What constitutes an Antifa terror cell? Apparently, a group of people that did not all know each other before being scooped up and charged as one. While some of the nine defendants who were convicted on Friday had met through self-defense classes, the Socialist Rifle Association, and an anarchist book club, loosely associating through Signal group chats, others didn’t know anyone—and only happened to be at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center last July 4 because they found the details for the demonstration online.
An FBI official previously stated it was unclear who then shot first, but Gross was shot in the trapezius muscle, between his neck and shoulder, by a protester identified as Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist who was carrying an AR-15-style rifle. (Gross was airlifted to a nearby hospital and released a few hours later; Song was found guilty of one count of attempted murder on Friday.) There was enough ambiguity to the claim that Song fired out of malice that the federal judge—Mark Pittman, a Trump 1.0 appointee—had to rule that the defendants couldn’t claim self defense. Prosecutors had called self-defense theories in this case “legally insupportable” and compared the Prairieland case to precedent set against the Branch Davidians, members of the religious cult made famous during the 1993 siege in nearby Waco. In the Waco trial, determining who “shot first” was hotly contested, and the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals eventually ruled self-defense arguments were out of the question.
Meanwhile, prosecutors had to walk back their claim that there were multiple shooters, given evidence to the contrary, but still argued what happened that night was a “planned ambush.” They drew broadly from reading material found in protesters’ homes, including a review of the 2019 film Midsommar titled, “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real”—a scintillating header belying a more mundane dark art (literary criticism). They tapped Kyle Shideler, who works at the Center for Security Policy think tank—described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece”—as an “expert” witness. If his testimony was unconvincing, prosecutors also referred to protesters’ use of nicknames on Signal as evidence of their malevolent plot—names such as “Champagne,” “Jon ValJon,” and “Not Beating the Little Creature Allegations.”
Although Song pulled the trigger, five were charged with attempted murder. Song was convicted, and the four others were acquitted of that charge, suggesting a slippage between what prosecutors argued and what jurors bought. Still, eight were convicted of rioting, providing “material support” to terrorists, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and the use of an explosive—the “explosives” being the fireworks, which the warden testified did no damage to the facility. Moreover, the use of fireworks at noise demonstrations is commonplace: After Renee Nicole Good was killed, Minneapolis protesters lit fireworks outside an ICE-occupied hotel, and during New Year’s Eve noise demonstrations last year, fireworks were used outside jails in Chicago, Detroit, Durham, and even in Austin. Were these ambushes too?
“There will be an appeal,” Patrick McLain, defense attorney for defendant Zachary Evetts, wrote in a statement. He alluded to irregularities during the trial that had “raised many reasons” for doing so: the first and most obvious, that Judge Pittman declared a mistrial hours into the first day of jury selection, expanded the juror pool from around 75 to 130, and singlehandedly selected the jurors on the second go-around, using questions defense attorneys submitted to the court under seal. These moves were all legal, of course. Yet, multiple studies have shown jurors act differently when questioned by a judge versus by an attorney. An attorney close to the case, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals, described a “chilling effect” enacted through repeated orders against how the defense can argue their case. Amber Lowrey, older sister to Prairieland defendant Savannah Batten, noted that the first jury pool was more critical of ICE and the Trump administration. (The official reason for Pittman’s decision was a “politically charged” T-shirt featuring Civil Rights icons, underneath a defense attorney’s blazer, which he deemed prejudicial.) “He knew that the first jury was not going to convict these people,” she told me the night after the verdict.
Barr told the news site NOTUS he “knew of” the Antifa case but claimed he was just “getting a tour of the courtroom” and hadn’t discussed the trial with the judge. He was in town for a Fort Worth-area Federalist Society panel. Notably, the Prairieland case was for months overseen by Nancy Larson, also a Federalist Society member and the interim head of the Northern District of Texas’ U.S. Attorney’s office, who joined Barr’s boutique law firm, Torridon Law, as partner on February 6, days before jury selection began. Given just how broadly the word “conspiracy” has stretched during this trial, what should we call this?
Lowrey, a mother of three, has been advocating for her little sister from the beginning, making statements to the media when others feared reprisals, waking up at around 4 a.m. to sit through the trial every day, and returning from the courtroom after her kids had gone to bed. Last July, after the FBI raided Savannah’s home, she came by to coax her cat, traumatized by the flash grenade, into her car. With sentencing set for June, and an appeal sure to follow, she remains determined. “We’ll just keep taking care of her cat and loving on her and wait,” she said, “until her cat-mom gets home.”
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