Por Paul Street
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NSPM-7 in Fascist Action in Texas and Minnesota
Last March, the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) successfully tried and convicted nine protesters on charges of “Antifa”-aligned terrorism for a July 4, 2025 action outside a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement concentration camp in Prairieland, Texas, just south of Dallas.
The trial focused on a protest in which participants set off fireworks in solidarity with the camp’s detainees. During the action, three protesters broke away from the larger group and vandalized ICE vehicles. A police officer drew his weapon at one of the activists and was allegedly by a protester legally armed with an AR-15 (Texas is an open-carry state).
The DOJ argued that the fact that the Prairieland activists all wore black clothes to the protest was sufficient to convict them of “material support for terrorism.” Also presented as supposed evidence of “terrorism” was the defendants’ use of the popular encrypted chat Signal.
Trump’s DOJ changed its initial charge of those arrested from “attempted murder of a police officer,” to “terrorism” and “material support for terrorism” after the White House designated “antifa” as a “terror group” in its September 25, 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). This document directs federal law enforcement to target left-leaning groups and activities, all placed under the “antifa” rubric.
(Antifa is simply an umbrella term for militant leftish groups that confront neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.)
NPSM-7 (titled ‘Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence’) designates as legitimate targets of federal counterterrorism enforcement any individuals or groups suspected of being “anti-fascist,” “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” Never mind the absence of any statute authorizing the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism.
Yesterday, the Trump-appointed US District judge Reed O’Connor called the July 4, 2025 action “an assault on democracy” and collectively sentenced the Prairieland Eight to 450 years in prison. Benjamin Song (the alleged shooter), a former US Marine Corps reservist, convicted of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, got 100 years. Maricela Rueda got 70 years; Cameron Arnold, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris, and Elizabeth Soto each got 50 years; Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years.
Trump’s prosecutors argued that the eight are members of “antifa, a decentralized anti-fascist organization.” The defendants denied any affiliation with “antifa” and say they engaged in their action simply to support detained immigrants.
“This is a bunch of kids and young adults who really have a really big heart and really wanted their voice to be heard,” Song’s lawyer told reporters after the sentences were imposed. “It was never intended that anybody get hurt. It was never intended that any shots would be fired.” According to ABC News:
“Autumn Hill said the gathering ‘seemed more like a party to me than anything else’…she and others who participated ‘didn’t expect or want any violence or destruction of property to occur. Amber Lowrey told the judge that her sister, Savanna Batten, is a compassionate person with dreams of opening a bakery. She said Batten’s activism started with animal rights and evolved into anti-war and human rights advocacy. ‘She’s the best person I know,’ Lowrey said. Hill and Batten both received 50-year sentences.”
“I am livid,” says Autumn Hill’s wife Lydia Koza. “The government wants to take her entire life away because she attended a protest. Nobody died.”
The Trumpist prosecutor Frank Gatto urged the judge to order harsh sentences. “People with…extremist beliefs need extra time in prison,” Gatto said.
Gatto got what he wanted. –
(A ninth defendant, Ines Soto, will be sentenced on 1 July. Seven others involved in the incident pleaded guilty before the trial to one count of providing material support to terrorists. They face sentencing on July 1st.)
Extreme Irony
Trump’s personal attorney and acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche responded to the wildly disproportionate punishments by condemning political violence. “The sentences handed down today,” Blanche said, “make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice.”
The DOJ argues that the convicted activists were enlisted in a “North Texas Antifa Cell” that was part of a network dedicated to “the overthrow of the US government, law enforcement and the system of law.”
These are darkly ironic words from the mouth of a January 6 cheerleader working for a president who pardoned 1600 thugs who were convicted by federal juries for trying to physically cancel the 2020 presidential during a bloody assault on the US Congress five and a half year ago! (Trump also commuted the prison sentences given to the nation’s top two fascist paramilitary leaders – Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers and Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys – for helping coordinate the January 6 insurrection, whose culprits Trump wanted equipped with military assault weapons.)
None of those convicted for participating in the Capitol Riot, a literal physical insurrectionary attack on the US Capitol, received sentences remotely close to the ones given to the Prairieland Eight.
Adding to the Orwellian-fascist absurdity, the Trump DOJ has refused to investigate, much less charge, any US Border Patrol gendarmes for murdering two protesters in cold blood in Minneapolis last winter.
Trump’s fascist Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth scandalously shared sensitive military information on the Signal messaging app last year.
The Message: Stay Home, Shut Up, and Let Fascism Be
The Prairieland prosecution, verdict, and sentencing set a terrifying precedent, advancing the criminalization of all dissent. Under its arch-repressive logic, noise demonstrations, pamphlets, zines, clothing, chants and mere physical presence at a protest can be used by the state to lock citizens up for decades. The arch-authoritarian message is clear as day: one now merely attends a protest of the Trump regime’s fascist, racist, and nativist mass detention and torture program at the risk of being locked up for most of one’s remaining life. This is a grave menace to basic constitutional freedoms of speech and public assembly.
Minnesota Next
That same message is being sent by the DOJ’s recent indictment of 15 anti-ICE activists who protested immigration sweeps in the Twin Cities last winter. The activists are accused of being with “antifa” groups that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement.” (The indictment names two real-life groups: Direct Action Minnesota and Black Cat Workers Collective.).
There is a significant and menacing difference with the new anti-“antifa” indictments. The Prairieland case criminalizes protest outside an ICE concentration camp. The Minneapolis indictment paints rapid response networks well beyond camp locations as “criminal conspiracies to impede and threaten federal law enforcement” – a significant expansion of the target to include regular middle-class moms and dads in the fascist regime’s “enemy within” (see below) construct.
The Wolf is Here
Many liberals considered civil libertarian concerns over NSPM-7 as “boy who cried wolf” alarmism since Antifa isn’t an actual organization. Their dismissal missed the point. As the civil liberties advocate Corey Archibald notes, “when the villain is a made-up boogeyman, the target becomes ‘anyone who disagrees with Trump’ — and this is the result.”
Mainstream Enemies Indicted
It’s not just left activists like the Prairieland and Minneapolis defendants who have been targeted for repression by the Trump regime. Former FBI Director James Comey is currently under federal indictment for supposedly advocating Trump’s assassination because he posted a photograph of beach pebbles arranged to say “86-47.”
US Congresswoman LaMonica McIver faces a federal trial on the charge of assaulting federal officers because she stood in solidarity with Newark, New Jersey’s mayor as he tried to investigate conditions in ICE’s Delaney Hall concentration camp last year.
New York Attorney General Letetia James was indicted last October on subsequently dismissed charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution in retaliation for her civil fraud case against the Trump corporation.
Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton has been indicted as retaliation for writing a book critical of Trump.
The Trump regime has preposterously indicted former CNN anchor Don Lemon and eight others for “interfering with religious freedom” during the Minneapolis protests last winter.
Last February, the regime sought but failed to secure a draconian indictment against six Democratic members of Congress after Trump accused them of “seditious behavior…punishable by death” because they released a video in which they said that U.S. service members could refuse illegal orders.
Among those on Trump’s political enemy list that are currently under federal investigation: former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, US Senator Adam Schiff, US House Rep Eric Swalwell, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, California Governor Gavin Newsom, former US Special Counsel and January 6 investigator Jack Smith, former US Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs, former CIA Director John Brennan, former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson, and E. Jean Carroll.
“The Rolling Coup That is Already Underway”
You don’t have to be a “radical leftist” or an “extreme” civil libertarian to smell the fascist authoritarianism the Trump administration is cooking up. As the retired leading US Congressmen Richard Gephardt and Tim Wirth have recently argued, these prosecutions and investigations are part of a broader “Rolling [fascist] Coup” undertaken by the Trump regime:
“On September 25, 2025, the president signed a directive called a National Presidential Security Memorandum known as NPSM-7 (titled ‘Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence’). Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian,’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.’ No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism; NPSM-7 does it anyway.
On September 30, 2025, the president stood before nearly 800 senior military commanders at Marine Base Quantico, an assembly without modern precedent, and told them that the United States was ‘under invasion from within.’ He said, ‘the enemy is not in Beijing or Moscow. The enemy is domestic,’ adding that US cities should serve as ‘training grounds’ for troops to target domestic ‘enemies.’
NPSM-7, the sweeping federal directive issued by the White House, orders federal agencies to aggressively investigate and disrupt groups or financial networks associated with political violence and domestic terrorism. It tasked the FBI, the IRS, and the Treasury Department with tracking the funding sources and supporters of organizations suspected of directly or indirectly facilitating political unrest, with no reference to the First Amendment.
Soon thereafter the FBI organized a Joint Mission Center, drawing hundreds of personnel from 10 federal agencies to identify and prosecute the targets of NPSM-7. The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, subsequently testified to a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified that thousands of US citizens and nongovernmental organizations are now on a secret watch list tied to the Joint Mission Center.
Concurrently the Justice Department has opened grand-jury investigations and indictments aimed at officials of previous administrations including former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. The president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly described political opposition as a ‘fifth column,’ and the president himself amplified this by posting on Truth Social, ‘Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all……… But first, Barack Obama.’
0n May 6, 2026, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy that names ‘violent left-wing extremists,’ ‘anti-fascists,’ and certain religious minorities as principal threats to the United States. Bondi provided a Department of Justice operational order that included a five-year plan for retroactive mining of data files and plea interrogations along with the requirement that financial donors be named. The Joint Mission Center uses its $12.5 billion budget to do the targeting.
Trump v. The United States provides absolute immunity for official acts; and the president’s lead lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel has preauthorized the use of domestic force. Meanwhile, the administration has appropriated $45 billion for construction of new ICE detention facilities, a 265 percent increase over previous years and more than four times the entire budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Tom Homan, the president’s ‘border czar,’ has overseen the proposal for the acquisition of over 100,000 detention beds above the current capacity of 70,000, with contracts for permanent mega-centers whose scale far exceeds anything an immigration processing operation would require. These are undoubtedly prisons for political prisoners, even as 1974 federal law prohibit the detention of US citizens without an act of Congress.
In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific US forces have killed more than 200 people across nearly 60 strikes on small boats designated as ‘narcoterrorists’ without indictment, trial, or judicial review. The commander of US Northern Command has said publicly he would ‘definitely’ execute lawful orders to apply this same authority on American soil. The White House has declined to rule out using lethal force against US citizens designated as members of domestic terrorist organizations, while the president has fired most of the Department of Defense officials responsible for overseeing the legality of military operations. And he is seeking yet more funding for what appears to be his private army of ICE and Border Patrol agents to be deployed in numerous target states, at airports, and at urban polling places in the states he lost in the 2024 election, where he has now begun to seize voter rolls and ballots.
Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter rolls, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents (PEADS). These are among the many individual actions and plans of the ‘rolling coup’ that is currently underway. Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute, and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.”
Herr Miller: “The Radical Democrat Party Wants Total Anarchy Where Criminals Can Rape and Murder with Impunity”
Trump’s top domestic political adviser, the open fascist Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller had this to say about progressive Democrats’ victories in this week’s New York Democratic primaries:
“The Democrat party has adopted …radical, revolutionary, and in many cases, violent ideology that wants to tear America down and destroy everything that we know and love, from top to bottom. Right? Living in a state of total anarchy, without police, without law enforcement, where criminals can rape and maim and murder with impunity, where your kids are taught from the age of two to hate America, to hate their God, to hate their parents, to hate their family, to even hate their own gender, that’s their agenda…that’s just the death knell for America.”
That is an expression of the paranoid-style fascism that informs NSPM-7, Gorka’s National Counterterrorism Strategy and the rest of the overall “rolling coup.” This is the mindset that makes the Trump fascist regime feel entitled to tear up the previously normative rule of law and rig elections in “the world’s greatest democracy.”
Deadly Incrementalism
Refuse Fascism (RF) has been warning about and detailing the Trump MAGA rolling coup for nearly a decade now! Why has this grave fascist assault on previously normative democracy and the rule of law not yet received the depth and degree of popular concern and resistance it deserves? Beyond the crippling and false American exceptionalist belief that “it [fascism] can’t happen here,” a good part of the answer is that the Trump regime has been inflicting its dictatorial project incrementally, step by step, with each of its authoritarian moves wrapped in the deceptive, pseudo-legitimate rhetoric of “national security” and “law enforcement.” Each step, Gephardt and Wirth write, has been “paired with a reassuring denial: We are not deploying the military domestically; we are not declaring an emergency over elections; we are not coming for citizens.”
“Refusing to Face This is Unconscionable”
The reality is that the fascist Trump regime has in fact domestically deployed the military and likely plans to do so on a significantly increased scale going forward. They may well declare an emergency over elections and are clearly working to create justifications for doing so. They are coming for citizens and building out a militarized police and prison state meant for “homegrown” dissenters and critics as well as so-called illegals.
As RF says in its recent statement calling for mass protests on July 4th:
“Trump/MAGA fascism is not collapsing. In fact, every setback they face compels them to escalate their attacks to lock in their fascist program using every means at their disposal, unbound by domestic or international law. The more ‘unpopular’ Trump becomes, the more he lashes out with revenge, hatred, and moral depravity, and the more hardened his fascist movement becomes, celebrating the use of intimidation, blackmail, and violence to eliminate opposition and crush dissent. The powerful sections of the rulers that back Trump, who have staked the future on changing the form of rule of this country, will not give up power easily.
Refusing to face this reality is unconscionable. Accommodation and conciliation with this fascism is immoral. The danger we face is not only what the regime is doing. It is the millions who oppose fascism adjusting to, and being conditioned to, adapt to each new outrage. To tell themselves that the midterms or someone else will stop this. To learn to live with what they once swore they would never accept. History is full of moments when people deluded themselves there was still time—until suddenly there wasn’t. The question now is whether that will happen again—or whether a force can be forged that is capable of providing the leadership needed to change the course of history.
As we approach this 250th anniversary, whether you believe in the promise of this country or think America has never been a land of the ‘free,’ facing the truth about this fascism and acting nonviolently with others to stop it will decide whether or not we even have a future worth living in.”
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).
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