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We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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To Iran’s Political Prisoners, trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissors”
Open letter
August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the August 19 anniversary of the UK- and U.S.-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of U.S.-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.
To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The U.S. and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of June 23, 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom.”
In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.
We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the U.S. government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the U.S. targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.
Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
In solidarity and with love,
Alberto Toscano, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London
Angela Davis, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz
Bernardine Dohrn, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University
Bill Ayers, professor, *College Unbound
Cherríe L Moraga, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist
Dan Berger, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell
Hossam el-Hamalawy, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner
Jairus Banaji, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto
Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Michael Löwy, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Michael Mansfield, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister
Mumia Abu-Jamal, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist
Ricardo Jiménez, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Graduate Center, *CUNY
Walden F Bello, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton
Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria
* Organizations for identification purposes only
** Signatories are sorted alphabetically
—The Guardian, August 20, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) ‘What Authoritarian Governments Do to Promote Their Leaders’
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Oct. 3, 2026
Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times
Have you seen this?
It’s one in a slew of pro-Trump ads that has been airing since last Wednesday. Set to the song “Love Me” by the singer-songwriter JMSN, the roughly 30-second spot shows a rapid progression of pictures and video of President Trump, as he touts his accomplishments and denounces “communism, socialism and Marxism.” As it ends, you are informed that it was “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Trump is deeply unpopular and running strange, propagandistic advertisements is not likely to change that fact. But the wisdom of the campaign notwithstanding, the real problem with this is more legal than political. It is against the law to use taxpayer dollars for propaganda and explicitly partisan purposes.
“This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “It is a Hatch Act violation for any government employees who worked on it or used government resources to make it. It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns.”
In a news release, The White House wrote that the ad is a public service announcement, “a reminder for Americans to love their country and know why it’s worth defending — at home, at the border, and abroad.” For his part, President Trump — who personally directed the chief of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, to use taxpayer funds for the ad campaign — says “these are ads for the country.” “I’m not promoting a candidate,” he added. “I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.”
But unlike a public service announcement, this ad — and others like it — aren’t promoting a government program or service. They exist to glorify President Trump: to love him, as the song suggests.
Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer who served under President George W. Bush, gave The Associated Press a blunt assessment of the advertising campaign. “You watch all three ads, they’re sheer propaganda,” he said, adding that “This is increasingly looking like what authoritarian governments do to promote their leaders.”
Compared with the money used to build the president’s ballroom, this is not an expensive campaign. So far, the White House has spent about $5.5 million of a $20 million contract to produce and promote its pro-Trump propaganda. But again, it is less the cost than the fact that the president is showing his deep contempt for a fundamental norm of American democracy: We don’t use government to glorify our political leaders, at least not while they’re alive.
If future Americans want to vote to memorialize or otherwise praise past leaders, that is up to them. But it is not the place of the president to issue propaganda on his behalf, with money taken from the public till.
It is not clear that Democrats have the appetite to impeach Trump for a third time. Even if they did, there is almost no chance that they would have the votes to convict and remove him from office. And yet, this is exactly the type of offense that demands a response from the legislature. A president that shows this much contempt for the republican character of the American system — who seeks, at every opportunity, to set himself up as a strongman over the entire nation — is a president who must be sanctioned by the people’s representatives.
There are any number of strategic reasons to do this as well. With both chambers of Congress, should they win them, Democrats could orchestrate a long investigation and drawn-out trial that consumes the administration and implicates key figures beyond the president. But to be honest, I care less about the politics here than I do the principle. If this propaganda campaign — among many other offenses — isn’t worthy of an article of impeachment, then nothing is.
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2) How a Failed Execution Left Christa Pike Hovering Between Life and Death
Her legal team had repeatedly warned that her execution could go wrong. On Wednesday, they were proven right.
By Shaila Dewan and Emily Cochrane, Oct. 3, 2026
Emily Cochrane reported from Nashville.
The night before she was scheduled to die, Christa Pike did not choose a last meal. She had asked that the money for that indulgence — $20, according to Tennessee prison rules — be used to buy pizza for homeless people in downtown Nashville.
The next morning, journalists gathered in a tent in the parking lot of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, along the Cumberland River on the outskirts of Nashville, to monitor the first execution of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Demonstrators, most of them opposed to the death penalty, amassed in a field on the prison grounds.
The execution was set for 10 a.m. on Wednesday. But the careful choreography of the day almost immediately went off track. By evening, Ms. Pike would survive two separate attempts to inject her with execution drugs, bringing horrified reactions, renewed scrutiny of the death penalty and the second moratorium on executions in Tennessee in the past five years.
Many questions remain about exactly what went wrong. The Tennessee Department of Correction has said that it followed its lethal injection protocol to the letter. But the protocol does not lay out what should happen if two attempts to kill a condemned prisoner fail.
Ms. Pike remains unconscious and on a ventilator at a Nashville hospital, her fate still an open question. This account of her failed execution has been pieced together from the witnesses and lawyer who were at Riverbend.
Ms. Pike, 50, was condemned to death for torturing and murdering a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, with her boyfriend and a friend when she was 18. Ms. Pike has acknowledged that she initially did not have remorse for the crime, but that she grew to regret her actions over decades of physical isolation in prison.
Her lawyers said that a history of extreme trauma and sexual abuse that began when she was a toddler had not been considered at her trial.
Just 90 minutes before Ms. Pike was set to die on Wednesday, a federal appeals court issued a stay, saying that it needed more time to consider new arguments in the case. For Tennessee, that set off a race against the clock. The execution warrant would expire just before midnight.
Nine hours elapsed as everyone waited. Outside, flowers that had been placed near enlarged portraits of Ms. Slemmer drooped in the heat.
Inside, Ms. Pike was in a cell next to the execution chamber with one of her lawyers, Randy Spivey, and her Buddhist spiritual adviser. Finally, just after 5:45 p.m., the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the stay, and the execution resumed.
Ms. Pike was strapped to a gurney and taken to the execution chamber, where an IV team was to insert a catheter into each of her arms. The process is supposed to take 10 minutes, according to state protocol. Instead, Mr. Spivey said, it took an hour.
“I counted at least seven needles used in her left arm alone, one of which appeared to be bent when it was pulled from her arm after an unsuccessful attempt,” he said.
At a hearing last month, Ms. Pike’s legal team had warned of this very possibility, saying that their client had small veins and a blood disorder. In the execution chamber, Ms. Pike tried to help. “Over and over again she said, ‘Please try up on my shoulder higher, please try here, please try here,’” Mr. Spivey said.
Witnesses including the victim’s mother, who had driven from Florida, and seven journalists had been allowed into the viewing rooms, but the curtain was still drawn to block their view. With the microphone off, they heard muted sounds of paper rustling, Velcro fastening, groaning and whimpering.
“If you imagine what it sounds like when you open up a Band-Aid, that’s what I heard on multiple occasions,” said Will Puckett, a TV reporter in Knoxville, Tenn. By 7:15, he said, journalists who had attended executions before began to comment on the unusually long process.
Around 7:30, the curtains opened, the microphone was turned on and Ms. Pike was given a chance to say her final words. She spoke of leaving the world with love even for those who hated her. “I’m ready to be free,” she said. “This is a happy day.”
The catheters were connected to tubing that ran outside the chamber, to an out-of-view location where a “special operations team” would administer two syringes of the drug pentobarbital. At 7:34, Ms. Pike began experiencing obvious pain, witnesses said.
“The vein in my arm feels like it’s about to bust,” Ms. Pike said, though she was smiling and laughing. Moments later, Mr. Puckett said, “I saw a tear roll down her right eye, and then she said, ‘One spot is really throbbing.’”
At 7:41, a hand wearing a purple latex glove appeared and placed a small rock on a ledge, an apparent signal that the drugs had been administered and a five-minute waiting period should begin.
As that time neared its end, Ms. Pike gave a big yawn, the curtains closed and the spiritual adviser was removed from the room. But Ms. Pike was still audibly breathing, making a noise witnesses described as snoring or choking.
At this point, the protocol says that a physician is supposed to verify that the condemned person has died. If the person has not, a second round of injections is administered.
The curtain again opened, and the spiritual adviser returned. Ms. Pike continued to make the snoring noise, punctuated at one point by a grunt, and at another by her body lifting into a V-shape.
At 8:01, the rock appeared for a second time, and five minutes later the curtain was drawn. But Ms. Pike was still obviously alive.
This time the curtain remained closed, leaving the journalists literally and figuratively in the dark. When they protested, they said, it appeared that the correction staff members present were at a loss.
“They were in the same boat as us, to be fair,” said Steven Hale, a reporter for The Nashville Banner. “They didn’t seem to know more than we did.”
In a later interview, he added that the botched execution was “an extreme example of what every execution is, which is the grim reality of what is being done colliding with that sort of anesthetic planning.”
Mr. Spivey, the lawyer, was similarly in the dark. He did not know what was happening to his client, because after the IVs were inserted he was required to move to the witness room. Cellphones were not allowed, and he had no way to notify his colleagues on the outside of the situation.
“It took approximately seven minutes and passage through six locked doors to finally get me to a phone,” he said.
After the call, Ms. Pike’s legal team on the outside tried to get her medical attention. The governor’s office did not respond, they said. The emergency number they had been given for the State Supreme Court went straight to voice mail. Finally, they filed two separate emergency motions and were able to have a hearing, where they learned from the state attorney general’s office that an ambulance had been called.
At almost 9 p.m., all the witnesses were instructed to leave. The reporters walked out of the prison to give a news conference, their faces pale and stricken. “When they told us to leave at 8:53, Christa Pike was still breathing,” said Catherine Sweeney, a reporter with the local public radio station.
While they spoke, an ambulance could be seen pulling up to the prison, lights flashing. Everyone turned to watch.
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3) A Progressive D.A. Pushed to Overturn Convictions. Now He’s Under Fire.
Two blistering court opinions have put Mr. Krasner, a prominent progressive district attorney, in what may be the most precarious position of his public career.
By Campbell Robertson, Reporting from Philadelphia, Oct. 3, 2026
District Attorney Larry Krasner of Philadelphia in his office in 2022. Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
For nearly a decade, Larry Krasner, the most prominent of a national cohort of progressive district attorneys, has been gut-renovating the criminal justice system in Philadelphia.
He has stopped criminal prosecutions for an array of low-level offenses, aggressively pursued charges against police officers and pushed for judges to vacate scores of past convictions he believes were unjust, all while scrapping with officials from the White House on down. Last November, he won a third term by a more than 3-to-1 margin.
Between that election and the fact that violent crime in the city is at historic lows, Mr. Krasner’s power should be at its zenith. But in two blistering opinions this summer, state and federal judges have put Mr. Krasner, 65, in what may be the most precarious position of his public career.
In June, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found that Mr. Krasner’s office had withheld evidence and misstated facts in pushing to vacate a 2004 murder conviction. The court ruled that moving forward, the state attorney general’s office — which Mr. Krasner has described as the province of “Nazis,” according to members of his own staff who testified about him in court this summer — could weigh in when the D.A.’s office found that past convictions were unjust.
And in September, in an order based largely on the testimony of the district attorney’s own staff, a federal judge asked the local U.S. attorney to investigate Mr. Krasner and one of his top prosecutors for possible criminal obstruction of justice and conspiracy.
“If what they say is true,” the judge, Paul S. Diamond, said after hearing from multiple assistant district attorneys, “potential wrongdoing abounds.”
The U.S. attorney’s office has not commented on the judge’s order, and it remains unclear whether or when the district attorney’s office will be investigated. A spokesman for Mr. Krasner declined to comment.
Mr. Krasner, a former criminal defense lawyer, has been characteristically defiant. He condemned the June State Supreme Court decision as undermining democracy, and, in a series of filings this week, he insisted that the federal case be transferred to “a judge who does not appear biased or prejudiced.” Calling the allegations against him “Orwellian,” he also said they would put him among the ranks of those who have been “willfully terrorized by bogus investigations and prosecutions to benefit Trump.”
In the past, such defiance has paid off for Mr. Krasner, who has survived an attempted impeachment and multiple challenges at the ballot box. Other progressive prosecutors around the country lost or were recalled as voters turned against efforts to roll back incarceration at a time of elevated crime rates. But there are few signs so far of discontent among the working-class Black voters who make up Mr. Krasner’s loyal base.
“My community’s overwhelmingly behind him,” said Carl Day, a preacher and activist, who praised the district attorney’s efforts against street gangs as well as police brutality.
But some in the legal community, including those who share Mr. Krasner’s goals, fear that the judicial blowback is the inevitable outcome of his pugnacious, one-man-against-the-world approach. While Mr. Krasner relishes combat with officials outside the office, there has been incessant turnover within, several former members of his staff said, bleeding the office of institutional knowledge and alienating potential allies.
“You’ve got to cross all your t’s and dot your i’s when you’re doing very controversial work,” said Keir Bradford-Grey, the city’s former chief public defender. “When you’re doing good stuff and you’re going to piss a lot of powerful people off, you’d better know that they are going to confront you. You’d better make sure that you’re doing this stuff so that it can never be questioned and that the legacy of it lives on — and that you don’t cut it off because of your own carelessness.”
The case in federal court arose from the murder conviction of a man named Dennis Johnson, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2009. For years, Mr. Johnson sought to revisit his conviction, and in 2022, the district attorney’s office filed a motion agreeing that he should be retried or released.
But when Judge Diamond ordered a hearing on the matter this May, supervisors in the district attorney’s office reviewed the 2022 motion and found significant flaws. The office withdrew the motion, but an internal dispute broke out about who would shoulder the blame.
Jaclyn Mason, the prosecutor who had signed the motion, was an experienced lawyer but had been at the district attorney’s office for only four months when she was given the case by Matthew Steigler, who supervises the unit that reviews past convictions.
“I just was the conduit for drafting this,” she testified before Judge Diamond in July. Mr. Steigler had assured her, she said, that defense lawyers had found Mr. Johnson’s claims worthy.
Mr. Steigler told the judge that he had assumed Ms. Mason had investigated the case. But over three days of testimony, four other assistant district attorneys said that Mr. Steigler had crafted a plan to blame the flawed filing on Ms. Mason as a “rogue actor,” even suggesting they look through her past filings for mistakes to highlight.
The four prosecutors said that Mr. Krasner had agreed with this plan, calling it a “really good idea” and insisting that the priority was to “protect the office.” They said he was determined to head off interference from the state attorney general’s office, with which he has frequently clashed.
Mr. Krasner warned there would be “consequences” for anyone who alerted the judge about the internal conflicts around the case, his employees testified. Much of what they described struck Judge Diamond as veering into criminal behavior. An appointee of George W. Bush, the judge had stunned the city’s legal establishment in 2017, when he ordered the previous district attorney handcuffed and jailed after the man pleaded guilty in a bribery trial.
In the response he filed in court this week, Mr. Krasner suggested that the judge was inferring conspiracy where there was none. He said that he had simply sought a review of Ms. Mason’s cases to ensure there were no other problems, and that he was right to warn his employees about filing notices in court that he had not authorized.
He insisted that the four prosecutors who testified were acting out of a “pervasive fear” in the office “of being unfairly targeted” by federal courts for their work on exoneration cases, alluding to the disbarment and suspension of two prosecutors for their “misleading and dishonest” actions in an earlier case.
Judges have blasted Mr. Krasner’s office for how readily — and at times negligently, they charge — it has sought to revisit or overturn past convictions, having done so in more than 100 cases so far. The State Supreme Court accused the office of acting not on the facts but out of “personal, political, ideological, policy or other nonlegal reasons.”
State Representative Martina White, a Republican from Philadelphia and a leader of the 2022 attempt to impeach Mr. Krasner, said the judicial orders were long in coming. “Krasner has an agenda,” she said. “He’s willing to do whatever tasks without regard for the public interest and without regard for his job and his duty.”
To Mr. Krasner’s defenders, the criticism reflects a system resistant to badly needed reform. Frank Rizzo, the police-commissioner-turned-mayor whose approach to criminal justice in the 1960s and ’70s was summed up as “break their heads,” left a long shadow in Philadelphia, as did Lynne Abraham, the chief prosecutor in the 1990s and 2000s, nicknamed “the deadliest D.A.” for how eagerly she pursued capital sentences.
“You’ve got to think about all those people they were throwing away in the ’80s and ’90s,” said Jonathan Wilson, who runs a nonprofit in West Philadelphia that steers young men away from violence. “The people he’s against, they want to lock people up and throw away the key.”
People who have worked for Mr. Krasner see it as more complicated. While they concede that Mr. Krasner has the inclinations of a defender, with exonerations more prized within his office than convictions, several said in interviews that management, more than ideology, was the source of many of the office’s troubles.
With so much turnover, daunting responsibilities were placed on people with little prosecutorial experience, several former prosecutors said, which meant there were fewer lawyers in a position to push back. “There was not a lot of room for dissent in the office,” said Christopher Lynett, who was an assistant district attorney in the office until 2020.
But these problems ultimately undermine Mr. Krasner’s mission, said Mr. Lynett, who recently represented the families of the murder victims in the conviction case before the State Supreme Court. With the office so dominated by one man, he said, important reforms could simply be rolled back after that man is gone. Already there are murmurs that lawyers with more hard-line prosecutorial instincts are maneuvering to succeed Mr. Krasner.
Still, Mr. Lynett said the district attorney was not the type to fret about scoldings, or even the possibility of criminal charges.
“Larry would love to get indicted,” he said.
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4) Kristi Noem’s Agency Gave Her Donor a Lucrative Contract Just Before She Left
The Homeland Security Department signed a multi-million dollar agreement to buy five aircraft from a company owned by a political contributor of the secretary on her last day, documents show.
By Hamed Aleaziz, David A. Fahrenthold, Nicholas Nehamas, Tyler Pager and Niraj Chokshi, Oct. 4, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/us/politics/kristi-noem-planes-donor.html
A Boeing 737 airliner purchased for $108 million by the Department of Homeland Security seen parked at Ronald Reagan National Airport in December in Arlington, Va. David Lee
In the last hours of Kristi Noem’s tenure as the homeland security secretary, her agency delivered a windfall to one of her political donors by buying five airplanes from the man’s firm at a substantial markup, documents show.
The Department of Homeland Security agreed to pay the donor’s firm $108 million for a Boeing 737 airliner that had been converted into a massive private jet, complete with a stand-up bar, two bedrooms, marble showers and a table covered in manta ray skin.
The firm, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, had bought the same plane a few months earlier from a seller who had asked for less than $90 million, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
At the same time, the agency agreed to buy two smaller Gulfstream luxury jets at prices that also seemed to yield a hefty profit for the seller. Daedalus spent about $83 million to buy the pair, but resold them to the agency for $106 million, the documents show.
The agency also paid the company $45 million apiece for a pair of 17-year-old Boeing 737 passenger planes, the documents show. The Times spoke to six aviation experts, who said that those prices were millions of dollars higher than the typical market value for jets of that age.
A sales brochure for the Boeing 737 purchased by the Department of Homeland Security obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee featured a bar, a bedroom, a marble shower and a seating area.
President Trump announced on March 5 that he was firing Ms. Noem after a series of controversies, including questions about her agency’s awarding of contracts. But she remained in the position until her successor, Markwayne Mullin, was approved by the Senate and could take over on March 24.
After taking over, Mr. Mullin explored backing out of the deal, according to two White House officials, but feared a significant financial penalty. The officials said that Mr. Mullin consulted the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who shared his concerns about the possible financial ramifications and told him that he should not seek to block the purchase. He did not.
Mr. Mullin’s staff did not address specific questions about that account, but provided a statement saying that “these planes were purchased prior to Secretary Mullin’s arrival at D.H.S.”
The Times reported in August that the Department of Homeland Security bought 10 airplanes from Daedalus during Ms. Noem’s tenure, paying the firm $464 million. Those planes have already become a symbol of government waste. The agency said that they were needed urgently for deportation flights, but it lacked the crews to fly them. The department leased one of the planes to the F.B.I. and left the rest largely idle.
Through the newly acquired documents, The Times is now revealing fresh details about five of those planes: the three luxury jets and the two $45 million passenger planes. They were the most expensive planes the agency bought from Daedalus, and were purchased in a bunch on Ms. Noem’s last morning in office.
What the documents do not explain is why the agency went through with such a costly transaction just before the arrival of a new leader.
Ms. Noem, who is now a special envoy at the State Department, declined to answer specific questions about the sale or the prices that her agency had paid. Instead, she provided a statement identical to the one she shared with The Times in August.
“The purchase of these planes was not completed during Secretary Noem’s tenure at D.H.S.,” Ms. Noem’s statement said. “Funding for the 10-aircraft acquisition was made available during the leadership transition, and the acquisition process continued, and the purchase was finalized under Secretary Mullin’s leadership.”
Though the sale was approved under Ms. Noem, government documents show the planes did not formally change hands until April, when Mr. Mullin was in charge.
Daedalus’s chairman is William Walters, who gave $10,000 to Ms. Noem’s American Resolve political action committee in 2024. The company said Mr. Walters did not know the group was associated with Ms. Noem at the time, though the group existed to support her. Its website prominently displayed a photo of her face.
After Ms. Noem took office, her agency awarded more than $900 million in contracts to companies led by Mr. Walters. It hired his company Salus Worldwide Solutions to encourage immigrants to leave the country voluntarily, and to fly her and her aides on chartered jets. Then it gave Daedalus a no-bid contract to procure planes for deportation flights, under an arrangement in which the company could buy planes from others and resell them to the government, in essence as a middleman.
In a statement, the firm defended its prices, saying they reflected a market with a limited supply of suitable planes.
“Daedalus Aviation is proud to have delivered aircraft of the highest available value under very tight time constraints in an incredibly competitive market for aircraft acquisition,” the firm said.
Asked about the account of Mr. Mullin seeking advice about whether to follow through with the sale, the firm said that it believed the contract was already final when Mr. Mullin took office.
The Times requested a copy of the contract that the Department of Homeland Security signed to purchase the planes, but the agency has not released it.
The Times also requested documents laying out the agency’s rationale for awarding Daedalus its no-bid contract. The law generally requires such documents to be made public, but the agency declined to do so in this case, saying that releasing the documents would “compromise national security or create other security risks.”
To assess whether the Department of Homeland Security got good value for its purchase, The Times talked to government officials and aviation industry experts familiar with the aircraft. Reporters also reviewed records detailing how the jets were sold and resold.
The records made clear that the purchase of the expensive luxury planes was one of the last acts of Ms. Noem’s turbulent 14-month tenure.
Mr. Trump said in early March that he would replace Ms. Noem, after she struggled to answer questions about a different set of contracts in which her agency had hired some of her political allies to work on a $200 million-plus ad campaign.
But Ms. Noem remained in office for 18 more days.
On March 24, Mr. Mullin was scheduled to take over the role in the early afternoon. Ms. Noem was in Guyana that day, starting her work as a special envoy.
Late that morning, with Ms. Noem still in charge, the department approved the significant change to its contract with Daedalus.
Previously, the agency had purchased only aging Boeing airliners from the company, in line with its mission of finding aircraft for flying deportees en masse. It had paid the firm between $17.6 million and $35 million each to buy five planes that were between 17 and 23 years old, the documents reviewed by The Times show.
But under the new agreement, the agency contracted to buy three luxury jets that Mr. Walters’ companies had been using to fly government officials.
One was the Boeing 737 with the manta ray skin table. The sale of that plane for $108 million was first reported by The Daily Beast.
The plane’s previous owners were Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, brothers who live in Las Vegas and lead the Station Casinos chain. The brothers had put the jet on the market in early 2023 for $89 million, according to documents that Mr. Walters’ companies provided in response to questions from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. The sales brochure promoted electronic bidets, a wine chiller and four televisions.
But the plane sat unsold for more than two years. In early 2025, its broker was still hawking it online for less than $90 million.
Daedalus bought the plane in September 2025. The Fertittas are prolific Republican donors, and their cousin Tilman Fertitta is Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Italy. They declined to say how much they had sold the plane for, citing a confidentiality clause in the deal.
While the Department of Homeland Security was paying to charter the plane for Ms. Noem’s travel — but did not own it — Daedalus repainted it the same red-white-and-blue color scheme as Mr. Trump’s redesigned Air Force One.
Ms. Noem had made clear that she supported buying the luxury plane and others. In testimony before a Senate committee on March 3, two days before Mr. Trump announced she would be replaced, she said that buying the planes would save taxpayers money by reducing the department’s reliance on chartered aircraft. She implied the planes could have dual purposes.
“There are aircraft being purchased that will be utilized for executive air travel and for deportations,” Ms. Noem said.
At the time, the department was already paying another vendor to deport immigrants on a network of chartered planes. The agency did sometimes use smaller planes like the Gulfstream jets.
In the hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, pressed Ms. Noem about the luxury 737. Would a plane like that really be used for deportations?
“In the past, we have used jets of this size, in this configuration, for deportations,” Ms. Noem said. She added that she thought the plane was being refurbished to remove a bedroom.
Daedalus said that after the department purchased the plane, the government paid to replace one of the two bedrooms with a conference room. The agency left the rest of the plane’s interior, including the bar and manta ray skin table, in place, the company said.
On March 24, the Department of Homeland Security also agreed to buy the two 10-year-old Gulfstream jets, which both seat about 14 people.
Daedalus had bought one last December for $41 million, and another — with a longer range — in January for $41.8 million, both roughly in line with the market prices for planes of that age, according to records kept by Aircraft Post, a market intelligence firm that gets reports from aircraft brokers. A representative for the cheaper of the two planes also confirmed the sale price.
The records obtained by The Times indicate that the Department of Homeland Security then paid $53 million for each — a markup of more than $11 million per aircraft.
Among the five planes in the March 24 purchase were the two Boeing 737 airliners. Like the airliners it had previously bought from the firm, they were more than 17 years old, and had been used by Southwest Airlines and the low-cost carrier Avelo Airlines.
But this time, the department paid much more than it had for similar planes: $45 million for each.
Daedalus declined to answer specific questions about the prices it charged for those planes, or what it had paid to purchase them. The planes’ previous owners declined to comment. The Times was unable to ascertain what Daedalus paid for them.
The Times talked to a half-dozen experts on the valuation of aircraft, who said the prices appeared to be far higher than market rate. They estimated that jets of this make, model and age typically sell for anywhere from $15 million for a modestly maintained plane to $30 million for one in unusually good condition.
Prices can rise with included extras, like maintenance or spare parts. But even then, experts said it would be difficult to imagine an airline paying $45 million for a plane of this type.
“I hope they came with buckets of caviar each, otherwise it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” said Richard Aboulafia, a managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consulting firm. “This does not resemble any aspect of an airline marketplace.”
After buying the planes, the government needed a place to store them. It turned again to Mr. Walters.
Under Ms. Noem, the agency had hired his other company, Salus Worldwide, to maintain the first five planes it had purchased from Daedalus. Now, under Mr. Mullin, the agency continued that arrangement, and put the new planes in that company’s care as well. Contracting records show that the department paid the company more than $2 million in both May and June.
In August, the agency hired a contractor unconnected to Mr. Walters, Eastern Air Express, to take over caring for most of the planes. The contract does not cover the 737 luxury jet. The Department of Homeland Security has sought to transfer it to the Pentagon, but a spokesperson there said no agreement had been signed.
Department of Homeland Security officials now say that four of the 737 airliners will not be used for deportation flights, but rather will be used to fly government leaders and members of Congress on overseas trips.
The agency declined to say when, if ever, one of the 10 would be used for a deportation flight.
Julie Tate and Andrea Fuller contributed reporting.
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5) An Outrage in 2019. No Problem in 2026. Trump Has Moved the Ethical Line.
The president’s decision to hold an international summit at his own private golf club, an idea rejected in his first term, illustrates how much he has shattered norms.
By Peter Baker, Oct. 4, 2026
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is covering his sixth presidency. He reported from Washington.
“A record 89 percent of Americans said corruption is widespread in government, according to a poll released by Gallup last month, the highest level since the firm began asking the question two decades ago.”
When President Trump decided in his first term to host the annual Group of 7 summit of world leaders at his own private golf club in Miami, the act of self-dealing was so astonishing that it incited an uproar among fellow Republicans, forcing him to scrap the idea.
Now in his second term seven years later, Mr. Trump has decided to host the Group of 20 annual summit of world leaders at his private golf club in Miami in December — and this time the plan has generated practically no protest.
The unprecedented blitz of self-enrichment by Mr. Trump, his family and his friends since he returned to the White House last year has become so extensive, so profligate and so brazen that he has effectively moved the goal posts of what is considered out of bounds. An act that was deemed an outrage in 2019 is barely noticed in 2026.
Mr. Trump has blurred the line between personal and public interests so much that it is hardly distinguishable anymore. He personally made at least $2.2 billion last year through business ventures and investments, many with implications for government policy. His family-backed firm introduced a cryptocurrency called stablecoin just months before he signed legislation promoting stablecoin. He accepted a luxury jet from Qatar. He arranged for his administration to grant him immunity for any back taxes and penalties that he owed, potentially more than $100 million.
In recent days, Mr. Trump has ordered the government to use taxpayer dollars to air television advertisements lauding himself, commercials that resemble campaign ads even as voters are already casting ballots in this year’s midterm elections. Mr. Trump’s private business last month filed a trademark application for Trump TV, seeking to control the name of a streaming service that the White House in theory uses for official presidential communications.
Melania Trump, who already was paid millions of dollars for a flattering self-promotional film by Amazon, a federal government contractor, now has a two-part docuseries about herself to be released this fall. Donald Trump Jr. allowed a Russian business mogul close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to pay for part of his wedding after-party in the Bahamas. And President Trump next month will headline “the most exclusive dinner in the world” for the crypto firm that runs his meme coin.
The decision to bring the leaders of the G20 nations and their considerable entourages to Trump National Doral Miami from Dec. 14 to 15 in some ways offers the most clear-cut case study of how the standards have changed, not just from other presidencies but from Mr. Trump’s own first term.
“Let’s be honest — in the world of all the bad things he’s done, this is pretty small,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who was a senior counsel to Ken Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton and later served in President George W. Bush’s administration. “But it is a really good, easily understood example of how he has defined deviancy down.”
When Mr. Trump announced plans in 2019 to hold the G7 at Doral, it generated criticism not just from Democrats but from some fellow Republicans and even Fox News hosts. At the time, he was facing impeachment over his effort to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating Democrats and allies said it would undercut his support.
When Mr. Trump last year picked Doral for the G20 summit, he said he chose it because “everybody wants it there” and he promised that it would be cost-free. “We’re doing a deal where it’s not going to be money, there’s no money in it,” he insisted. “I just want it to go well.” He effectively hosted a practice run in March when he held a one-day meeting of Latin American leaders at the Doral club, a gathering that produced no uproar.
The White House did not respond to a request Friday asking why it was now appropriate to go forward with meetings at the president’s own property after canceling a summit there in the first term.
The only real Republican complaint about hosting the G20 at Doral was that Mr. Trump has invited Mr. Putin despite his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. As for the self-dealing, Republicans who once saw that as inappropriate have gone quiet. In 2019, Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho called the idea “politically insensitive” because it looked like “he’s doing it for his own benefit.” In 2026, by contrast, Mr. Simpson has endorsed the idea.
“Congressman Simpson supports what his colleague posted,” Lexi Hamel, his spokeswoman, said, pointing to an online statement by Representative Mario Diáz-Balart saying that he was “thrilled that the G-20 Summit is coming to Doral” in his Florida district. Asked about Mr. Simpson’s switch in positions, Ms. Hamel said, “A quote from seven years ago is quite a stretch,” without elaborating.
There are at least three major differences from seven years ago: First, Mr. Trump has fashioned a more pliant party by systematically using primaries to purge Republicans who defied him, sending an unmistakable warning to those remaining to stay in line.
Second, he has dismantled much of the regular apparatus of accountability in government by firing inspectors general; gutting the Office of Government Ethics and the Justice Department’s public integrity section; paralyzing the Federal Election Commission; and demoting, transferring or pushing out career prosecutors and F.B.I. agents deemed disloyal.
And third, Mr. Trump came into his second term more indifferent to criticism over possible ethical concerns. To win in 2024, he had to overcome two impeachments, four criminal indictments and a jury trial conviction on 34 felonies tied to hush money paid to an adult film actress, making him the first convicted felon ever to serve in the Oval Office.
In an interview with The New York Times in January, he explained that he did not feel the need to impose as many limits on his family’s business activities this time around “because I got no credit in the first term” and “because I found out that nobody cared.”
But while elected Republicans give him a pass, polls suggest that voters may in fact care when they decide this fall’s congressional elections. A record 89 percent of Americans said corruption is widespread in government, according to a poll released by Gallup last month, the highest level since the firm began asking the question two decades ago.
A separate survey by the Economist and YouGov last month offered registered voters 13 adjectives like “strong,” “effective,” “racist” and “dangerous” and asked which described Mr. Trump. The top choice of all 13 was “corrupt,” which 53 percent said applied to Mr. Trump, while only 23 percent said it did not and the rest had no opinion.
“Public outrage and pushback still work,” said Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group. “But Trump’s second term has been filled with so much unprecedented and harmful corruption that it can be hard for the public to keep up with every story, and the members of his party who are still in power have been unacceptably permissive.”
Another example that got lost in the flood of news lately was the trademark application filed by Mr. Trump’s private business for Trump TV. The White House debuted Trump TV shortly after barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the building (a decision temporarily blocked by a judge) and promoted it as an unfiltered substitute for his followers.
Trump TV is a livestreaming service showing Trump speeches and events at taxpayer expense on the White House website. But just before midnight on Sept. 24, three days after Trump TV went live, Mr. Trump’s private business filed a $1,400 application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to assert ownership of the name. “The applicant has a bona fide intention to use the mark in commerce,” the application stated.
Josh Gerben, a Washington trademark attorney who first noticed and called attention to the application, said such a trademark could allow Mr. Trump’s business to require the government to agree to a licensing deal to keep using the name. It could also allow the president to essentially take what is currently a government operation with him after he leaves office.
“They’re reaping the benefits from all the taxpayer funds that are being used to create and run that channel,” he said. “Obviously, politics has changed a lot in however many years. But I’m 45 years old and I can’t imagine any president before Trump getting away with this without being eviscerated in the media.”
There is some indication of pushback among Republicans as the election grows closer. Mr. Trump, while defending the partial financing of his son’s wedding weekend by a Russian oligarch as “totally allowed,” nonetheless told reporters after it was disclosed by ProPublica that “I understand that Don has paid him back.” Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, comparing it to Hunter Biden’s foreign financial business dealings, called for an investigation, and was joined by a couple other Republican senators.
But Mr. Rosenzweig said that Mr. Trump’s willingness to push boundaries more than his predecessors has changed the rules of the office, proving that the limits were generally voluntary and not mandatory. Past presidents did not mix business and government in the way that Mr. Trump has because it was thought to be inappropriate or politically risky. And so now new precedents are being set.
“He has succeeded, by his own terms, in demonstrating that almost everything about America was not law-based but norm-based,” said Mr. Rosenzweig. “And by breaching the norms without fear of consequence, he has redefined the norms.”
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6) Who Owns the Moon?
A treaty from the 1960s declared that nobody can own outer space. Half a century later, billionaires and superpowers see fortunes to be made nonetheless.
By Selam Gebrekidan, Oct. 4, 2026
“As a practical matter, though, only a few countries have the deep pockets and advanced technology to explore and develop the moon. And there is enough wiggle room in the treaty for one of them to plop down a nuclear reactor or for an enterprising tycoon to start a mining operation. … ‘If China and America are the two countries doing everything on the moon,’ Dr. Bowen said, ‘they can basically sort out the rules between them.’”
The moon in April, visible from NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Credit...NASA
In Robert Heinlein’s 1950 novella “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” a tycoon embarks on a quest to be the first human on the moon, and proceeds to auction off title rights to the lunar surface.
“There is going to be one hell of a fight one of these days over who owns the moon,” he tells his fellow businessmen. “I want the deck stacked so that we win.”
In that era, as the United States and the Soviet Union raced to the moon, the future that Mr. Heinlein envisioned looked like it might come true. To head off this concern, the superpowers made an agreement, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
The moon, more than 100 countries agreed, belonged to no one.
These days, the matter appears less settled.
The world’s superpowers are now racing to build nuclear-powered lunar bases, and corporate leaders have their own moon dreams. Elon Musk, a fan of Mr. Heinlein’s work, envisions “trillion-dollar markets” including lunar data centers and a catapult for launching satellites deeper into space. Jeff Bezos wants to move heavy industry to the moon and leave Earth a “garden planet.”
The United States government is eyeing the helium, frozen water and other resources near the moon’s south pole. China has done its own prospecting and, in partnership with Russia, wants to build its base near the very same pole.
This era hinges on the belief that first is best and that whoever sets up on the moon quickest can set the rules. Everyone else will just have to follow.
The Outer Space Treaty declared that countries could not claim outer space “by means of use or occupation.” Space exploration, the treaty said, should benefit all countries. (The treaty was focused on arms control, and it barred nuclear weapons in space.)
But nearly 60 years after the treaty was ratified, some questions still need answers. What jurisdiction can a state claim on a moon base? Can a company profit from the moon’s wealth? Can a nation or a company set up a perimeter and keep others out?
Past attempts to answer some of these questions have largely failed. In the late 1970s, the Moon Treaty declared lunar resources a common heritage of humankind and insisted upon international governance of their exploitation.
Only 17 countries agreed to the treaty. The United States, the Soviet Union and China did not. The biggest powers did not want to share technology or split some future bounty to be found on the moon.
With an uncertain amount of resources on the moon, and no cost-effective way to extract them, the stakes have not been high enough to hammer out a resolution, according to Bleddyn Bowen, a professor of astropolitics at Durham University in England.
“It’s a gray area everybody’s happy with right now,” Dr. Bowen said.
One argument is gaining traction in the world of space law: States can own what they extract even if they can’t own the moon itself.
Some legal scholars draw analogies from the Law of the Sea, which addresses resource extraction in the deep sea, another common heritage of humankind. If nations can mine the deep sea, the argument goes, then they can mine in outer space, said Hussein Badreddine, a lecturer at the University of Sydney who specializes in space law.
Many countries have set their own laws governing state and private activities in space. A United States law from 2015, for example, allows companies to mine in space. The Artemis Accords, a set of nonbinding principles established by the United States and signed by 76 nations, declare that extracting resources from the moon, Mars, comets or asteroids does not violate the Outer Space Treaty.
China and at least 12 other nations have reached a similar agreement for an international lunar research station.
When NASA accelerated its plan to put a nuclear reactor on the moon, it based its decision on fears that if China and Russia were to build a reactor first, they could declare a keep-out zone that would limit where American astronauts and their rovers could go.
Such a perimeter, even for safety purposes, would go against the first article of the Outer Space Treaty, which commands free access to space for all, space lawyers and scholars said. Some diplomats argue that any reading of the treaty that allows first comers to set the rule could create de facto monopolies on the moon.
A United Nations working group is expected to finalize principles addressing some of these questions by next year.
As a practical matter, though, only a few countries have the deep pockets and advanced technology to explore and develop the moon. And there is enough wiggle room in the treaty for one of them to plop down a nuclear reactor or for an enterprising tycoon to start a mining operation.
“If China and America are the two countries doing everything on the moon,” Dr. Bowen said, “they can basically sort out the rules between them.”
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7) I Know Christa Pike’s Medical History. What Tennessee Did Is Unforgivable.
By Joel Zivot, Oct. 4, 2026
Dr. Zivot is an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician. He consulted on Christa Pike’s case before her attempted execution.
On Wednesday night, Christa Pike lay strapped to a gurney at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville while the State of Tennessee injected pentobarbital, a sedative that is lethal in high doses, into her veins. When the first dose did not kill her, the execution team gave her a second. At one point, she told the room her arm felt as if it were about to burst. She was nearly correct. More than an hour after the procedure began, an ambulance was called. She was severely injured, but still alive.
By Thursday, Ms. Pike was in critical condition, receiving what her lawyers called lifesaving care. In a matter of hours, she had gone from a prisoner the state was trying to kill to a patient doctors were trying to save. As of this writing, she is unconscious. She is intubated and cannot breathe without a mechanical ventilator.
I am an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician. I have studied pulmonary complications and respiratory distress caused by lethal injection, and I know of no other case in which a person was given lethal injection drugs and then carried from the execution chamber to a hospital bed.
Ms. Pike’s lawyers retained me as a medical expert in the months leading up to her execution. I reviewed her medical records and warned her team that she had medical conditions that could lead to a painful and cruel death by lethal injection.
Tennessee has not explained what went wrong on Wednesday night, but the evidence so far points in one direction. Ms. Pike has small veins, which make it more difficult to insert an intravenous line. After the pentobarbital was administered, her arms turned purple. Her lawyers report blistering and burning at the injection sites. This suggests that at least some of the pentobarbital entered the tissue of her arms rather than her bloodstream because the intravenous lines failed.
Gov. Bill Lee has said that as far as he knows, the Department of Correction followed its protocol exactly. I take him at his word. That is the problem. Lethal injection failures are not glitches; they are features of the process.
In 1995, at 18, Ms. Pike and two others tortured and killed Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student in a job-training program. Nothing I write here asks anyone to forget that. My focus is on the cruelty that the state subjected Ms. Pike to on Wednesday and the pattern of botched executions that has plagued this country’s death chambers for decades.
Pentobarbital is highly alkaline, like bleach, and when injected into tissue, it causes a severe chemical burn. In Ms. Pike’s case, it appears that enough of the drug reached her brain to sedate her deeply, but not enough to stop her breathing. I cannot rule out that the drug itself was degraded, because Tennessee, like other death penalty states, does not disclose how it buys and prepares it. This is a state whose own independent review found that none of the drugs prepared for the seven people it executed between 2018 and 2022 had been fully tested.
Ever since Oklahoma became the first state to adopt lethal injection in 1977, prison officials have tried to make executions appear like medicine: There are gurneys, IV lines and heart monitors. But lethal injection is a sinister impersonation of the medical profession. There is no patient, no consent and no healing purpose. Even the drug is miscast. In the hands of the physician, pentobarbital is a medicine. I use drugs like it regularly in my intensive care unit to sedate critically ill patients. In the hands of the state, pentobarbital is a poison. Pentobarbital is not a painkiller, and when it is injected by the state, no one can say when a prisoner stops feeling pain.
This medical impersonation hides a great deal. I have reviewed the autopsies of more than 200 people executed by lethal injection. In most of them, the prisoners’ lungs were heavy with fluid, often with froth in the airways. These are signs of pulmonary edema, which suggests that the prisoners could have felt as if they were drowning, even if some looked peaceful as they were dying.
After Tennessee executed Byron Black last year, his autopsy found the same thing. Witnesses reported that he moaned and said, “It’s hurting so bad,” during the execution. In May, Tennessee’s execution team spent about an hour trying and failing to place an intravenous line in Tony Carruthers. In desperation, and because the state’s execution protocol said they could, they tried to insert a central line in Mr. Carruthers’s chest. That failed too, leaving Mr. Carruthers deeply shaken and bleeding from multiple puncture wounds. While aspects of Ms. Pike’s case are unique, the cruelty she experienced in the execution chamber is not an aberration.
Consider what a hospital team faces when a patient like Ms. Pike arrives. In my intensive care unit, a massive overdose is a familiar emergency. We secure the airway, support the blood pressure and monitor the brain. We watch an arm swollen by drug use to check for dying tissue and for pressure that can choke off its blood supply. Dying muscle cells leach poison into the bloodstream and deliver it into the kidneys. We count the minutes that passed before anyone called for help, because the brain keeps that count too.
It may take months to fully understand the extent of the damage that has been done to Ms. Pike’s body. Given that Ms. Pike was taken to the hospital over an hour after the lethal drug was administered, it is very possible that she sustained permanent brain injury. She most likely faces a very long road to recovery.
No one in the hospital where Ms. Pike is being treated would call what happened to her a medical procedure. To them it is a poisoning, and she is now a patient entitled to health care. Same body, same drug, same night: In one room it was called an execution; in the next it was treated as an injury. The doctors caring for Ms. Pike now owe her everything medicine can give. If they succeed, they will hand her back to the state that may try to kill her again.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution does not guarantee a painless execution, a decision states such as Tennessee cite to defend their lethal injection protocols. Very well. Then states should stop telling the public that lethal injection is clinical and not cruel. The illusion does not fool death row prisoners. I was a medical expert in three separate execution cases in Tennessee over the past 10 years. In each instance, the prisoner elected to die by the electric chair instead of by lethal injection.
Some states have already turned to nitrogen gas and firing squads. Christa Pike asked to be hanged. I do not endorse those methods. But they, at least, do not pretend to be medicine.
The deeper question is whether a state that executes its citizens is willing to look at what it is doing. Lethal injection was designed so that it would not have to. It puts the violence behind a sheet and a saline drip, and behind curtains that close the moment something goes wrong. After the pentobarbital failed to stop Ms. Pike’s heart, prison staff closed the curtains separating the execution chamber from witnesses for nearly an hour. The blinds could not conceal what had happened. A woman left the death chamber in an ambulance, and the only people who could help her were doctors.
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8) Inside the Group of Texans Accused of Being Antifa Terrorists
The strange story behind the first federal terrorism prosecution of American protesters.
By Janet Reitman, Oct. 5, 2026
Source: Johnson County Sheriff’s Office
On the night of July 4, 2025, Lt. Thomas Gross sent out an urgent distress call over his police radio. Gross had received a 911 report of a possible break-in at the Prairieland Detention Center, a sprawling federal immigration facility on the outskirts of Alvarado, Texas, and he responded. Local police officers were regularly dispatched to handle disturbances at the complex, where more than a thousand people were held awaiting deportation. Gross assumed that a worried family member was causing a ruckus, but driving toward the gates, he saw a figure dressed in black running away. He jumped out of his car, shouted for them to stop and drew his weapon. Then came a blast of gunfire. “Fuck, I’m hit!” Gross yelled.
Across Johnson County, a farming and ranching area south of Fort Worth, officers raced toward Prairieland, which lay at the end of an unlit road, ringed by concertina wire and a heavy metal gate. At the entrance, someone had scrawled on a guard shack: “Fuck you pigs.” Gross was found by a city fire marshal, conscious but bleeding from a neck wound. He told the marshal that someone in dark clothing and a neon green ski mask had opened fire on him with a military-style rifle. More shots had followed, from the woods or across the street — Gross wasn’t sure.
Police officers and sheriff’s deputies took off in pursuit. Within minutes, they rounded up several suspects. A woman in black clothing and a ballistic vest, with a knife on her hip, was found lying in the grass. A young man, also dressed in black, was hiding behind a grassy berm with a can of spray paint in his backpack. Five more black-clad figures were spotted walking down a quiet residential street. One officer, noticing that some were wearing body armor, mistook them at first for fellow cops. The police ordered them to sit down on the wet grass and open their packs. The group refused.
“I will not consent to a search,” one said.
“Open the goddamn packs,” an officer said.
“Do you have a warrant?”
“We don’t need a warrant.”
Another officer pried open a pack and began to rifle through the contents.
“Everyone, don’t say anything,” a member of the group told the others. “Don’t talk.”
An eighth suspect, 35-year-old Zachary Evetts, was spotted a few hours after the shooting walking unsteadily along the highway a few miles north, dressed in black and covered in mud and burrs, as if he’d been scrambling through the woods. The police also pulled over a red minivan as it was driving away from Prairieland. The driver, 41-year-old Meagan Morris, told them she’d taken some friends to a protest at the ICE facility, where they wanted to “make some noise.” Inside the van, officers found two Kevlar vests, a ballistic helmet, a walkie-talkie, trauma kits equipped with tourniquets for gunshot wounds, a loaded pistol and an AR-15-style rifle.
Within 24 hours, 10 people were in custody for what federal law enforcement was calling a planned attack on Prairieland. A statewide alert soon went out for an 11th suspect, Benjamin Song, a 32-year-old Dallas resident who authorities believed had shot Gross. F.B.I. tactical units raided homes across the metro region, bashing in doors with battering rams and throwing flash-bang grenades to stun residents, some of whom were taken into custody as accomplices. As the list expanded — 20 people would eventually be rounded up — the F.B.I. tracked Song to an apartment in North Dallas. On July 15, after an 11-day manhunt, a small army of officers broke down the door. Song was shackled and taken to the Johnson County Jail, where he joined the other suspects, many of whom were housed in solitary confinement, on bond originally set at $10 million to $15 million.
The Prairieland arrests were hailed by the government as a milestone event in the Trump administration’s war on “left-wing terrorism,” which Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and a homeland security adviser, has called an existential threat to America. At the trial this spring, prosecutors presented a sensational theory of the case: They claimed that the defendants were “operatives” of antifa, a loosely affiliated movement of left-wing activists that Trump has labeled a domestic terror group. They said the group had plotted to attack the Prairieland facility, setting off fireworks and vandalizing government property in order to lure out, and ostensibly kill, ICE and local law enforcement officers. The “operatives” had conspired to hide their identities, dressing in black clothing and masks, communicating through walkie-talkies or encrypted platforms like Signal, where the conspiracy was allegedly hatched.
A joint state and federal investigation turned up a cache of military-style gear, including ballistic plates, helmets, high-capacity magazines, steel ammunition cans and 50 firearms — many of which were recovered from Song’s apartment. Also found in suspects’ homes, cars or backpacks were fliers and zines promoting anti-police or anarchist views. “All Cops Are Bastards.” “Fight ICE Terror With Class War!” “Make America Not Exist Again.” From the government’s perspective, this material presented evidence of the activists’ violent intent. “Make no mistake, this was not a peaceful protest,” the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, Nancy Larson, said in a statement. “This was an ambush.” If convicted of all charges, which included rioting, attempted murder and material support for terrorism, the defendants faced decades in prison.
The charges provoked instant outrage from a broad coalition of civil liberties advocates, leftists and other critics of the Trump administration, who rejected the government’s argument as not only wrong but dangerous: a chilling attack on the free speech rights of every American. The families and supporters of those arrested maintained that they were nonviolent activists who’d gone to Prairieland to stage a demonstration that would show solidarity with the immigrants detained inside. The guns were for self-defense, in case right-wing agitators came to harass them. The rifles discovered at the scene had been purchased legally, in an open-carry state where many residents carry guns.
With the exception of Song, they noted, no one in the group had fired a weapon. Almost everyone else had stashed their guns in their vehicles, which were parked nearly a quarter-mile away. One defendant hadn’t even been at Prairieland that night, but was charged with the rest of the group because he later moved a box of leftist zines that the government regarded as evidence. These were normal Dallas residents, their supporters said: parents, students, a restaurant server, a tattoo artist, an engineer. Most had never been in trouble with the law. Now they were unlucky pawns in the Trump administration’s war on the left.
The reality of the Prairieland case is stranger and more complex than either narrative suggests. I pieced together the story over six months by covering the trial and conducting dozens of interviews with attorneys, former government officials and friends and family members of the accused, some of whom had never spoken publicly before. At its heart is a charismatic leftist, Benjamin Song, who gained influence over a group of committed but inexperienced activists and channeled their idealism — and their fear. “These weren’t revolutionaries,” said Corey Lyon, a 37-year-old photojournalist and former activist who knew the group. “But the road to radicalization is a lot slipperier than people think.”
Dallas didn’t see much in the way of left-wing activism before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. That summer, a diffuse community began to form on Signal and Discord: anarchists, queer activists, mutual aid workers, progressive gun rights advocates. They were united less by ideology than by a shared sense of isolation in a deep-red state that felt increasingly hostile and dangerous.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, stood onstage at the Capitol rally in Washington, boasting of his legal fight to overturn the election, and pledging to continue the fight. Nearly 10 percent of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were Texans — dozens from the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs alone. Swastika banners started appearing on local highway overpasses.
Then, a month later, a brutal February storm nearly collapsed the state’s independent power grid, plunging millions into darkness during one of the coldest winters on record. Texans found themselves trapped in homes with no insulation as the thermometer dipped — in some areas to below zero. Water pipes burst through walls and ceilings, flooding living rooms. Hundreds of people froze to death, wearing every item of clothing in their wardrobes. There had been no emergency warnings, nothing to advise Texans what to do or how to cope. One local activist told me that his neighbors had to chop up their furniture for firewood. (This activist and others spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because they feared backlash from Song’s supporters or the Trump administration.)
Zachary Evetts never lost power at his home in suburban Waxahachie, but he spent the days of the grid emergency glued to his computer, studying where the latest outages were, horrified by the state’s abdication of responsibility for public welfare. A tall, brawny Texan, he was employed as an engineer at a Dallas-area steel plant. Meticulous and safety-conscious by nature, he was prone to disaster-planning. “Zach is the kind of person who lives in worst-case scenario,” his wife told me.
Evetts began stocking their home with cases of bottled water and canned goods in anticipation of future calamity. He also bought a rifle. The grid failure, coupled with Jan. 6, led him to want to improve his marksmanship. “I felt civil war was on the way,” he would later tell a psychologist who interviewed him after his arrest. More than half of the country felt similarly, according to a University of California, Davis, survey around that time. Almost 19 million guns were sold in the United States in 2021, the second highest year on record. (In 2020, Americans bought close to 23 million.) The surge in gun sales was particularly pronounced among people of color, women and those on the political left.
Evetts, who grew up in a upper-middle-class suburb of Fort Worth, had volunteered for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and held left-wing political views he rarely discussed outside a small circle of friends. Since Jan. 6, there’d been a surge in hate crimes against nonwhite, gay and trans people in Texas, and Evetts became concerned “it could be like Hitler,” he later told the psychologist. He went online, looking for people he could connect and organize with. He threw himself into mutual aid, spending months driving around Dallas-Fort Worth, delivering cases of water or cords of firewood to homeless encampments and handing out sandwiches with the anarchist collective Food Not Bombs.
Evetts also joined the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, a small but growing national gun rights group that declared itself an alternative to the “toxic, right-wing, exclusionary firearms culture” of organizations like the N.R.A. Founded as a nonprofit in 2018, the S.R.A. promoted gun safety, as well as disaster relief, trauma medicine, homeless outreach, bail funding and community support. The group’s bylaws stated its goal as to “unify and strengthen communities against the hardships of life under capitalism.” The S.R.A.’s motto: “We Keep Us Safe.”
One of the Dallas chapter’s most prominent members was Ben Song, who went by the alias Bubble. The hard-core activists all used pseudonyms to protect themselves against snitches or spies or others who sought to harm the left. In Song’s case, almost no one involved in progressive organizing knew his real name, though he was one of the most ubiquitous activists in the city. He appeared on the scene in 2020, pushing himself to the front of the Black Lives Matter protests, and had since been everywhere: volunteering at homeless camps and marching for reproductive rights, for Palestinian rights, to defund the police.
Song had served a stint in the Marine Corps. Now, he drove a white Mercedes. “He had this sort of swagger about him,” said Lyon, the former activist, who met Song in 2020. Some S.R.A. members wondered how Song paid his rent. They heard he worked for his father’s law firm in some capacity, though he was always free to take part in demonstrations. “From what I could tell, he was a professional activist,” Lyon said. “He was always, always at a protest. And he was always armed.”
Like Evetts, Song came from the well-heeled suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth, the eldest son of conservative Asian American parents. He grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and was a leader of the College Republicans at the University of Texas in Arlington. But then Donald Trump ran for president in 2015, and Song, who’d always denied the G.O.P. was racist, decided he’d been kidding himself. For a few years, he was active in the Libertarian Party, but in 2019 he flew to Hong Kong to march with pro-democracy demonstrators and, as he told The South China Morning Post, “put my money where my mouth is.” When he got back to Dallas, he threw himself into the George Floyd protests.
By then, Song considered himself an anarchist, though he wasn’t particularly ideological. He liked action. He was skilled in tang soo do, a form of martial arts from Korea, and he began teaching self-defense techniques to activists. Classes were free to anyone in the community and held at a martial arts dojo in Arlington owned by Song’s mother. “It was Ben’s temple,” the local activist told me.
Evetts was a regular at the dojo, where in time he’d meet many of the activists that formed the core of what Song would later call his “affinity group.” There was Meagan Morris, a leader of the local S.R.A. chapter who had a four-bedroom home known affectionately as the Big Gay House, as most of the tenants were trans or nonbinary. There was Morris’s housemate Autumn Hill, an ethereal 30-year-old who moved into the Big Gay House with her wife, Lydia. Song’s longtime girlfriend, Joy Gibson, a redheaded vegan known as Rowan, was also a regular at the dojo, as was Lynette Sharp, a 57-year-old married mother of grown children who had been protesting since 2020 and wanted to learn how to protect herself.
Everyone looked up to Song. “He had this vibe: calm, controlled, authoritative, but not in a way that made it seem like he was trying to be the authority,” said Russell McKinley, a friend of Evetts’s. McKinley said he met Song only once, at the dojo, where Song told him about being in Hong Kong when the Chinese government crushed the pro-democracy movement, arresting and imprisoning thousands. He claimed to others that he was tear-gassed by the police, arrested and deported. To McKinley, it sounded impressive. “He had some worldly experience most activists don’t have,” he said. “Certainly no one in this group.”
Armed protest was becoming a fixture of American political life, much of it driven by right-wing opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights. In Dallas, Song began recruiting people, including Evetts, to join a hard-line spinoff of the S.R.A. called the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, named for the 19th-century militant abolitionist. Unlike the S.R.A., whose bylaws prohibited brandishing weapons in public, John Brown members were known for showing up in military gear with long guns at protests, drag shows and L.G.B.T.Q. events around Dallas-Fort Worth to act as a deterrent to the threat of violence from right-wing groups.
Like everyone else in the scene, Evetts adopted an alias — John White — and embraced black bloc, dressing in black clothing and covering his face with a mask to avoid being doxxed by right-wingers. At the steel plant, Evetts heard his colleagues joke about “shooting the libs” and worried that they would find out about his protest activities. He was sure he’d be fired.
Evetts avoided talking in detail to his wife and his friends about participating in armed protests, though he once told McKinley he felt a responsibility, as a relatively imposing-looking white man, to “make it count” by ensuring those who lacked his privilege were safe. Still, McKinley suspected the stress was wearing on him. “To be honest I think Zach hated doing them,” he said. At least twice, Evetts threw up before a demonstration. He once showed up at a drag event to find a mob of right-wing protesters, one of whom carried a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Panicked, he spent most of the day in his car. Afterward, he texted his wife: “I feel like a coward.”
Song, however, was energized by confrontation: In July 2022, he organized an armed protest at a homeless encampment slated for demolition, positioning himself and other activists in front of the bulldozers. After a few tense hours, the City of Dallas backed down. Though the victory was short-lived — the bulldozers simply returned the next day — Song reveled in the attention, talking up his success on podcasts and in Rolling Stone, where he was photographed in black bloc, hands gripping his rifle.
Around this time, Song began offering a new self-defense course he called “anarcho airsoft,” which combined martial arts with tactical drills using airsoft rifles, which look like AR-15s and shoot plastic pellets. This concerned some longstanding members of the armed left in Dallas, a number of whom were certified firearms instructors. Many of the people in Song’s training program were first-time gun owners who barely knew how to use a safety. “He was teaching them SEAL Team 6 [expletive],” said the local activist. “It was all this pseudotactical, close-quarter combat stuff: room clearing, stacking up against doors.”
Song claimed he was mimicking some of the tactics he saw activists use in Hong Kong, but experienced shooters were skeptical. “It really wasn’t uncommon to see Bubble walk through the dojo with his airsoft gun, pretending to be a commando,” the activist told me.
The irony, he said, was that Song was a fairly terrible shot, especially for a former Marine. Song had always been cagey about his time in the corps, but McKinley was under the impression he’d been on active duty and in combat. Song’s vagueness was part of his mystique. “He was like Achilles, walking through his camp while soldiers told stories about his exploits,” the local activist said. “He’s the baddest motherfucker out there. That was Bubble.”
The truth of Song’s time in uniform was far less impressive. He enlisted in the reserves after high school and was assigned the job of supply clerk. He spent the next five years reporting one weekend a month to Fort Hood, where he filed inventory requests and once or twice represented the Marines at Toys for Tots events.
In 2016, having only reached the rank of lance corporal, the third lowest in the corps, he received an other-than-honorable discharge. In an unpublished interview with The Washington Post, a transcript of which was shared with me, Song said he was cut from the Marines because of downsizing. Then he said he quit. He also said he didn’t respect his leaders and was frequently late for drills. “I was fed up,” he said. Song left the reserves and never graduated from college.
Five years later, he reinvented himself as a street activist. In August 2020, he was arrested during a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Austin, after a large group of protesters blocked an intersection and refused to comply with police orders to clear the road. Song had a military-style rifle slung across his chest and was carrying a .45 semiautomatic pistol and two loaded magazines. According to court records acquired by local media outlets, a police officer on a bike tried to grab him, causing Song to trip over the bike. Song stood up, raised his rifle into a firing position and pointed the gun at two uniformed officers as he backed away into the crowd.
Song was arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon of a police officer — a standard charge in Texas for threatening a cop with a gun, according to local prosecutors. He spent two weeks in jail before being released on $10,000 bond and was never indicted by a grand jury, which found the evidence insufficient. The police returned Song’s guns and ammunition.
Song plunged back into activism, eventually becoming the unofficial leader of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club. In April 2023, a member pepper-sprayed protesters from the Christian Nationalist New Columbia Movement outside a drag venue in Fort Worth, leading to a clash with the police. Three other members were arrested and charged with aggravated assault. Song, who claimed he wasn’t at the protest, was not criminally charged, though he was later named in a suit filed by the members of New Columbia, alleging a range of offenses including assault, battery, stalking and civil rights violations.
“That Fort Worth incident almost killed activism in Dallas, and I hold Ben responsible for that,” Lyon told me. The unofficial credo of the armed left was never to attack, only defend. “Even though Ben wasn’t there,” he said, “he created the climate for that sort of thing to happen. He was completely undisciplined in his training, he had an open-door policy about who he let in, and he never instilled any rules in terms of what you should and should not do, like walking across the street unprovoked and attacking a group of people with pepper spray.”
Saddled with legal fees and facing the threat of a prolonged discovery process that would have exposed its membership list and internal communications, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club shut down. Song was doxxed by a right-wing activist and his records were subpoenaed, but because the plaintiffs were unable to show he was at the protest, he was dropped from the suit.
Song deleted his social media and rebranded, adopting the new alias Champagne. He also switched his base of operations from his mother’s dojo to Finn’s Place, an L.G.B.T.Q. community center and organizing space in Fort Worth. In this new incarnation, he adopted “any/all” pronouns, hinting at a trans identity. If some members of the gun scene found this slightly dubious — “I always saw that as part of his overall grift,” Lyon said — it was accepted unquestioningly by the young, gender-fluid activists at Finn’s, who gathered around him.
Many of Song’s former allies had distanced themselves, considering him too reckless to associate with. One story circulating was that Song’s mother had kicked him out of the dojo after he neglected to secure a loaded pistol, which a student fired by mistake, assuming it was an airsoft gun. The local activist told me he cut ties with Song after learning that he took some of his students to a rural property in Oklahoma, sat them behind a dirt berm and shot live rounds over their heads to simulate what it sounded like to take incoming fire. “That was the most [expletive] crazy thing I ever heard in my life,” the activist said. “You put someone down range and shot at him?”
The incident worried him enough that he raised his concerns with people in the S.R.A., but they shut him down. “It was like a wall went up whenever you said anything negative about Bubble,” he said. “They all had these pithy, thought-killing aphorisms they’d fall back on, like, ‘Kill the cop in your brain.’”
By then, the S.R.A. had transformed. The pepper-spray incident was viewed by many longtime activists and organizers as a signal that it might be time to depart. Once made up mostly of white male gun owners, the S.R.A. now had a predominantly queer and female membership that was much less experienced with firearms. The “femme council,” a subgroup mainly led by women, wielded tremendous power inside the organization, policing its language and politics. This accelerated the exodus of longtime firearms trainers like Lyon, and Song himself, during his era as Bubble. As Champagne, he was welcomed back. “He was the only one they had left,” Lyon said. “They’d drained themselves of anyone confident with guns.”
Those who remained were generally younger and less socially confident people, many of whom were in transitory phases of their lives. Lynette Sharp, who went by the alias Candied Dynamite, had recently come out as gay and was feeling adrift after stints as a conservative Christian, a member of a motorcycle gang and a dabbler in QAnon conspiracies. Susan Kent, a 21-year-old college student, had just bought a gun with her 20-year-old boyfriend, Seth Sikes, for self-defense. Meagan Morris, a longtime associate of Song’s, was on disability after injuring her back loading boxes at UPS, and was so afraid of anti-trans harassment that she carried a handgun to walk her dog.
All of them were active in leftist Signal chats, where there was frequent talk of revolution. Many were also part of the Emma Goldman Book Club, a leftist reading group run by a local mechanic, Ines Soto, and his wife, Elizabeth, both well-known figures in the Latino activist community. Named after the early-20th-century anarchist-feminist writer and activist, the group met monthly to read aloud works by Karl Marx, Pyotor Kropotkin and, of course, Goldman herself.
Song was a regular at the book club and was skilled at tapping into the fears of those around him. The trans members of the group worried that Texas, which by 2024 had more proposed anti-trans legislation than any other state, might try to strip them of their citizenship if the name and gender on their drivers’ licenses didn’t match their birth certificates. When ICE began its sweeps in 2025, they thought they might be next. Song promoted tactical and firearms training as a solution. “Marginalized, fearful, uneducated and anxious people are chum for the sharks in this atmosphere,” the local activist said.
By that point, Zach Evetts was peripheral to this scene. Even before John Brown dissolved, he had quit armed protest, concerned it was moving in a violent new direction. He was furious after the pepper-spray incident in Fort Worth. “Direct conflict with right-wing people? I felt it was too risky,” he later told the psychologist. Evetts felt the same about confronting cops. “Sometimes you have to respect authority. They can end you.”
But Evetts remained ferociously loyal to Song, whom he didn’t seem to blame for the escalation. He still took self-defense class and attended the occasional book club meeting. After Trump was re-elected, Evetts joined a new Signal group Song created for organizing called Discussion and News. When he met up with Song, he rarely told his wife where he was going, even when she pushed. “He’d say it was better OPSEC if I didn’t know,” she said. Song was careful never to endorse violence, but he often reminded his followers that threats were everywhere: from white supremacists, active shooters, particularly cops. He never failed to point out that the police used violence all the time. He said he thought everyone in America should be armed and trained — even that the country itself would be safer if everyone had their own personal nuclear bomb.
Seth Sikes, one of Song’s trainees who was majoring in social work at U.T.-Arlington, would later recall Song talking about how guns could be used to intimidate law enforcement. Sikes was an Army brat who went everywhere with a concealed pistol (“because, Texas,” he said), but he felt uncomfortable with the idea of open-carrying an AR-15 to freak out the cops. “It sounded like a great way to horribly escalate a situation,” he said. But Sikes never pushed back, nor did anyone else Song trained. “Either they didn’t take it seriously or they agreed,” said the local activist. “But they knew who he was.”
Song was now doing most of his trainings at a rifle range in Ferris, Texas, where his students shot at targets of hooded Klansmen, or in the backyard of Meagan Morris’s house. There, on Thursday nights, he convened his inner circle for regular “gear checks” to run through maneuvers and watch YouTube videos of defensive tactics like laying down suppressive fire. “They were a LARP militia,” said the local activist, derisively.
It was at one of these Thursday night gear checks, on July 3, 2025, that the plan for the Prairieland protest came into focus. The group that evening included Morris and her housemate, Autumn Hill; Song’s girlfriend, Joy Gibson; and Sikes’s girlfriend, Susan Kent. Song had also invited Sikes and Evetts, but they were unable to come — Evetts was seeing “How to Train Your Dragon” with his wife instead.
Kent had never been to one of these meet-ups before. She brought a backpack with a gas mask, an emergency first aid kit, some shields for rubber bullets and a firearm. It was, she assumed, some sort of S.R.A. thing, and at an S.R.A. thing, you came prepared.
Song instructed everyone to leave their phones inside the house, so no one would be able to monitor their conversations, and brought them onto the patio. He wanted to talk about ICE.
Huge anti-ICE demonstrations had been taking place that summer in blue cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, but not in Dallas — yet. Song and several others, including Evetts, had created a private Signal group to talk about staging a protest the following evening at Prairieland. Built to house roughly 700 people, the place was known to be overcrowded, with detainees reportedly crammed into dimly lit, bug-infested dorms. The facility was remote but accessible, somewhere they could attract a sizable number of people without immediately drawing the attention of law enforcement.
Song showed the group at Morris’s house photos he’d downloaded of the building, which didn’t seem to have many security cameras. There was a guard shack that he said was never manned.
“This is going to be as easy as it gets,” he said.
“Easy for what?” Kent asked.
“We can take the place and free the people inside,” Song responded, calmly.
“What do you mean ’take the place,’” Kent later recalled another person asking. “Do you mean we’d, like, have to shoot people?”
“It’ll be suppressive fire,” Song said. The idea, he explained, was to shoot in the general direction of — not directly at — ICE officials to make them duck and take cover. After that, the group could break the detainees out of the facility. “Someone’s got to do something,” he said.
To Kent, who later recounted the scene in court, it sounded crazy. She assumed it was all hyperbole. Song often posed hypotheticals as thought experiments: What would they do if the grid went down again? How could they make sure the community had supplies? Would they rip off an Amazon fulfillment center? What about if a civil war broke out?
Kent was surprised that a few activists actually debated the idea of freeing detainees, but they quickly acknowledged it seemed impossible. Even if they somehow managed to open the doors and let everyone out, how would they move them? “It would be pretty easy to steal U-Hauls,” someone suggested. But they agreed they didn’t have time to steal U-Hauls as that required planning, and the protest was the next day.
So the group abandoned the idea and talked about other possibilities. In the private Signal chat earlier that day, Maricela Rueda, a local doula and poet, had brought up the idea of a nighttime noise demonstration. Noise demonstrations were becoming common in other cities, where activists staked out hotels full of ICE officers and kept them up all night by blowing horns and banging pots. Evetts had responded to her message by offering to buy fireworks, so they could set them off in front of the facility and have their own Fourth of July celebration. If nothing else, it would be a master stroke of symbolism: staging a raucous protest for imprisoned people on Independence Day.
Song raised the idea with the group on the patio. They agreed that a nighttime noise demonstration sounded good. They would post about it in Discussion and News to try to draw as many people as possible. Kent had to work on the Fourth and wouldn’t be able to go, but Hill, Morris and Gibson said they were in.
“So do we bring our guns?” Hill asked. She had never been to a protest, aside from a Pride march.
“Absolutely,” Song said.
He took his friends back inside and showed them a YouTube video of soldiers taking a building and clearing each room, things he said he learned to do as a Marine. “We aren’t going to do anything dangerous,” he said. “But let’s be clear, I’m not getting arrested.”
The night of the Fourth was moonless and misty as Evetts pulled his red Mazda onto the quiet side street a quarter-mile from the Prairieland facility, where the group had begun to gather. It was about 10 p.m., and sitting in the driver’s seat, he felt a rush of anxiety, the familiar turn of his stomach. That afternoon, he had made a point to ask if they were planning on bringing guns. “I don’t know that I can personally manage a rifle, kit and fireworks,” he wrote to the group on Signal.
Rueda was against the idea. “Rifles might make the situation more hot,” she wrote.
But Song insisted. “I think you’d be surprised,” he replied. “Cops are not trained or equipped for more than one rifle so it tends to make them back off.”
Evetts decided to leave his pistol and AR-15 in his trunk. His phone was shut off and tucked into a Faraday bag that blocked its signal. Spotting Morris’s car, he headed toward the group wearing a black balaclava.
Sikes had arrived around the same time as Evetts and had opted to bring his AR-15, broken down and stuffed in his backpack, along with a pistol holstered on his hip. Song had brought his favorite rifle, a tricked-out AR-15 with a binary trigger mechanism that released two shots every time it fired. He lugged a wagon with a black rifle bag slung over the top, while Evetts carried the fireworks in a cooler.
Four more people met the group at Prairieland: Ines and Elizabeth Soto, the husband-and-wife team who ran the Emma Goldman Book Club; their friend Savanna Batten; and Nathan Baumann, a 20-year-old none of them had met before, who learned about the protest from the large activist Signal chat. By 10:30, they were all standing on the grass facing the detention center. Sikes and Evetts lit the fireworks, which exploded into brilliant starbursts.
Rueda, who brought a bullhorn, shouted in Spanish as a cluster of detainees stood at a long window, cheering.
“Esperanza!” she shouted. Hope!
It was exactly what the group had discussed the previous evening. “I dunno if people have been to a noise demo before but they are pretty tame,” Ines Soto posted in Discussion and News earlier that day. They knew they might be trespassing on private property and violating a local ordinance against setting off fireworks within the city limits, but they were prepared to take those risks.
Then Baumann, who brought cans of spray paint, peeled off toward the employee parking lot where he started defacing vehicles and a guard shack with graffiti: “Bigot.” “ICE Pig.” “Traitor.” “Tyrant.” The tires on a van were slashed. A security camera was knocked over. Who was responsible for this was unclear: At first, Baumann said Sikes vandalized everything. Later, he admitted that he did the graffiti and identified Evetts as the other vandal. But everyone was wearing black and had their faces covered, and he didn’t know any of these people. Two other activists, known only by their aliases, Rose and Eagle, were also at Prairieland, and never caught.
The explosions got the attention of the facility’s staff. A corrections officer named Dekeithan Reedy went out to investigate with his sergeant, Cindy Harp. Spotting the figures in black, Harp ordered them to leave. Then the officers heard the sound of something shattering coming from the parking lot. Harp radioed the control center to phone the police, and a Prairieland staffer called 911. “I don’t know what’s going on outside,” the staffer said. “I think they’re doing fireworks.” Then she seemed to get another report. “Someone’s trying to get in,” she said.
By the time Officer Gross arrived a few minutes later, Sikes, Rueda, Batten, the Sotos and several other people in the group had fled. Baumann and the other vandal were still in the parking lot, and one of them, seeing the flashing lights of the police car, started to run away. As Gross drew his gun and gave chase, he suddenly saw Song nearby. Sikes, who had lagged a bit behind the others, heard Song shout, “Get to the rifles!” Then he heard gunfire. “It was the weird thook-thook of the binary trigger,” Sikes said.
Song had fired his AR-15. Gross was hit at the top of his left shoulder and fired three shots in response, one of which may have struck Song’s rifle. Song fired back — Gross heard a series of shots in rapid succession — but the gun jammed, and he took off. Racing to catch up to the others already making their way toward their cars, Sikes saw Song run past him with his backpack and rifle.
“What the [expletive] did you just do?” Sikes yelled after him.
Song ditched his backpack and rifle and continued running until he vanished into the dark.
Within an hour, those in Song’s circle who hadn’t gone to Prairieland began to worry. When Susan Kent came home from work shortly before midnight, she noticed that Song had changed his Signal handle to Delete. She hadn’t heard from Sikes since around 9, when he’d texted her to say he was going dark. Twenty minutes went by, then an hour. Around 1 a.m., Lynette Sharp decided to drive to Alvarado and see what she could find out, but it was impossible to get anywhere near the ICE facility because the police had set up a perimeter.
In the morning, word started to spread through the broader activist community that some of their friends had been arrested. Sharp and Kent drove to the Johnson County sheriff’s office. “I had bail money in my pocket — that’s how little we understood what was happening,” Sharp said.
No one heard from Song until early that afternoon, when Sharp received a message on Signal from Delete. “I am alive and uncaptured and I need to be picked up in a few hours or tonight,” it read.
Song was hiding in high grass a few hundred yards from Prairieland. He’d spent the night and part of that day lying face down in a field of sunflowers as drones whirred overhead, hoping the dense stalks would mask his thermal signature — an evasive tactic he learned from a YouTube video. “I am going to try to sneak over to the highway,” he wrote. He intended to crawl.
Sharp met up with Song’s roommate, a fellow S.R.A. member named John Thomas. The two drove to find Song, who’d made it to a fence line on Highway 67, about half a mile from Prairieland. “Thank you for saving my life,” he said.
Thomas and Sharp brought Song to a house where Thomas was pet-sitting, and Song told his friends what happened. He’d seen activists in the parking lot popping tires and vandalizing cars. Then the police car arrived, and an officer got out and ordered the vandals to put up their hands. “I shot him,” both Thomas and Sharp recalled Song saying. Song would later say that Gross pointed his gun at the back of a protester as they ran away, and terrified, he shot in Gross’s direction to defend his friend. When the gun jammed, he panicked. If he could turn himself in and ensure that no one else got in trouble, he told Sharp, he would. But they were already in trouble. He had no intention of turning himself in.
On July 7, as the F.B.I. manhunt got underway, Thomas drove Song, wearing a blonde wig, to a Home Depot, where he was picked up by 24-year-old Rebecca Morgan, a friend from the mutual-aid world who agreed to hide him in her apartment in North Dallas until it was safe to move again.
Instead, he and Morgan were arrested eight days later.
Last November, the government unsealed a sweeping indictment against nine people associated with the Prairieland protest, claiming they were members of an antifa cell. Song was charged with three counts of attempted murder and three related weapons counts. Four of the activists who were involved in the planning chat or attended the gear check — Evetts, Hill, Morris and Rueda — were also charged with these crimes, under a theory that Song’s actions would have been “reasonably foreseeable” to them. Three other defendants who were at Prairieland — Ines and Elizabeth Soto and Savanna Batten — were considered co-conspirators in what was depicted as a wider “antifa” plot. This group of eight was also charged with one count of rioting and two counts related to the fireworks, which were considered explosives.
Rueda’s husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not at Prairieland and only learned about it after the fact, was charged with conspiracy to conceal documents because he later transported a box of leftist zines that the government regarded as evidence. Except for Sanchez Estrada, all the defendants were charged with material support for terrorism — the most serious of the charges.
The material support law, written in the mid-1990s, was intended to go after the funders and supporters of foreign terrorism, and has been only sparingly used in a domestic context, generally in cases involving what most people would consider ‘terrorism” — plots to blow up critical infrastructure, for example. The Justice Department had never charged American protesters as terrorists, even when those protests ended in violence or property damage. Until now.
To do this, the government relied on a part of the law that prohibits support of a “terrorist act,” which need not be in service of any specific organization at all. There are more than 50 federal crimes the government considers terroristic, and the Prairieland defendants were accused of three: attempting to kill someone assisting a federal officer, vandalizing government property and using explosives — in this case, fireworks — to damage government property. To gain a conviction, all the prosecutors needed to do was to show that the defendants had provided support — by buying fireworks, organizing car pools, planning the protest on Signal — with the knowledge or intention that one of those three crimes would be committed. Whether any of the accused knew that vandalizing an ICE vehicle or setting off fireworks outside a federal facility qualified as terrorist acts was immaterial.
“It is a completely subjective decision whether these acts are charged as ordinary crimes or crimes that qualify as terrorist acts,” said Kimberly Paschall, a former Justice Department prosecutor assigned to the Jan. 6 cases. Not a single one of the Jan. 6 defendants, she noted, was charged with material support, which Paschall said was intentional, as their cases could be charged just as easily under other statutes. “What you don’t want to do is create bad precedent,” she said.
The initial charges faced by the Prairieland defendants did not mention terrorism. The decision to add material support was made by Nancy Larson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District who, according to one former federal prosecutor in Dallas, was “singularly focused on doing whatever she could to impress the Trump administration.”
Trump had long spoken of his loathing for antifa, a boogeyman in right-wing politics. Following the murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September 2025, Trump issued an executive order designating antifa a terrorist organization, fulfilling a longstanding promise. There is no legal framework for designating domestic terror groups, and the president lacks the authority to unilaterally make even foreign designations, which are handled by the State and Treasury departments. “When the president issues an executive order designating antifa as a terrorist organization, it doesn’t mean anything legally,” says Tom Brzozowski, a former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Justice Department. “But most folks don’t really understand that.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s executive order, the White House released a national security memo known as NSPM-7, directing federal law enforcement to aggressively pursue domestic terrorism investigations into people associated with “anti-Americanism,” “anticapitalism,” “anti-Christianity” and extremism on immigration, race and gender. The memo specifically called on prosecutors to seek the highest penalties available.
Though the government cannot prosecute someone for their ideology, a person’s beliefs can be introduced in criminal cases as indicators of motive or intent. The Prairieland case, with its trove of antigovernment materials, presented just this sort of opportunity for Larson, the former Dallas prosecutor said. “I think she saw that executive order on antifa, and they were like, Oh, man, this is it.”
When the new charges were announced in November, the reaction among the defendants and their families was disbelief. “I fell to the floor,” Robin Evetts, Zach’s mother, told me. “Not my Zach. He’s the last person you would ever dream — it’s just unbelievable.” Evetts was advised by his lawyers not to talk about the case, even with his family, but Meagan Morris, who never got out of her car at Prairieland, publicly denied the allegations. “I’m not a member of a terror cell,” she said in a recent interview with a progressive news site. “I’m a middle-aged housewife.”
A number of former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials I spoke with raised concerns about the way the case was brought. Because of the severity of the material support charge, government lawyers seeking to bring such a case would typically need the approval of the national security division at headquarters. “I’m convinced this case didn’t follow the normal path through the Department of Justice,” Jeff Breinholt, a former terrorism lawyer there, told me. There was no mention of the national security division on any of the department’s news releases announcing the case, which former prosecutors say is highly unusual. “What that tells me is the guardrail is gone,” Brzozowski said.
Seven other defendants — Sikes, Gibson, Sharp, Morgan, Thomas, Kent and Baumann — pleaded guilty and were never indicted by a grand jury. Instead, the government offered them a pre-emptive deal: plead to a single count of material support for terrorism, which carried a maximum 15-year sentence, and every other charge would be waived. As part of the plea, they were required to either acknowledge that they held an “antifa” ideology or were associated with the “antifa cell” that planned the Prairieland protest. Baumann insisted he’d been unaware of his co-defendants’ ideology before meeting them at Prairieland, but otherwise agreed to the plea. There wasn’t much choice,” his attorney, Ben Florey, told me. “It was to plead to material support or no deal.” Baumann and four others — Sikes, Kent, Sharp and Thomas — also agreed to testify at trial in exchange for the chance of a reduced sentence.
The trial would take place in Fort Worth, one of the most favorable districts in the country for the government. “The city is conservative and staunchly pro law enforcement,” said Marlo Cadeddu, a federal criminal defense attorney who has defended numerous clients charged with terrorism-related offenses in the Northern District. “Both federal judges there are former federal prosecutors and they’re backed up by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the country. Being able to bring that case in Fort Worth was like winning the lottery for the government.”
The Justice Department billed the Prairieland trial as the first ever prosecution of “antifa terrorists.” It was also a crucial test case for whether terrorism statutes can be massaged, as Brzozowski put it, to “rearrange the machinery of government and exercise that latent power that’s always existed in a manner that allows them to silence dissent.”
The trial began in February in the courtroom of Judge Mark Pittman, a founding member of the Fort Worth branch of the Federalist Society. On the first day of jury selection, Pittman declared a mistrial after noticing that one of the defense lawyers was wearing a T-shirt under her blazer featuring the faces of civil rights leaders, including Shirley Chisholm and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Pittman said the shirt sent a politically charged message, and compared it to a prosecutor’s wearing an ICE pin. Pittman quickly became an object of ridicule for supporters of the defendants, who gathered in a public park across the street, one of whom animated a black-robed puppet with reptilian slit pupils meant to represent the judge.
The key facts of the trial were not in dispute: Song shot in Gross’s direction with his AR-15. The other activists set off commercial fireworks that were purchased, legally, at a nearby fireworks stand. Some of the activists also vandalized vehicles, a guard shack and a security camera in the parking lot. Some were members of the S.R.A. Most were either regular or occasional members of the Emma Goldman Book Club. Everyone had some form of leftist politics, had attended protests and harbored an abiding distaste, and fear, of ICE, the Trump administration and law enforcement.
These latter facts had no legal bearing — the government didn’t need to prove that the defendants identified as antifa or were part of an organized “cell” of any kind for the charges to stick. In fact, the F.B.I. agents who testified at trial seemed ill prepared to make that case. The F.B.I. had been investigating the Prairieland case as a standard criminal matter until mid-September. Then, two days before Trump announced on Truth Social that he had designated antifa a terrorist organization, a U.S. District Court judge signed a federal search warrant for the home of Ines and Elizabeth Soto, the husband-and-wife team behind the Emma Goldman Book Club.
The Sotos ran a small left-wing publishing outfit from their garage, printing zines on topics like “insurrectionary anarchy” and surviving the death of a loved one from brain cancer. Agents had already searched their home in July, but the new warrant specified a search for evidence of mass production of propaganda. Morris Boatner, a 22-year veteran of the bureau, discovered a diagonally bisected red-and-black flag in the Sotos’ garage — an anarcho-communist symbol carried by antifascist regiments during the Spanish Civil War. Boatner, who testified at trial, acknowledged he was unfamiliar with the term “anarcho-communism” and was unsure of what the symbol represented. He did a “quick Google search,” he said, and concluded that the flag was likely “antifa.”
Boatner’s lack of knowledge was unsurprising. “Prior to Jan. 20, 2025, I never met a single person within F.B.I. leadership who thought that antifa was anything resembling an organized terrorist organization,” said Michael Feinberg, a former assistant F.B.I. special agent in charge in Norfolk, Va.
In its indictment of the Prairieland defendants, the government defines antifa as a “militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to a revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology, which explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government, law enforcement authorities and the system of law,” and whose adherents have “espoused insurrection and advocated violence to affect the policy and conduct of the U.S. government by intimidation and coercion.”
The author of this definition testified at trial: Kyle Shideler, a former fellow at the Claremont Institute and a director at the Center for Security Policy, a far-right, Islamophobic think-tank that has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Though little-known outside of right-wing circles, Shideler has given congressional testimony about antifa several times since 2020. Last September, he published an essay in Claremont’s online magazine The American Mind, titled “How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks,” described as a “road map” for countering radical left ideologies and organizations. That included many progressive nonprofits “whose true objective,” Shideler wrote, “is revolution.” Among the road map’s recommendations was for the Justice Department to bring seditious conspiracy and material support for terrorism charges.
Five days after Shideler’s road map was published, Trump signed the executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. The executive order described antifa as a shadowy enterprise that “employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives” and “conceal its funding sources,” and it directed agencies to target “those who fund such operations” — language that closely tracked Shideler’s recommendations, which included going after progressive nonprofits, mutual-aid groups, and crowdfunding efforts. Echoes of the road map could also be found in NSPM-7, which specifically cited antifascism as an animating force behind political violence.
Shideler acknowledged on the stand that there was nothing inherently illegal in engaging with antifascist ideas, but he argued that membership in groups like the John Brown Gun Club, the Emma Goldman Book Club or even the Socialist Rifle Association indicated an openness to engaging in militant behavior. Though there was nothing in the defendants’ Signal chats to suggest they had planned to harm people or damage property at Prairieland, he said this was to be expected. “It would be inconsistent with security culture to discuss that over an encrypted channel.”
The defense rested without calling a single witness. “There was no need,” Patrick McLain, Evetts’s lead counsel and a Marine, told me. The consensus among the 18 defense attorneys was that not even a conservative Texas jury would believe the defendants had done anything more than organize a noise protest that went horribly wrong when someone fired a gun. Yes, there was some vandalism, but the fireworks did not cause any damage. No one responded to Song’s cry, “Get to the rifles!” — everyone other than Song and Sikes had stashed their weapons in their vehicles, which, as McLain repeatedly pointed out, were parked the equivalent of five football fields away. Elizabeth and Ines Soto and Savanna Batten, whose connection with the Emma Goldman Book Club made them, in the government’s narrative, part of the “recruitment” arm of the cell, had arrived late, without weapons, and later maintained they were unaware that anyone had brought guns. Most of the group was already on its way back to their cars when the shots were fired.
Pittman told the jury to examine only the evidence related to the crimes of which the defendants were accused. Any other question, such as whether or not they were antifa or members of any other group, was immaterial. The only thing that mattered was whether the defendants had committed the acts for which they were charged. After less than two days, the jury concluded they had.
Song was found guilty of attempted murder and the weapons charges, and was sentenced to 100 years in prison. The jury rejected the argument that Evetts, Hill, Morris and Rueda were equally culpable for the shooting, but everyone was convicted of the other charges they faced, including material support for terrorism. Evetts received a 50‑year sentence, as did most of his co‑defendants. Maricela Rueda, who had argued against bringing guns to Prairieland, worrying they would “make the situation more hot,” was given 70 years. Her husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, whose only crime was transporting a box of zines, was sentenced to 30 years.
The staggering length of the Prairieland sentences was without precedent. The punishments exceeded those given to supporters of international terrorist organizations: Since the early 2010s, ISIS recruits prosecuted for material support have often received less than 10 years. The sentences were also significantly higher than those received by the Jan. 6 rioters, all of whom have since been pardoned by Trump. The longest sentence handed down to an insurrectionist went to Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, who received 22 years.
Though the Prairieland jury was prohibited from taking ideology into account when deciding guilt or innocence, it was clearly a factor in sentencing. The sentences were determined by Pittman and another federal judge in Fort Worth, Reed O’Connor. “The defendants’ violence and terrorism is an assault on democracy,” O’Connor said. According to observers in the courtroom, he explained that he was handing down the maximum possible sentences to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”
For other activists on the left — and on the right — the Prairieland case has set a dangerous precedent. Cadeddu, the federal defense attorney, told me that the most worrying of all the “terrorist acts” was vandalism. There is no dollar amount set on what sort of damage might qualify as an act of terror. Even throwing a snowball at an ICE vehicle during a protest and scratching the paint or damaging a taillight might qualify. “In theory, if you happen to be on a Signal chat with some people planning a protest, and one of the people at that protest — you don’t even have to know them — throws that snowball, you could be implicated in material support for terrorism, simply for helping to organize,” she says. “That’s the meaning of the case.”
The shooting made it the perfect test case to extend this law to protesters. “Terrorism lawyers look at a case like Prairieland as a case with bad facts,” she says. “And bad facts make bad law.” Brian Bouffard, one of Evetts’s attorneys, agreed. “Song shot a cop,” he said. “It was a clear opportunity for the Trump D.O.J. to overreach on everyone else who wasn’t Song. That is the story of this case. And it was ridiculous, until it became unspeakable.” The defendants are appealing their convictions, but they also face state terrorism charges, which, according to their lawyers, have begun to move forward.
Much of the activist community in Dallas continues to support Song, who they maintain never shot at Gross directly, but at his feet, a bullet that ricocheted and hit him by accident. “If he didn’t shoot him intentionally, then it’s not attempted murder,” said one organizer with the Prairieland Defendants Support Committee, a group for family and friends of the defendants. One image making the rounds among the defendants’ supporters reads: “Song Did Nothing Wrong!”
But in an F.B.I. interview days after her arrest, Meagan Morris appeared to feel differently. A transcript of her interview was introduced at trial. (The two sides agreed her statements could be prejudicial, so the F.B.I. agent who read them in court changed Song’s name to “a person.”) “I mean, a person [expletive] shot someone in cold blood,” Morris had said. “My suspicion is a person wanted to do this the whole time, shoot someone,” she continued. “I don’t think it was an accident. A person set things up to have a bunch of people there to have cover while he gets the [expletive] away. I felt disgust and betrayal.”
After the judge delivered his sentence, Song gave a statement explaining that his conduct was motivated by fear of law enforcement. “I did not want to hurt anyone. I never had the intent to hurt anyone,” he said. “Now, 22 people have been arrested, have been persecuted, have been tortured, for what? For nothing. None of these people really did anything. And none of these people have anything to do with what happened with me.”
The statement hit a nerve with some of his former friends. “I have little sympathy tbh,” the local activist texted me. “A whole lot of lack of acknowledgment of getting people into harm’s way.”
“I see he conveniently underplays how he [expletive] up his comrades’ lives,” another activist said.
“I don’t think I know how I feel about him at this moment,” said Shelby Donahue, who still lives at the Big Gay House, along with several others who opted not to go to Prairieland that evening.
“You’ve got to judge people by the effect of their actions,” she said. “I don’t know what the long‑term effect is going to be, but the short‑term effect is that I’m going to be apart from my loved ones for a very long time, and they’re going to be suffering a whole long time. And ultimately, if we’d all just kind of stayed at home like I did, nothing would have happened.”
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