Protesters Accused of Antifa Ties Found Guilty of Support for Terrorism

The guilty verdicts marked the first time that terrorism charges had been successfully brought against purported members of antifa.

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.

President Trump, in a series of executive actions, has prioritized bringing criminal cases against antifa and other left-wing demonstrators, especially those who have protested his aggressive immigration crackdown in cities across the country.

But while the jury in Fort Worth clearly believed the prosecution’s theory that most of the defendants had supported an act of terrorism when they joined the attack on the immigration facility, shooting a police officer in the neck, the evidence that emerged from the trial offered a more complicated view of the Trump administration's repeated claims that antifa presents a serious threat to national security.

Five of the government’s own cooperating witnesses — people who were part of the supposed antifa cell — denied under oath that they or their compatriots thought of themselves as belonging to antifa, a contraction of the word “antifascist.” Lawyers for the nine defendants sought to portray them as something much less sinister: a group of left-leaning activists who became involved in “tragic” violence and then fell prey to a political prosecution by the Trump administration.

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.”

During closing arguments on Wednesday, Shawn Smith, a federal prosecutor, said that Mr. Song, who trained left-wing groups in firearms and close combat, wanted to provoke violence during the incursion at the ICE facility. Mr. Smith pointed to a Signal chat message from before the attack, in which Mr. Song said, “Picking a good confrontation is about building momentum.”

“This was Song’s plan, to build a confrontation, and he was using the people in his inner circle to accomplish that,” Mr. Smith told the jury. He added: “This was not a peaceful protest. This was a direct action.”

While some of the defendants were linked to the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association, both leftist organizations, their lawyers claimed that the government’s use of the term antifa was designed to smear them and to prejudice the jury against them.

“That’s exactly what the government has tried to do in this case,” Cody Lee Cofer, a lawyer for the defendant Autumn Hill, said in court on Wednesday. “They tried to make the defendants an ‘other.’”

Other lawyers reminded the jury that several of the prosecution’s witnesses rejected claims that they and the defendants belonged to antifa. One of the witnesses, Lynette Read Sharp, testified that she had met Mr. Song in 2022 at an L.G.B.T.Q. community center in Fort Worth. Ms. Sharp also told the jury that two of the other defendants, Elizabeth and Ines Soto, had hosted a book club named after the early 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman where they read “zines” and discussed topics that included philosophy and gender identity.

But under questioning by Phillip W. Hayes, a lawyer for Mr. Song, Ms. Sharp said that she did not consider herself to be a member of antifa, though she did see herself as an antifascist.

“Shouldn’t everyone be?” Mr. Hayes asked, prompting Ms. Sharp to agree.

“The government thinks you’re an organization called antifa,” he said.

“No,” Ms. Sharp said, “we are not.”

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