelled. “Get on the ground!”
Prosecutors attest that someone yelled “Get to the rifles!” Then, gunfire. The two officers sprinted for cover. “Fuck, I’m hit!” Gross shouted. This is where his body cam footage—less than three minutes—abruptly ends. It’s the most critical moment of the case, and it’s difficult to discern how many shots were fired or by whom.
One of those bullets hit Gross. When Adam Sharp, a fire marshal with the Alvarado police, arrived shortly after, the injured officer walked up to him, indicating which way the protesters escaped. Sharp then cut open Gross’s uniform to better check the wound. The bullet had entered the trapezius, above Gross’s collarbone and followed the trajectory out his upper back. “It grazed you, bud,” Sharp said, before driving him to a nearby Brookshire’s supermarket parking lot, where an emergency helicopter was set to land.
That is what’s clear from records reviewed by The New Republic. But many open questions remain. Federal prosecutors initially claimed that multiple assailants armed with AR-15–style rifles shot 20 to 30 rounds at Gross and the officers. By early August, state filings indicate that only 11 shell casings were found at the scene, suggesting just one shooter, and “leading investigators to believe the initial 20–30 shell casings to be an inaccurate amount of spent rounds.” Finally, in a lengthy preliminary hearing in September, an FBI official told the court that he could not say where the first shots came from.
And then there are the questions of the rifles themselves and the four words that prosecutors pointed to before Gross was shot: “Get to the rifles!” If the group really was planning an ambush, would it have been necessary to “get to the rifles”? When Amber Lowrey, sister of Prairieland protester Savanna Batten, visited Batten’s home after the FBI searched it, she found Batten’s work uniform laid out on the bed, a meal prepped in the microwave, her cat traumatized by the flash grenade. Lowrey remains unconvinced her sister would leave this life she’d made behind: “Any rational person would know that the story the state has spun—that was a suicide mission.”
The ensuing police roundup involved seven offices, including the Texas Game Warden, to supplement Alvarado’s 26-person police department. Nine of the 11 protesters were arrested that night and taken to Johnson County Jail. Eleven firearms—those brought, according to the protesters’ pre-protest chat, with the intention of deterring force—were recovered, many from inside cars or unassembled in backpacks. At least two phones were found in a Faraday bag, which prevents wireless tracking.
Soon, North Texas’s then-acting U.S. Attorney Nancy Larson, an active member of the conservative Federalist Society, learned of the case. Larson had only been on the job since May 29, and her office had been rocked by DOGE cuts and resignations: As much as one-fourth of the office had left, disillusioned by the Trump administration’s politicization of the Department of Justice.
Shawn Smith, among the office’s remaining highly respected assistant attorneys, was assigned to the Prairieland case, but he had someone looking over his shoulder. Larson had recently given two positions—first assistant to the U.S. Attorney, and Acting Criminal Chief, who oversees all investigations—to Matthew Weybrecht, another assistant attorney, who once argued for the president’s “absolute” authority over the historically independent DOJ. (The North Texas U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment for the story.)
Meanwhile, Larson made her case to the cameras. At a July 7 press conference, she labeled the protest “a planned ambush with the intent to kill ICE corrections officers.” Johnson County District Attorney Timothy Good, a Liberty University law school graduate who had recently ousted a 32-year Republican incumbent, also expounded the case to the media. On July 16, he told a local Fox affiliate “there are more people involved” than had already been arrested, adding that police would target everyone who “aided and abetted” the protest. (Larson has since been replaced by Ryan Raybould, formerly a litigation partner at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis.)
Autumn Hill, Koza’s wife, was the tenth protester arrested, during a July 5 raid on the house she shared with Koza and several roommates, which the FBI has described as a “commune.” On July 7, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a green card holder and husband to defendant Maricela Rueda, became the eleventh person arrested, for transporting “Antifa materials”: a box containing anarchist art and literature, including Cruel Fiction, a book of sonnets by the poet Wendy Trevino. Prosecutors alleged that he was attempting to conceal evidence against his wife; days after his arrest, ICE’s official Instagram posted a picture of Estrada, saying he was found with “literal insurrectionist propaganda.”
Dario Sanchez’s arrest stemmed from a surprise July 9 visit from a fellow Socialist Rifle Association member, John Thomas, who is accused of “smuggling” Song, his former roommate, out of Alvarado. A distraught Thomas had shown up at Sanchez’s door after his apartment had been raided, his electronics confiscated: He told Sanchez he didn’t know where else to go—he only remembered his address. Sanchez, following their SRA chapter’s security protocols, removed Thomas from group chats in an attempt to prevent messages and identities from leaking.
Six days later, on July 15, Sanchez and his girlfriend, Irina, awoke to an FBI bullhorn ordering him to come out. He was being charged with tampering with evidence for deleting Thomas from SRA group chats. As the couple threw on their clothes, an armored vehicle with a battering ram slammed through their front door. A handheld drone entered, observing the couple as they exited the bedroom.
Outside, Sanchez and Irina were handcuffed and separated. Casey Brashear, an FBI task force officer, took Sanchez aside and asked about another soon-to-be arrested alleged co-conspirator, though Sanchez said he didn’t recognize her name. This turned out to be Rebecca Morgan, who wasn’t at the protest but allegedly housed Benjamin Song for several days, until that evening, when her home was raided, Song was captured, and she was arrested at work. Brashear offered Sanchez a deal: Let the police impersonate him online, and he could avoid 50 years in prison. “That just told me they were just angling to try and scoop up other people for no good reason,” Sanchez said. After Sanchez told Brashear he wouldn’t talk without a lawyer, he spent around 30 days alone in a segregation cell. In September, he was briefly rearrested at gunpoint after Googling about whether he could convert a model car into a remote-controlled device. His home still bears the scars where the FBI busted in last July.
The later arrests largely stem from defendants’ connection to Benjamin Song and his 11-day-long evasion of police. As of mid-December, seven defendants—four of whom weren’t even at the protest—had accepted plea deals rather than face years in federal prison.
In early November, I walked to the edge of the sunflower field next to the Prairieland Detention Center, brown and dried by fall, where police had captured several protesters months earlier.
The facility had since installed a new gate and increased the number of guards, said Justin, 34, whose home is mere yards from the gate. Otherwise, it’s been “pretty calm…. Sometimes you hear them hollering back there,” he added, shrugging.
Then Justin’s mother, who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, appeared at the door. “You need to go,” she told me. In July, she gave a statement to local news, and since then, she said, she and her family have faced recurring traffic stops “every time we fucking pull out of our driveway.”
“They’re over there watching us all right now,” she said, then slammed her door shut.
Shortly before I arrived, the police had arrested Janette Goering—accused of participating in Benjamin Song’s escape by providing him a Faraday bag. Song allegedly thanked her for the bag on July 6, but Jesse Spahn, Goering’s husband, said she’d made it at a workshop, a month or two earlier, not directly connected to the protest.
“This could go good or bad, you know, if she cooperates or not,” an officer told Spahn at the raid. Then they ordered Janette, barefoot and in pajamas, into a black SUV. Her bond is set at $5 million.