We Are Either All Terrorists or All ICE Agents

I’ve recently been reading Tad Stoermer’s A Resistance History of the United States, and if there’s one thing I can safely take away from that book to tell all of you, it is this: safety was never on offer.

You do not need any more proof of that then the Draconian sentences that were handed down to eight people in Praireland, Texas this last week.

(ALSO, sidenote: if you like any particular line of this essay, please restack that line. It helps the reach so much. If you like the essay, please like it. Engagement is king!)

For those of you who are not in the know, let catch you up to speed. On July 4 2025, eight people participated in a noise demonstration outside of an ICE detention facility which is notorious for its particularly squalid living conditions. During their noise demonstration, a local police officer from Alvarado, Texas attempted to interrupt them. During this interaction, the officer drew their weapon on the protestors.

In response, one of the protestors, named Benjamin Song, drew their AR-15 that they’d brought to this demonstration. All of the other protestors testified under oath they had no idea that Song intended on bringing a firearm to this demonstration.

After the officer drew their weapon, Song fired one round at the ground in the officer’s direction. This bullet ricocheted off the ground and struck an officer in the arm.

For this, Song received a sentence of 100 years in federal prison. The other protestors who, again, had no idea Song had brought this weapon, received sentences of between 50 and 70 years merely for being there with him. One man who was not at this protest, but who moved a single box of magazines that contained leftist literature, received a sentence of 30 years.

The justification of these heinously egregious sentences is more breathtaking than the durations of the sentences themselves. One of the judges who handed down these sentences said on the court record that he wished to make an example of these protestors for their “assault on democracy”.

However, it gets worse, because these people were not just charged with attempted murder or something. They were charged as domestic terrorists because of their supposed membership in a cell of Antifa.

One would be forgiven if they read this and asked, "‘How is this possible? Antifa does not exist.”

Well, to answer that question, you just need to consider the fact that, as Tad put it on his TikTok recently now it does.

It’s right there. It’s in the court record.

A recognition of it - bolstered by such inscrutable evidence as one of the condemned protestor’s possession of a single black sweatshirt - has now been used by a Federal judge to anchor an actual conviction of domestic terrorism charges which were handed down to multiple individuals.

It doesn’t matter if the facts on the ground suggest that Antifa only exists in people’s heads, or that there is no evidence of a real group of people called Antifa. Because of Prairieland, Antifa is real now. A legal fiction was made into material reality in the form of the sentences of death-by-jail that these eight people received.

“Okay,” you say, “but how did that happen? How did people who weren’t even there at the protest get domestic terrorism charges?"

To answer that, we need look no further than NSPM-7.

NSPM-7 is the National Security Presidential Memorandum (the 7th one). It was signed on September 25, 2025, just two weeks after Charlie Kirk was shot.

It is, to put it lightly, a frothing-at-the-mouth hit list of enemies of the oligarchy. It explicitly says that holding certain ideologies and engaging in acts of civil disobedience are indicators of a propensity for committing domestic terrorism.

All throughout the memo, the Executive branch makes it clear: if you engage in acts of resistance against this administration and its friends in the private sector, we will hunt you down, break you, jail you, and, if we deem it necessary or satisfying, we will kill you.

Besides stoking fear in the people who read it so that it dissuades them from thinking of resistance in the first place, this memo acts as a doctrinal basis that judges can use to manufacture evidence in service of its core purpose. If a defendant is presented in your courtroom for doing things like protesting ICE, now the Executive branch has given you something real on top of which you can (more probably than in the past) secure grandiose convictions and sentences.

Do you see the game yet?

You should—it’s fucking everywhere now.

Praireland is a huge story because of the jail sentences, yes, but they are by no means the only people trapped in this maw of oppression. In the same 72 hours the Prairieland 8 were sentenced, 15 individuals in Minneapolis came under federal indictment for their participation in anti-ICE resistance during Operation Metro Surge. Their indictment - not even convictions yet - is terrifying because it makes clear that the Feds indicted these people in part just because some of them merely attended meetings where DSA members were present.

And, mind you, anti-ICE protestors are just the first tranche of targets. I cannot stress that enough.

NSPM-7 does not limit its scope for charging people as domestic terrorists just for participating in or associating with groups who participate in anti-ICE actions. It actually casts a much wider net, citing people who are opposed to big tech consolidation, private prisons, really any of the oligarchic interests that put Trump into power as potential domestic terrorists.

ARE YA FEELIN IT NOW MISTER KRABS? Let me make this clearer.

Do you or anyone you know go to meetings where you’re trying to argue against a data center being built in your town? You could easily be clocked as a domestic terrorist in waiting. Better watch what you post.

Do you or anyone you know talk online about how you’re against fat cats making billions off of locking up your friend for years because they had a pill problem? Better watch your mouth, domestic terrorist. Hate for you to become bunkies with them.

Do you or anyone you know like to go take walks with people in your city and knock on doors in support of candidates who want to make your rent more affordable? Better hope no one has ever seen you wear a fucking rose pin, because Democratic Socialist and Domestic Terrorist are one in the same to this admin.

Do you have SIGNAL on your phone? Put your hand down, idiot, now you’re marked.

You think I’m kidding? IT’S IN THE MEMO. IT’S IN THE CONVICTIONS.

“Oh Cornpop, come on, man,” you say with exasperation. “Yes things are scary, sure, but the government has always targeted radicals who take direct action.”

Ask yourself this: why would they stop here?

Seriously. Why on EARTH would Trump’s admin stop here? You think that they don’t know the sentences of the Prairieland 8 are going to be appealed? You think that they don’t know this outraged people who are already boiling over?

I need you to

To do that - to use your brain - I need us to not only look at the convictions and sentencing as part of a system of control and oppresion, but to go one step further and ask: why go this hard this fast to stand up that system? What is going to make the government decide to accelerate this?

We have to look at New York.

Democratic Socialists of America candidates decisively swept the New York City primaries, taking out some of the titans of the DNC, and Hakeem Jeffries - who campaigned against all three of them - lost.

You need to understand what these candidates represent to the people running the federal government right now, because it is not “the loyal opposition.” These candidates want ICE defunded. They want the facility contracts investigated, the ones where the government paid grotesquely inflated prices to private prison operators and blew taxpayer money on signing bonuses for agents. They want people held accountable for the grand theft of public resources that this administration has turned immigration enforcement into.

Some of them want people in the Federal government to go to jail for it.

Like let’s not mince words, some of these people who just won - and some of their allies who are looking increasingly like they’ll win - want retribution.

Mike Johnson, current Speaker of the House, knows this.

He stood in front of his own allies and said the truth with terror in his voice: if Republicans lose the midterms to this tranche of Democrats, impeachment won’t even be the worst thing Republicans face. See for yourself:

(side note: I personally do not believe that Mike Johnson is correct. I believe that even the pluckiest and go-getting-est of the incoming DSA legion do not have the appropriate political capital to force the handshakers like Ro Khanna and AOC to give the cold shoulder to Republicans enough that any of them actually face jail time. What I do believe, though, is that Mike Johnson has seen Washington change dramatically in ten years, so he knows it only takes one hair-brained idea coming from one charismatic enough messenger to gain steam for him or his friends to end up in handcuffs, and so he is terrified.)

So, now hold these facts together and ask yourself: if you were a Republican operative staring down a wave of incoming legislators who want to put your friends in prison, and you had a memo on your desk that lets you charge anyone adjacent to that movement as a domestic terrorist, would you slow down?

No. You would not. You would do exactly what they are about to do. You would use the courts to start criminalizing the organizing infrastructure that feeds those candidacies before it gets any bigger.

Now, the NSPM-7 infrastructure does predate the DSA sweep. It was built before anyone knew what the New York primaries would look like. But the sweep nudges back at what the infrastructure was originally for: to dismantle the political base of a movement that, if it reached critical mass, could then use the same legal system to hold the people currently in power accountable for what they’ve done.

That is why the net in NSPM-7 is cast so wide. It is because the threat to this regime is not a handful of people with fireworks outside a detention center; it is, instead, millions of voters putting people into Congress who will treat the last two years as a crime scene.

And so, they are building a trap as fast as they can, because they know that the clock is running.

So, with all this in mind, it’s clear that the sentences in Texas were not about the eight people in the court room, but were actually about the ten thousand who will now think twice.

The goal of them and the indictments in Minneapolis are to make association and solidarity itself radioactive. The Federal government wants you to read articles like this and make the connection of NSPM-7-based charges = decades of federal prison, because then you’re more likely to immediately ostracize anyone who you think the Feds would be willing to label as Antifa. This means those individuals practicing resistance have even less of a network to support them, which lowers their tolerance for risk, which lowers their willingness to resistance.

In effect, the federal government wants you to be an ICE agent they never hired.

But, obviously, to do that is the losing hand. There is no such thing as safety right now. Compliance is not protective at all. If you’re asking yourself “is it safe to organize? is it safe to associate? is it safe to show up?” then you’re asking the wrong question entirely.

The government doesn’t care if you’re actually against them. They will sentence you to death-by-jail if they think you might as well be.

So the only logical choice is to stop triangulating your way into safety, because there is no angle that gets you there. The only safe place left is with each other. And to admit that, to admit that you need other people, that you need other workers, that you actually have something worth resisting for, already makes you guilty of a thought crime under this regime. The mere suggestion that you are not alone, that your conditions are shared because of them, that solidarity is not optional but necessary, is enough to make you legible as the enemy they’ve already drawn.

So accept it. You are already in their crosshairs. You were before you read this, and you will be after. The only difference now is whether you know it. Accept your place among the forever guilty, and begin resisting now.