On June 23, 2026, eight defendants were sentenced over a July 4, 2025 incident at the Prairieland Detention Center, an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, in what the Justice Department has called the first federal terrorism case tied to “antifa.” The sentences totaled roughly 450 years, a figure the administration publicized as evidence it was “dismantling antifa.”
The ringleader, Benjamin Song, received 100 years after being convicted of shooting and wounding an Alvarado police officer during the incident, a serious violent crime. The other sentences, ranging from about 30 to 70 years, went to defendants who were not the shooter, including Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who received roughly 30 years on a charge tied to transporting a box of antifascist zines. Defendants and their lawyers said the event was meant to be a peaceful demonstration in support of detainees.
This is the first sentencing under the antifa domestic-terror designation Trump signed in September 2025, and the severity of the sentences for the non-shooter defendants, defended by the administration as anti-terrorism, has drawn concern that protest-related conduct is being punished as terrorism (see Trump Designates 'Antifa' a Domestic Terrorist Organization, Though U.S. Law Has No Domestic Terrorist List, The DOJ Indicts 15 Minnesotans on Conspiracy Charges Over Anti-ICE Protests, Citing 'Antifa Ties').
A June 2026 analysis in The Intercept, by free-press advocates Seth Stern and Jeremy Busby, argued that Sanchez Estrada's 30-year sentence rested on his transporting a box of antifascist zines he did not write, which contained nothing about the protest or the shooting; the government's theory was that possessing the political literature showed he shared the shooter's ideology. The authors, writing in an opinion analysis, called the case a First Amendment overreach that criminalizes possession of political material.
In July, Sanchez Estrada's sister took the case public herself, writing a first-person account in The New Republic under the headline “My Brother Was Sentenced to 30 Years for Moving a Box of Zines,” keeping the sentence, and the theory behind it, in national view a month after the courtroom emptied.