MS Now reports:

On July 4 last year, a few hours after sundown, about a dozen left-wing activists gathered outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in North Texas.

Some protesters set off fireworks while others spray-painted cars and a guard booth. As federal officers stepped outside to confront them, local police arrived, and shortly after, shots were fired. Investigators say an Alvarado police officer was hit in the neck by a bullet and released from the hospital the following morning.

Most of the activists were arrested. Nine of them face serious federal charges, ranging from attempted murder to providing material support to terrorists, in a trial that begins Tuesday.

Prosecutors characterize the events that night as an “antifa attack” on the federal government. The defense calls it a protest gone wrong. But the implications of this trial extend beyond the fate of one group of activists: For the first time, federal prosecutors are seeking to convict protesters — most of them American citizens — on charges related to domestic terrorism. The outcome will test whether President Donald Trump’s yearslong campaign to brand leftist activists as terrorists can succeed in the courts.

“This is the first indictment in the country against a group of violent Antifa cell members,” acting U.S. Attorney Nancy Larson said in a November press release.

Since charges were filed, senior members of the Trump administration have held up the Prairieland case as a proof point in their wider campaign against anti-government organizing, arguing that local activism and demonstrations are coordinated attacks by domestic terrorists. Trump’s Department of Justice portrays antifa — a contraction of “anti-facist” long understood as a loose left-wing ideology, not an organization — as a structured “militant enterprise” comparable to foreign terrorist organizations, one that calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government and poses a national security threat.

But legal experts tell MS NOW that the Prairieland case — in which defendants face decades in prison on state and federal charges — is more complicated than the government’s framing suggests, and that the prosecution appears to be motivated by politics. They warn that the DOJ’s targeting of progressive activists risks criminalizing protest activity, and reflects an expansion of executive power under the Trump administration that casts protesters and perceived political opponents as enemies of the state.

“This indictment stretches far beyond a specific, violent criminal action that might have taken place,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It characterizes these people who put together a protest as being in an antifa cell and tars all of them with this label of domestic terrorists.”

Levinson-Waldman said the overreach threatens the civil liberties of all Americans. [Continue reading…]