Transcript of They Protested ICE. Now They’ve Been Convicted of Terrorism. New

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Yes, we need the police to come out to Perryland Detention Center. I don't know what's going on outside. They just told me to call.

On the night of July 4th, 2025, police outside Dallas, Texas get a call from inside an ICE detention center.

Okay, you don't know what's going on?

No, sir. I think they doing fireworks.

The caller reports that a small group of protesters has gathered outside the center and are dressed in black.

They outside walking the perimeter. I don't know, sir.

Okay. All right, we got them en route, okay? Call us back if anything happens.

Within minutes, a local police lieutenant arrives at the scene. As he approaches the detention center, he sees somebody dressed in black. Hey,

stop! He exits his

police car, draws his weapon,

He's running! Get on the ground!

And is suddenly engulfed in gunfire.

I'm hit!

And he's hit with a single bullet in the shoulder. All of those facts are undisputed. But what came next?

It was a planned ambush with the intent to kill was a prosecution

unlike any in American history.

That it is now the first time that the FBI has arrested someone that the agency has identified as Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremists, and terrorism charges now, as a result, have been brought. So that takes us to the indictment itself.

Today, my colleague Janet Reitman on what she's uncovered about what's become a defining legal case of the second Trump presidency and the troubling questions that it raises about who now qualifies as a terrorist in America. It's Tuesday, October 27th. Janet, welcome back to The Daily.

Thank you for having me. Good to be back.

So you have covered national security and extremism for decades. We call upon you very specifically for that purpose from time to time. You've reported on dozens of cases of domestic and foreign extremism. So what was it, given that, about this particular case that really struck you?

So there were 2 things that struck me about this case. The first was that this was really the first time that the federal government has ever tried American protesters on either the right or the left for terrorism-related charges. And it was also the first time that the government has prosecuted what they call an Antifa cell.

Right, because we don't think of Antifa as really having much of an organization at all, let alone having cells.

Exactly. There's no group known as Antifa, right? The term has been used by the GOP as a sort of catch-all for the left. And as you said, it's not an organization. It isn't a group with cells the way sort of Al-Qaeda or ISIS or some other foreign terrorist group that we've heard of would have cells. It's a very loose, decentralized movement of left-wing activists whose ideology is kind of broadly anti-fascist. And that's what Antifa stands for. Anti-fascist. Antifa. And that's what made this prosecution for me, as somebody who's reported on terrorism cases for years, shocking, frankly. Hmm.

Well, we're gonna get very deeply into this prosecution and into the government's decision to charge the folks in this case as an Antifa cell. But let's just start with the very basics of this case. You went and did a lot of independent reporting to try to understand who they are, what motivated them. What did you end up finding?

So I spent months looking through documents, talking to a lot of people who knew the protesters, and even more people who were just part of the larger left-wing scene. And what I came to see very quickly is that the place that this happened in Dallas-Fort Worth does not have a sort of established protest scene in the way that, say, a city like Seattle or Portland or New York or some other sort of blue city, frankly, that have, you know, really long histories of progressive activism.

Right.

Dallas-Fort Worth does not have that.

Which makes sense because it's Texas. It wouldn't seem to be a hotbed of left-wing activism.

Exactly. And so what scene does exist is more of a patchwork of people with different interests or tendencies. So, you have, like, the self-styled anarchist types, you have artists, you have LGBTQ activists, you have immigration activists, you have, you know, a really broad cross-section of people who care about a variety of different social issues, who are left of center.

Mm-hmm.

And so, just like many, many people in this world, they connect with people online. And so, that's where the central meeting place of this community is.

And how is it that people involved in this online community end up gathering at this detention center?

So the people I spoke to told me that this had really been brewing for a while. Texas's conservative government and legislature had been taking a series of actions for several years that were making a lot of liberals, especially liberal activists, very, very fearful. They were restricting the rights of trans people. They were cracking down on abortion. They were targeting immigrants. in all of these areas, they were way in front of a lot of states in this country. In fact, in some cases, they were at the front.

Right. Texas's governor, Greg Abbott, was so proud of his immigration crackdown, for example, he was literally busing people out of state to Democratic— Oh, yeah.

Yeah, he went around federal immigration law to crack down. And so that is the backdrop for this pivotal moment that comes in February of 2021, When Texas is hit by this massive, massive winter storm that plunges the whole state into these, like, literally subzero temperatures, and about 5 million homes and businesses across the state lost power. And what the state actually didn't do was warn people. They had a very weak power grid. They knew it. They had known it for about 10 years. They had never, ever made an effort to fix it. And what happened was you had hundreds of people who literally froze to death in their homes. So these activists who are already feeling fearful and already feeling as if the government doesn't care about them, or that the government could, like, try to legislate them out of existence on some level, now are connecting the dots and feeling like, you know, oh my God, we are genuinely at a crisis point. We're genuinely at risk. Our government doesn't care if we live or die. This is a very galvanizing moment for the activists across Dallas-Fort Worth, a lot of whom start to realize that they really need to learn survival skills and how to protect themselves in case something like this happens again.

And one avenue available to them was a group called the Socialist Rifle Association. Hmm.

Not a group I have heard of.

The SRA is an organization that has cast itself over the years as sort of the progressive alternative to the National Rifle Association. This is a national organization, so it has branches around the country, but it functioned in Dallas as a meeting place for a lot of people who wanted to get involved not just in learning how to shoot guns, but in doing things like mutual aid, you know, in doing, like, a variety of projects that were all reinforcing of a community and sort of building community strength and resiliency.

So this scattered group of activists starts to find a home in SRA.

Yeah, some of them. They're gravitating to people or groups that will make them feel more in control. And one of the figures who sort of represents himself that way is a guy named Ben Song, who was a leader of the SRA. And Ben was a professional activist. These are the guys that are just everywhere. They're at every protest. They're at the front of every protest. Ben was a Marine, had been in the Marine Corps, and he'd been involved in the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And this was a huge deal within a community of very inexperienced activists to have a guy who had gone to a foreign country and had thrown himself into these very famous and actually quite violent protests. And so he had a myth about him. So Ben creates a group of people around him who are all sort of united in this fear that something terrible is gonna happen. And so they need to be prepared. They need to know how to defend themselves. They need to know how to use a gun. And they need to be a little small cadre, like a little army, right? They need to be a tribe.

And Ben is the unofficial leader of the tribe. He is the expert within the tribe. And they train at the range. Shooter ready? Yep. Target 1! And he has quite a few AR-15-style rifles that he will lend or give to people that don't have them.

6 is down! Move!

He has offered to teach them self-defense for free.

If you just practice these at home, you're going to be able to move your weapon administratively much faster, engage much faster, much more accurately.

So all of this is going on for a couple of years, and it winds up building to a head after Donald Trump is elected. Because at that point, every fear within this community, particularly when it comes to people who are trans or non-binary, and deportation of those who are of Latino origin, those fears are now becoming a reality in their minds.

So what do Ben and this group that he is essentially leading do with these feelings of being under siege now that Donald Trump is reelected?

So Ben has created a Signal group for the broader activist community to share their fears and anxieties. And by the spring of 2025, we are seeing some big deal protests, anti-ICE protests happening in blue cities like LA and Portland and Seattle. And the Dallas activists are sitting there and going, we need to do something like this. So what can we do that would be effective? And they come up with an idea that they should do some sort of protest outside of an ICE facility. Mm-hmm. And Prairieland, which is a privately run ICE facility about an hour from Dallas-Fort Worth, becomes the place that they think, well, maybe that would be a good place to go. It's called the Prairieland Detention Center. And Ben and some other activists are on this private Signal chat, and they're talking about doing a noise protest on the 4th of July, which they think would be the spectacular moment of symbolism, right? They're gonna hold a protest on the day that America celebrates freedom, to show solidarity with people who are detained by the government. Mm-hmm. And their idea is they're gonna set off fireworks outside of the ICE facility Prairie Land to remind the detainees that they haven't been forgotten.

At the same time as they're having this conversation, Ben has another idea. And he will bring that idea up at a gathering that he's holding With about 6 or 7 activists at a house in Dallas, where he starts showing them videos and pictures he's pulled off of the internet of the Prairieland detention center. And he begins to point out, look at this guard shack. It's not very well manned. Look at these video cameras. There's not that many of them. They might not even be operational. And all of this leads to him saying to the group, This is gonna be as easy as it gets. Hmm.

What will be as easy as it gets?

Exactly. So several people in the group go, what are you talking about? What? And he goes, oh, we're gonna take the place and free the detainees.

Wow! We're gonna take over a federal immigration detention center.

How? What, are we gonna shoot our way in? What— are we gonna kill somebody? And he says, oh, no, no, no. We're gonna lay down suppressive fire. It's just suppressive fire. It's a way to sort of hold them back. And he doesn't really explain much more than that, as far as we know. And the group is really shocked by this, and they're like, oh, oh, that sounds like a terrible idea. We don't want to do that.

That's not what we signed up for.

That's not what we signed up for. And so the conversation switches to, okay, well, what could we do? And so they return to this idea of the noise protest, and they decide, okay, we're just gonna do that. Hmm. One person in the group says, so do we still bring our guns? And Ben says, oh, definitely. Hmm. With that, the evening ends, and they, you know, go home. It's the night of, and they show up at Prairie Land. They park about a quarter mile away on this quiet street. They've scoped this out. They're very intent on making sure that they're secure and making sure that they're not identifiable. Mm-hmm. They are wearing black. They are wearing masks. They have walkie-talkies to communicate with each other. And they're using aliases, which they always use. So the group gets to the intersection where Prairie Land is. And most of them hang a left, and they head off to this grassy area that is right in front of the window inside the facility where the detainees might be able to come and look. And they start to set off fireworks.

As planned.

As planned.

Just to be very clear, they're approaching this, the vast majority of them, unarmed.

Yes. There are a few important exceptions, however, and one of them is Ben. Ben has brought his favorite AR-15, and so he stayed a little bit further down, sort of near the guard shack to keep guard. The rest of the group, they're setting off fireworks, they're shouting Esperanza, which is hope in Spanish. And you see at the window, this very long window inside the facility, all these detainees lined up with their faces pressed against the glass. They were obviously invisibly cheered by this. Hmm. One person in this group with the fireworks is a guy that nobody knew. and starts heading towards the parking lot and has some spray paint in his backpack and starts spray painting the guard shack and some cars and writing, like, fuck you, pig, and traitor, and fuck ICE, and things like that.

Not part of the plan.

Not part of the plan. And it was also something almost everybody was unaware of. Meanwhile, inside the ICE facility, the security guards are hearing these fireworks, and they're a little bit worried that something might be hitting the building or whatever. And so 2 of them go out to check out what's going on. They see these fireworks going off. One of them walks right up to the activists and says, hey, you know what, you guys? It's time to go. You're on private property. You gotta go. And the group says, okay. Hmm. And they start packing up. You know, they've kind of done their thing. It's beginning to rain, so no more fireworks are really gonna get set off at this point. And they take off. And the security guard who had told the group to leave, she and her partner are starting to walk towards the parking lot because they're hearing some noises. They're hearing some breaking glass. They're hearing some pop-pop sounding of, like, tires being popped. And She now realizes, oh, there's some actual vandalism going on. There's the spray paint. And she calls the security desk inside ICE and said, you need to call the police.

So, at that point, we have a local police lieutenant named Thomas Gross who answers that call, and he shows up in his car alone, without a partner. Wow. And he sees all this graffiti. All of a sudden, somebody all in black runs in front of his car. He parks his car, gets out. He shouts for this guy to stop. And the next thing you know, Ben, who's wearing a green ski mask and has moved towards the parking lot area, begins to shoot. Lieutenant Gross claims that he did not shoot first. But he returned fire, and there's a quick exchange of fire. In that exchange, Gross is shot. Hmm. So with the shooting of Lieutenant Gross, everything changes.

Right.

So Ben begins to run away, and another activist who is also walking away sees him racing past him. and goes, what the fuck did you do? And Ben says, oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. And he just drops his weapon and disappears. And within a very short amount of time, all of these law enforcement have arrived on the scene.

Right. A cop has been shot, and they want to find everybody who might be involved.

Absolutely. And they start arresting people. But Ben evades capture by hiding in the sunflowers, you know, in a field near the Prairieland facility until about a day or so later, he's spirited away by some friends that he contacted. And he spends the next 2 weeks kind of on the lam, hiding in the home of one friend and then another friend until he's finally arrested.

And once this very disparate group who were all there that night where this cop is shot, once they're arrested, what are they charged with?

Initially, they were charged with attempted murder. And Texas is a state that takes a pretty aggressive approach and had identified Ben as the shooter. And they identified the rest of them as sort of the supporting cast that made that shooting possible. And they had identified this group as holding anti-government views because of some materials they found in their backpacks and their cars. And so their perspective was this was a planned ambush of law enforcement, and everybody is basically charged with attempted murder, and this is going to be a conspiracy case. And they proceeded with a case that was, by many estimations, somewhat of an overreaction, but at the same time was pretty standard. I mean, they were able to use these laws to go after them in a very punitive kind of way. But then not long after this, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk is killed. And at that point, everything in this case changes.

And let me tell you something I've not shared with anybody, but the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me was he said that we have to dismantle The radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me.

We'll be right back. So, Janet, how does the assassination of Charlie Kirk end up Influencing the course of this prosecution in Texas?

So Trump and members of his administration have long blamed political violence in this country not on the right, but on the left. And they saw the Kirk assassination as, like, the example of that. Here it is, violence against a person that is widely known to be a sort of lightning rod for the left. And so with that, they see an opportunity to declare war on the left.

We are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, and that are committing acts of wanton violence.

And so officials like Stephen Miller and, and J.D. Vance, vice president, really laid out the rhetorical case for action. No, no, no. We're gonna go after the NGO network that foments,

facilitates, and engages in violence. President Trump's leadership, I don't care how, it could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. It has to stop.

And within a few weeks of the Kirk assassination, Trump had released a couple of directives. The very first one was He made an announcement initially on social media, and then—

These are anarchists and agitators, professional anarchists and agitators, and they get hired. He

released an executive order designating Antifa as a terrorist organization, even though there is no actual legal mechanism to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization in the same manner as the government does designate foreign groups as terrorist groups. So this is kind of a symbolic statement.

Got it.

And a few days after that executive order, Trump sends out another directive that directs law enforcement to aggressively pursue domestic terror investigations into people who are associated with what was described in this document as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and extremism on immigration, race, and gender.

Interesting.

And this memo specifically called on prosecutors to seek the highest penalties available. And it also cites anti-fascism as a key source of political violence. So what this means is that The Charlie Kirk assassination has unleashed a kind of revenge campaign on the left by which the government has directed law enforcement to invest a tremendous amount of its resources into going after people who hold these kinds of views and to punish them to the highest extent of the law.

Okay. Once the president issues these back-to-back directives and there's this new framework for thinking about the threat of left-wing activism, What ends up being the impact on this Prairieland case?

So the US Attorney— she was an acting US Attorney in Dallas. Her name is Nancy Larson— had for a long time, since she'd been appointed in the spring of that year, in fact, been looking to please the Trump administration. This is according to former prosecutors. And she saw this opportunity. She has a case involving the shooting of a law enforcement officer, the defacing of a federal building, and individuals who are charged who believe in an anti-government, anti-law enforcement, anti-Donald Trump ideology. She also has in her hand a directive from the Justice Department instructing U.S. attorneys to charge every case in the highest, most serious way possible. So, With these 2 things in mind, she decides to charge them with material support for terrorism. So material support is a terrorism law that's been on the books since the '90s. It became a sort of a go-to for prosecutors who are looking to make cases against supporters of al-Qaeda or Hamas or any other foreign terrorist groups because it could be used against a very broad range of activities. When it is used in a domestic context, which it has been, it's usually used to go after people who have arguably provided support for what we would all think is terror, like blowing up infrastructure or providing the material to damage the power grid or something like that.

And that's not uncommon. What is uncommon is that it's never used against protesters. And the DOJ has made a really big point of avoiding that. It's very close to treading on speech, treading on the First Amendment. And so to use it is kind of the nuclear option. Hmm. But Nancy Larson decided to go for it.

So how does Nancy Larson use this statute that is generally focused on foreign terrorists on domestic protesters?

So there's a part of the law that allows prosecutors to go after individuals for what they call terrorist acts. And the interesting thing about the way they charged these people, and the reason that they used this particular law, was because this part of the law does not require you to be a member of a terrorist group, to think of yourself as committing any act of terrorism. All it requires is that you committed one of the crimes that the government says can be terrorism. Hmm. And there are about 50 or so crimes, federal crimes, that could qualify as a terrorist act. And ultimately, Larson determined that there were 3 crimes that would allow her to charge these people with material support for terrorism. So, one of them was defacing government property, which was vandalism. The other one was setting off fireworks that qualified as explosives.

Hmm.

And the attempted murder of federal law enforcement or someone coming to the aid of federal law enforcement. The ICE facility was manned by people on contract to the federal government, so they qualified as some form of federal law enforcement. And Lieutenant Gross was coming to their aid. Hmm. The shooting of him qualified as the attempted murder that could qualify as a terrorist act.

So once this prosecutor breaks all kinds of norms and files these charges in a way that the Department of Justice has long avoided, what happens once those charges actually reach the courtroom?

So in February, I went to Fort Worth to attend the trial of these At this point, it was 9 activists. And it's important to know that it was prosecuted in Fort Worth because Fort Worth is very conservative. And the 2 judges in the Fort Worth federal courthouse are very conservative. Mm-hmm. When the case opens— so the onus is on the government to prove that these people did what they accused them of doing, which is not just vandalizing a building or shooting at a police officer, but doing that for a political purpose. That's what would make it terrorism, right? And so, in order to do that, they must bring in their ideology, which under law you cannot prosecute a person for. But you can bring an ideology if it informs the motive or the intent. Mm-hmm. So, the prosecution opens their case with Sort of a spectacular story of an Antifa cell that met on Signal, an encrypted chat platform, to discuss their plans to attack this facility. And they bring out all the things that they consider the evidence in this case. So they bring out chat transcripts where they discuss the protest and the planning.

They bring out into the courtroom all these guns, all these AR-15s. And photographs of weapons. And they bring in the fact that Ben Song and a number of the other activists were members of the SRA, the Socialist Rifle Association. Some were members of the John Brown Gun Club, which is a much more militant kind of organization. And they bring in the fact that they had all these zines and flyers and books. And one of the most important parts of this case was that a number of the activists were involved in an anarchist book group called the Emma Goldman Book Club, which was exactly what it sounds like. It was a book club. And yet the government considered the Emma Goldman Book Club to be the recruiting ground for the Antifa cell.

So the prosecution is connecting a lot of dots here. And they say, in our view, This is terrorism, and this is Antifa. But I have the question of why so far in our conversation, in the way you've talked about this group of protesters and what motivated them, why you never mentioned the word Antifa. So was there any actual connection between these activists and that idea, that acronym?

A question was put to 5 activists who pled guilty and were cooperators and testified about Antifa. Not one of them denied that they held anti-fascist views. And in fact, some of them said, isn't it a good thing to be anti-fascist? Don't we all hate fascism? None of them, however, identified as Antifa in a sort of organized group way. And we've already discussed how Antifa—

Isn't really an organized group.

Right. And so on one of the last days of the trial, they call to the stand a guy who's been sitting in the courtroom for 3 weeks named Kyle Scheidler. He is a little-known figure in the world of counterterrorism, but is a well-known figure on the right as being an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood and most recently on Antifa. He's very fixated on Antifa. And in September of 2025, right around the time that Kirk was killed, he published an essay in a right-wing magazine called How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks. And he described that as a roadmap for countering radical left ideologies and organizations. Among the roadmap's recommendations was for the Justice Department to bring seditious conspiracy and material support for terrorism charges.

Which is what happens.

Exactly. Kyle Scheidler—

Creates the template for the prosecution and then testifies for the prosecution.

And not only that, he created the definition of Antifa that the prosecution used in its indictment and used in the trial. I mean, this is highly unusual for any civilian, non-DOJ employee, non-lawyer to be consulting with the prosecutors on any wording—

A federal terrorism indictment.

Of a federal terrorism indictment. Any of the wording. So Scheidler is asked to essentially identify what Antifa is and what would be behavior that is—

That's Antifa-like.

That's Antifa-like. Right. So he testifies that wearing black bloc, which is, you know, the black clothing and the black mask, is both Antifa-like behavior and possibly could be connected to a potentially violent intent. He testifies about the use of walkie-talkies. He testifies about the use of aliases. At one point, a point is made that none of these people in their Signal chats ever talked about violence at all, in any capacity. And he says, well, of course not, because that would be a violation of security culture. Of course they would never. do this. Because we can't prove that you're a terrorist, that means that you're a terrorist has been used over and over again. It's not— It's a circular logic. It's a very circular logic. So when Scheider was done, the government more or less rested its case.

So how does the defense respond to this? What argument does it put forward on behalf of the folks who are outside this detention center?

So the defense has been challenging the prosecution's argument every step of the way. Their argument is that this was a peaceful protest that went wrong. And so throughout the trial, in cross-examination, in their responses, they're constantly challenging this narrative and saying, I'm sorry, but what you're saying here does not amount—

To what you said.

To what you said. It's just you're not proving your case. So when the prosecution rests, the defense rests.

Was the defense right to think that they didn't need to put on much of a case because the prosecution had failed to persuasively make its case?

No.

They were wrong?

They were wrong. And it took about 2 days for the jury to find every single one of those defendants guilty. They weren't all guilty of attempted murder. Only Ben was found guilty of attempted murder. But they were all found guilty of material support for terror. Hmm.

The most provocative, the most unusual of the charges.

Right. And 2 months after this, they are sentenced. And the sentences were astonishing.

What do you mean?

Well, let's start with a man who wasn't even at the scene that night. His name is Daniel Sanchez Estrada. He's the husband of one of the Prairie Land protesters. And he was charged and convicted of concealing documents and with his wife conspiring to conceal documents, which turned out to be a box of leftist pamphlets and other material the police found in the trunk of his car. Hmm. He was sentenced to 30 years.

Wow!

His wife, who was one of the people who planned the protest and was the sort of driver of wanting to do a noise protest— Mm-hmm. She's a poet, she's a doula, and she was the one that shouted Esperanza. Mm-hmm. She got 70 years.

Wow! Why 70 years?

Ostensibly because—

No arms, no violence.

Not only no arms, no violence, she vocally opposed guns. She was the one that said, I don't know about guns. That could make the situation more hot. But she was heavily involved in planning this protest. And so the planning is what made her a potential terrorist. And the other sentences were just as harsh. Most of the others in the group got 50 years.

Can you just put these sentences into some perspective for me?

Interestingly enough, most people who are prosecuted for material support for terrorism in this country receive under 10 years.

Hmm.

I mean, these are the kinds of sentences that you would get if you were the leader of a drug cartel. that you would get if you were a member of the mafia. High-level. These are high-level leaders of drug cartels or mafiosos or—

Responsible for untold numbers of deaths.

Untold numbers of deaths, for extreme, extreme violence.

And no one was killed here.

No. No one was killed. And I should say that Ben Song, who shot at Lieutenant Gross, was given a sentence of 100 years. And Lieutenant Gross's injury was Relatively minor. He was not hospitalized. He went to the hospital, was treated, and was released in about an hour.

So how integral was the charge of material support for terrorism to the astonishing length of these sentences?

It certainly enhanced the length of the sentences. But I think what was integral to these sentences was the belief system. Because even though the prosecution could not prosecute them for their ideology and could only bring in their ideology to suggest their intent, the judge who sentenced them could use the ideology to impose these extremely long sentences. And one of the judges, in fact, reportedly said during sentencing that he was imposing these sentences as a deterrent.

Hmm. Janet, how should we think about this case and its outcome? Should we think of it as an outlier because it was the first of its kind, because every element of it seems so specific, including the fact that it was tried in a very conservative part of the country where I have to imagine the jury may not have been particularly sympathetic to the defendants? Or should we view it as a really important template for how the government starts to treat protests and ideologies that it doesn't like as terrorism?

I don't even think this was an unsympathetic jury. There were jurors who argued vocally in the jury room to the point where people heard them having very spirited debates about this case. When they came in to deliver their verdict, I think at least one of the jurors had been crying and seemed very distraught. Hmm. But once they were confronted with these undisputable facts, they were really in a bind because the government had essentially said to them, these facts make these people terrorists.

So in a sense, once these charges were brought, this jury was boxed in.

Yeah, I think so. In this case, one of those acts of terror was vandalism. Vandalism under many, many, many, many other circumstances is simply vandalism. And so that was the bind that the jury found themselves in. They were looking at crimes that were fairly minimal aside from the shooting of a police officer. But when it becomes an act of terror, now you're in a different category. And so that's how you find a group of activists, most of whom don't have criminal records of any sort, going to prison for 30, 40, 50, 70, 100 years.

And that outcome feels totally inextricably linked to the Trump administration's decision to articulate this idea that left-wing activism and activists should be seen as terrorism. I'm just thinking back to that original executive order that you mentioned much earlier in our conversation, where the president was ticking through all the forms of activism that he wanted to treat as domestic terrorism. And they're all viewpoints that he disagrees with.

Absolutely.

Anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, Extremism on immigration. And that inevitably raises the question, if the president right now wants to, in a certain sense, criminalize protest that he doesn't like, which happens in this moment to be left-wing activism, who's to say that the next president won't criminalize the activism of the right? Or the middle. Who knows? I mean, how much is that a real risk?

That's a real risk. I think that's a real risk. I mean, I think that there's— so there's a line that prosecutors use. Bad facts make bad law. And what that means— What does that mean? So what that means is that you have a fact in your case that makes your case, if you're a defense attorney, kind of losable, right? You have a fact that looks bad. In this case, it was the shooting of a police officer. You cannot minimize that a police officer was shot.

Right.

Once you did that, that opens up a huge can of worms. And that's the thing that initiates this permission structure. Without the shooting of the police officer, I'm not sure these guys would've gotten prosecuted. Maybe not at all, but certainly not in the way that they were. But with the shooting of the police officer, where you have an undisputed act of violence, that allowed the government to basically say, well, see? They are terrorists. See? They are violent. Here's political violence. Let's charge them all as violent terrorists. And where that makes bad law is that if it is not somehow overturned in an appeals court, which at the moment, it's very uncertain what will happen, that bad law can be applied to anybody. So as long as you've created a permission structure to go after people that you disagree with, based on your belief that their ideology is dangerous, then anybody can use that same template to go after a different group of people. So while this was used against the left, 4 years or 5 years from now, it could easily be used against the right. This is the kind of case that January 6th Arguably, based on everything that occurred, could easily be called a terrorist incident.

There were a million things that people did on January 6th that qualified, but they weren't charged in that manner. And then they actually walked out of prison after a very short amount of time. But if there's something similar like that happened in another administration, they could go after all of them and make it a serious, serious situation where people would be sentenced to 40, 50 years.

Right. And suddenly we have a system from the top on down, the president on down, where terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. And that is not something we've ever had. That's not a tradition we have legally in this country. Terrorism is supposed to be terrorism.

The idea that terrorism is in the eye of the beholder is the danger in declaring a war on terror. As somebody who's been reporting on it for a long time. This is why anyone who has been involved in prosecuting terrorism, in working in law enforcement, they understand that. That once you declare a war on terror, which is actually a war on fear in a lot of ways, right? Weaponizing that. You're weaponizing your fear. You're weaponizing your dehumanization of your enemy. When you can do that, That cannot be stopped. That could mean you're a radical supporter, or what somebody says is a radical supporter of literally anything, as long as you can find the construct to brand it as terrorism. Hmm. And that's what we did with Prairie Land. And I think this is a dangerous corner that we've turned in this case.

Well, Janet, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me.

Janet Reitman's new book is about the hidden costs of the US war on terrorism. The book, entitled The Inheritance, An American Tragedy in 5 Acts, was published earlier this month. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the artificial intelligence giant Anthropic offered the most detailed look inside its finances to date when it filed paperwork to soon become a publicly traded company. The documents reveal that Anthropic's revenue has skyrocketed in the first half of this year to more than $16 billion, a 14-fold increase from a year earlier. But the company's debt has surged as well. Anthropic's IPO expected next month, could value the company at up to $2 trillion. That would make the 5-year-old startup one of the most valuable companies in the world. Today's episode was produced by Astha Chaturvedi and Jack DiSidoro, with help from Alex Stern and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Michael Benoit. With help from Chris Haxall and Rob Zipko. Contains music by Brad Fisher, Marian Lozano, Alicia Batetube, Dan Powell, and Rowan Amisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.