The future of protesting in the United States may have been decided in a cramped Depression-era courtroom in downtown Fort Worth on Friday of last week. Nine defendants, who federal prosecutors claimed were part of an “Antifa cell,” were found guilty of an array of charges, including providing “material support” for terrorism, for attending a demonstration outside an ICE facility that turned violent on July 4, 2025. The verdict is a clear victory for the Trump administration, which, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, has stretched the definition of “domestic terrorist organization” to include a staggeringly broad set of “terroristic activities,” such as “extremism on migration, race, and gender.” The Trump administration had already informally labeled its perceived enemies as radical terrorists, from Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by federal agents in January, to Marimar Martinez, who was shot several times by a Border Patrol agent last year. But last Friday, for the first time, the formal designation stuck in court.What constitutes an Antifa terror cell? Apparently, a group of people that did not all know each other before being scooped up and charged as one. While some of the nine defendants who were convicted on Friday had met through self-defense classes, the Socialist Rifle Association, and an anarchist book club, loosely associating through Signal group chats, others didn’t know anyone—and only happened to be at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center last July 4 because they found the details for the demonstration online. The events of that night lasted about half an hour: a handful of protesters arrived outside the facility around 10:37 p.m. wearing dark clothing—what prosecutors defined as “tactical gear” and “black bloc” attire—and set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with the detainees inside. Some brought weapons—11 firearms were recovered at the scene, many from inside cars or unassembled in backpacks—though group chat logs before the demonstration suggest they thought carrying them would act as a deterrent against violence from police or federal agents. At least two protesters broke off from the main group and spray-painted cars in the parking lot and an empty guard shack with anti-ICE slogans, slashing a van’s tires and breaking a security camera. It took approximately 15 minutes after the demonstration began for corrections officers to call 911. Two minutes later, a local police lieutenant, Thomas Gross, arrived at the scene and drew his weapon, aiming at the back of one of the alleged vandals. An FBI official previously stated it was unclear who then shot first, but Gross was shot in the trapezius muscle, between his neck and shoulder, by a protester identified as Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist who was carrying an AR-15-style rifle. (Gross was airlifted to a nearby hospital and released a few hours later; Song was found guilty of one count of attempted murder on Friday.) There was enough ambiguity to the claim that Song fired out of malice that the federal judge—Mark Pittman, a Trump 1.0 appointee—had to rule that the defendants couldn’t claim self defense. Prosecutors had called self-defense theories in this case “legally insupportable” and compared the Prairieland case to precedent set against the Branch Davidians, members of the religious cult made famous during the 1993 siege in nearby Waco. In the Waco trial, determining who “shot first” was hotly contested, and the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals eventually ruled self-defense arguments were out of the question. This wasn’t the only allusion to cults made during the trial. Indeed, the most consequential piece of the case against the Prairieland defendants is how prosecutors defined what counts as “conspiracy.” With the outcome of this trial potentially creating a new weapon with which the Trump administration can bludgeon its political opponents—sidestepping the First Amendment—prosecutors effectively concocted a “criminal enterprise” through innuendo and partial truths. Before the trial, the FBI described one defendant’s home as a “commune,” presumably because the group of friends living there together were pooling cash for the mortgage. Meanwhile, prosecutors had to walk back their claim that there were multiple shooters, given evidence to the contrary, but still argued what happened that night was a “planned ambush.” They drew broadly from reading material found in protesters’ homes, including a review of the 2019 film Midsommar titled, “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real”—a scintillating header belying a more mundane dark art (literary criticism). They tapped Kyle Shideler, who works at the Center for Security Policy think tank—described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece”—as an “expert” witness.