'Major Escalation': Trump Prosecutor Invokes NSPM-7 While Unveiling Charges Against 15 ICE Protesters

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have struggled to come up with charges that stick as they've indicted dozens of people this year for protesting President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, and observers suggested Tuesday's indictments of 15 organizers would likely fail to convince any court. But with a US attorney explicitly citing Trump's memo threatening to crack down on left-wing protesters, advocates warned the charges were a "major escalation" against First Amendment rights.

US Attorney Daniel Rosen, who was appointed by Trump for the District of Minnesota last year, noted in his announcement of the indictments that Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) last September and that "Joint Task Force Vanguard," an investigative group set up "to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation," had worked on the case.

NSPM-7, as Common Dreams reported last year, was issued weeks after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and focuses exclusively on left-wing and "anti-fascist" activities, mandating a "national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

Around the same time, Trump issued an executive order asserting that "antifa," or the anti-fascist movement, had been designated as a "domestic terrorist organization," despite the fact that there is no centralized antifa group and that the president does not have the authority to make such a designation.

The president's directives underpinned the indictment of 15 organizers, including at least one professor and several union leaders and members, who had led direct actions and protests against federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, a crackdown by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies in Minnesota earlier this year.

Rosen said the defendants were members of two Minneapolis-based groups—Direct Action Minnesota and Black Cat Workers Collective—that were associated with "antifa" and were "violently opposed to the enforcement of federal law in our state."

Twelve of the defendants were arrested on Tuesday, while one had already been in custody on other charges and two had not yet been detained.

The charges include conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, interstate stalking, assault on a federal officer, and destruction of government property.

But after examining the indictment, David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, found just one "documented, charged violence by any defendant in the actual indictment against any ICE agent's person": A defendant, William Morgan, "approached one of the agents and knocked the agent's notes out of his hand."

Bier listed the rest of the overt acts included in the 94-page indictment, which he described as a "cobbled together series of basically unrelated incidents or comments, nearly all of it not criminal with a few minor crimes, effectively all nonviolent acts of civil disobedience."

The other acts include "attending meetings," "posting on Facebook and social media about resistance to ICE," "posting flyers advertising direct actions," "conducting after-action reviews," "forming human blockades" at a building used for ICE operations in Minneapolis, and impeding ICE vehicles with sandbags, debris, and vehicles to block roads.

At the press conference Tuesday, evidence presented by Rosen included a Facebook post in which one defendant, Cameron Kennedy, said, "We need to become ungovernable."

Organizers expressed that they were "highly critical of nonviolent peaceful protest," said Rosen.

"Oh," said Bier in response on social media.

Journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News also pointed to a section of the indictment that accuses Isaac Auman Sant of engaging in conduct that "caused, attempted to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to a person."

"Actual federal charges in Minnesota for hurting ICE agents' feelings," Grim said.

The defendants appeared in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota on Tuesday, where Judge John Docherty said the defendants were being released for the time being and that the conditions for a detention hearing had not been met.

A defendant named Erik Davis, a religious studies professor at Macalester College, told Docherty that according to the indictment, he was being "indicted for holding meetings.”

While the charges were denounced as outrageous by a number of observers, an attorney for one of the defendants, Bruce Nestor, told Democracy Now! that the conspiracy charge "is really an attempt to broaden the net of federal law enforcement and to expand the ability of the federal government to target our movement and to foster repression."

Adam Federman of Type Investigations said the administration's strategy for cracking down on those who oppose its political agenda appears to be: "Define a loose coalition of activists opposed to the government's immigration policies as Antifa, make the case that Antifa is a terrorist organization, and then prosecute them on conspiracy charges. We're going to see a lot more of this."

The indictment was announced weeks after federal prosecutors dropped all charges against four protesters who had been accused of interfering with ICE agents at a detention center in the Chicago area.

In March, the Trump administration won its first legal victory in its effort to criminalize groups that organize against its agenda when a federal jury convicted eight people of domestic terrorism because they wore all black to a protest outside ICE's Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, where one of the protesters shot and wounded a police officer.

"Prairieland was exhibit A," said Federman on Tuesday. "My guess is that we will get to the end of the alphabet before this administration runs its course."

US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) noted that the federal officers who fatally shot two Minneapolis protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in January have not been criminally charged.

"While the killers of Renée Good and Alex Pretti walk free, the DOJ is busy bringing bogus charges against protesters," said Omar. "The administration thinks intimidation will make us back down. They keep learning the same lesson: Minnesotans don't scare easily. We organize for our rights."