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The Trump Admin Wants the Prairieland Sentences to Scare You Into Silence
NSPM-7 is the architecture of a system designed to make dissent unthinkable, but it won’t work.
Jun 29, 2026
Mari Rueda's favorite color is blue, as is, sometimes, her hair. She used to live with two cats, two rabbits, a dog, and her tween child. She was a casual gardener and an enthusiastic karaoke singer in training to be a doula. Des Sanchez Estrada is a tattoo artist, poet, and animal lover who sometimes fostered orphaned baby possums and liked experimenting with vegan cooking. Des and Mari are married. One year into the Trump administration's violent campaign of mass deportation and immigrant roundups, they are facing a combined century in federal prison: 70 years for Mari, 30 for Des. Their crimes? Mari went to a noise demonstration outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center. Des moved a box of zines.
On July 4, 2025, Mari joined dozens of others at a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Noise demonstrations are a commonly used form of protest solidarity; I've been to a number of them outside metro Atlanta jails over the years. People gather outside carceral facilities and get loud, because the people inside have no other way of knowing that anyone outside is fighting for them. People bang pots and pans, play music, sometimes set off fireworks. The vibes are generally good, until police invariably show up.
Prairieland sits on the discordantly cheery-sounding Sunflower Lane, 40 miles southwest of Dallas. It's a private prison run for profit by LaSalle Corrections, designed to hold 707 people, although it usually cages more than a thousand. Like every ICE detention center, it has a documented record of inadequate medical care, suicide prevention failures, and deaths in custody.
When police showed up to interrupt the July 4 noise demo, things devolved into chaos quickly. One of the responding officers had a gun trained on an unarmed protester who was running away, and Benjamin Song, a former Marine and firearms trainer, acted in a split second: He fired a shot at the officer, who sustained an injury to his neck and was discharged from the hospital hours later. It's obviously a very good thing that this wasn't a fatal shot—but we didn't need to look much further into the future for what Song was fearful of to come to pass. In Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed two protesters within a three-week period this January.
The people who show up outside detention centers, who defend forests and animals, who organize bail funds and drive people to demonstrations, are not doing it because they expect it to be free.
So: one person, acting on their own, fired one shot. The federal government then used it to imprison people in the vicinity, and some who weren't even there at all.
Song received a sentence of 100 years. Mari's 70-year sentence came down after she was convicted of rioting, material support for terrorism, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, use and carry of an explosive, and conspiracy to conceal documents for allegedly asking Des to move the box of political literature. Five others who were present received 50 years each for rioting, material support for terrorism, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and use and carry of an explosive (which, to be clear, were consumer fireworks, the kind you can buy on the side of the road in most states). For comparison: the longest sentence handed to any January 6 participant before the pardons was 22 years, given to the former leader of the Proud Boys a paramilitary organization that stormed the United States Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election.
I think it's important to name two things here: first, how exceptionally long these sentences are, even on a US-adjusted scale; and second, how this criminalization of protest is not unexpected, it’s just the next mutation of the sprawling policing and incarceration apparatus we've built over decades.
It's not even a unique strategy. In November 1919, in what became known as the Palmer Raids, the Department of Justice arrested more than 4,000 people across the country. Much like the Prairieland defendants, the vast majority were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time—guilty, in the eyes of the government, of possessing radical politics: being Russian, simply being present when others were arrested, attending meetings, holding the wrong beliefs. The government eventually deported 800 of them.
The legal tools on display today are the same ones, just tweaked a bit over the ensuing century. The felony murder doctrine has sent thousands of people to prison for life for deaths they didn't cause. (A notable example that garnered a lot of attention: Ryan Holle lent his car to a friend in Florida, went to sleep, and was convicted of first degree murder when his friend committed a robbery and killed someone). Conspiracy law has been used to prosecute the periphery of alleged drug networks, “gang” affiliations, and social movements for generations. Mandatory minimums have produced sentences that are wildly disproportionate to the underlying conduct for as long as they have existed. The terrorism enhancement applied to the Prairieland defendants—because they had fireworks—has been used to inflate sentences and justify mass surveillance against Muslim communities, environmental activists, and animal rights protesters for decades.
The brutality of these sentences is not particularly shocking to the communities that have been living with police violence and mass incarceration for generations. It is a confirmation of what they already knew—that this is a country willing to sentence an aspiring doula and mother of a 13-year-old to 70 years in a cage for fleeing a righteous protest, while pardoning everyone who stormed the Capitol.
The Prairieland prosecution was underwritten by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), the presidential memo issued in September 2025. President Donald Trump also cited the Prairieland case in an update to his memo designating “antifa”—which literally just means anti-fascist—as a terrorist organization. His memo defines the common threads of left wing terrorism, among other things, as anti-capitalism and opposition to immigration enforcement. It’s being used across the country: in Minneapolis, 15 organizers were indicted in June under NSPM-7 for “overt acts” which included sharing flyers. In Atlanta, two Stop Cop City protesters were federally indicted two weeks ago for conduct from 2022—four years ago!—explicitly as part of the NSPM-7 initiative. In Michigan, pro-Palestine student protesters face federal charges for conduct from 2023. People who carry zines, use Signal, defend land and animals, wear black, or show up outside detention centers are now, under NSPM-7, potential domestic terrorists.
Prairieland was a detention center—our country’s modern answer to a concentration camp—before it was a crime scene.
I watched the Stop Cop City movement—and the state’s violent response to the community’s dissent—unfold in Atlanta. In November 2023, I sat in a courtroom as 57 people churned through arraignment proceedings on a sweeping racketeering case; defendants held neon green numbers and were split into groups of five because the courtroom wasn't big enough to hold them all at once. The rambling, 110-page indictment had charged protesters with criminal conspiracy for things like transferring less than $20 in reimbursement for harm reduction supplies, refusing police commands to exit a tree house, and signing an arrest form with the acronym "ACAB." These, the state alleged, were overt acts in furtherance of a terrorist enterprise. That RICO case eventually collapsed.
Many of the new NSPM-7 cases are not over, so they too may eventually collapse. The Prairieland defendants have pending motions for acquittal and new trial. The Brennan Center has found NSPM-7 to be wholly unmoored, legally. But "eventually" is measured in years of people's lives spent in federal cages.
What happened in Fort Worth last week is a message. The federal government is betting that sentences of 30, 50, 70, 100 years will make the cost of showing up too high. But the people who show up outside detention centers, who defend forests and animals, who organize bail funds and drive people to demonstrations, are not doing it because they expect it to be free. They are doing it because the alternative—a world in which Prairieland and everything it represents goes unchallenged—is unbearable. NSPM-7 is the architecture of a system designed to make dissent unthinkable, but it won’t work. What it will do is hurt people, and the question every organizer now has to answer is: How do we build a movement sturdy enough to absorb that hurt and keep going?
As Marlon Kautz, an Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizer and Stop Cop City RICO defendant, has said: "A plan to avoid repression is a plan to lose." The only meaningful response is to build protest movement infrastructure that can withstand it—through legal defense funds, rapid response networks, the refusal to throw anyone under the bus, the refusal to cooperate with the government, and the sustained work of dismantling the infrastructure that made these sentences possible.
You certainly don't end people’s willingness to protest by making those same people angrier. Prairieland was a detention center—our country’s modern answer to a concentration camp—before it was a crime scene. That's why people were there, and that’s why they'll be back.
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US News Outlet Sues Trump Admin Over Refusal to Release 'Secret List of Activists'
“The government is not allowed to selectively hide information about its actions that impact protected First Amendment activity,” said a member of the legal team representing The Intercept in its legal challenge.
Jun 24, 2026
The progressive US media outlet The Intercept filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to compel the Trump administration to hand over documents related to claims by federal officials of a secret database used to track protesters and others dubiously deemed "domestic terrorists."
The Intercept is asking the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to force the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release material sought via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it filed on February 23.
“It’s not illegal to monitor the activity of immigration agents inside your community,” Intercept editor-in-chief Ben Muessig said on Wednesday. “What is illegal is the US government’s secret list of activists—and its refusal to turn over information about that database to the American public.”
The Intercept's FOIA request came amid mounting evidence that, "by using photos, video, license plates, hotel check-in information, and more to create a database of lawful protestors, the government may be taking concerning action affecting the rights of those exercising their First Amendment rights," as plaintiff's counsel Democracy Forward noted in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
The Intercept's complaint cites a video posted on social media on January 23 that shows a federal immigration agent telling a legal observer in Maine during a protest against the deadly US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) anti-immigrant crackdown that "we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist."
According to the lawsuit:
In a court hearing regarding immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota, attorneys for the state of Minnesota reportedly included an exhibit of a recording of a federal agent saying, “Well, this person is gonna have a hard time traveling from now on" after taking a photo of an ICE observer's license plate. The press has reported that “a memo sent earlier this month to agents temporarily assigned to the city asked them to ‘capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.'"
Democracy Forward noted that "in a separate court case, a civilian observing ICE submitted a declaration stating that her [Transportation Security Administration] PreCheck and Global Entry were revoked three days after an encounter with immigration enforcement officials."
"Additionally, at least one prominent supporter of transgender rights has reportedly had her Global Entry and US passport canceled in the past few months," the group added.
Not included in the lawsuit are remarks made by White House "border czar" Tom Homan during a January interview with Fox News, during which he said that he aimed to “create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, and assault" and "make them famous.”
Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said Wednesday, "The government is not allowed to selectively hide information about its actions that impact protected First Amendment activity."
"The surveillance and retaliation being reported would be egregious violations of core constitutional principles," she added, "and we are honored to represent a storied news organization as it fights to demand the public have access to the information we need to protect our democracy.”
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Why the People of Bolivia Are Revolting
To understand why Bolivia is on the brink, we must understand a fundamental betrayal of the people by their political representatives.
Jun 18, 2026
For over six weeks now, Bolivia has been engulfed in a national revolt. What started as sectoral demands over public employee salaries, fuel subsidies, and land rights has metastasized into a full-throated cry for the resignation of Trump-aligned President Rodrigo Paz. The country is paralyzed by more than 100 road blockades that have severed the capital, La Paz, from the rest of the nation, cutting off food, fuel, and medicine. Ten people are dead, dozens more injured, and over 300 have been arrested. Journalists and activists have also been caught in the violence.
The government’s response has been a schizophrenic mix of hollow calls for peaceful dialogue and negotiation, and brutal repression. Paz has signed deals with some social sectors, and organized a Social Economic Council, while jailing the leaders of the groups he’s “negotiating” with.
Thousands of militarized police have been deployed, using tear gas, rubber bullets, and, according to persistent rumors the government denies, live ammunition. Leaders of various protest groups, including the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), the largest trade union in the country, and radical Aymara defense force Ponchos Rojos, have been jailed. The Wiphala, the sacred flag of Bolivia’s Indigenous majority, has been burned in public squares by counterprotesters while the state itself no longer displays it publicly.
As Argentinian President Javier Milei’s expatriated adviser Fernando Cerimedo put it, this government is fighting against “dirty leftists.” Cerimedo was reportedly crucial in deporting a human rights mission from Argentina this week. Protest leaders and politicians have been kidnapped in broad daylight, including one senator with the Movement Toward Socialism, taken by police in plain clothes.
When a government disregards the voting blocs that got it into office, blocks every avenue for democratic change, criminalizes dissent, and rules on behalf of a foreign-aligned racist elite, it leaves the people few political options for engagement and representation.
Far-right groups and “The Resistance” have re-popularized the slogan, “Make the homeland, kill an indian,” which had become a popular rallying cry in the 2019 coup. Those same far-right groups were also seen in San Julian, near Santa Cruz, using illegal weapons and explosives against protesters, alongside state security forces. The Paz government has not rebuked any of these figures, statements, or actions, and instead cracked down further on the left.
Internationally, the reaction maps perfectly onto the new ideological conflict dividing Latin America. The right-wing autocrats, from Argentina’s Milei and Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado to the Trump administration, have been unequivocal. They have labeled the protesters “narco-terrorists” threatening democracy itself, with the government applauding their solidarity.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that the US “will reject all attempts to overthrow the legitimate government.” President Donald Trump himself expressed solidarity for Paz at the Shield of the Americas, held at his very own Trump Resort in Miami. This support has emboldened the Bolivian far-right, which is openly pushing for a full “state of exception,” a euphemism for martial law that has been developed by various autocrats including Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, to crush democracy and opposition in the name of a “war on drugs.”
That scenario is likely for Bolivia, too, where protesters labeled “narco-terrorists” would be the subject of that war on drugs. Paz and the government coalition in the Plurinational Assembly have already passed and signed a law modifying the state of exception law. The old law was passed in 2020, after the pro-US unelected government of Jeanine Anez committed multiple massacres against opposition in that state of exception, to try to tamper state abuses.
Now, many safeguards have been removed, with the law giving carte blanche to state agents to kill, seize property, shut down telecommunications, and suspend political rights. The president has also declared a 90-day humanitarian emergency, which allowed for the deployment of militarized forces in El Alto, leading to the death of one protester and multiple injuries.
To understand why Bolivia is on the brink, we must understand a fundamental betrayal of the people by their political representatives. Rodrigo Paz ran under the banner of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), a big-tent coalition with Indigenous currents previously aligned with the left, populist anti-corruption crusaders, and hard-right figures from the Santa Cruz elite. Voters, exhausted by the chronic crises of the Luis Arce administration and facing a nightmare choice against the far-right former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga (who was vice president to former pro-US dictator, Hugo Banzer), held their noses and voted for what they believed was the least destructive option.
They were promised “Capitalism for Everyone,” a softer, more competent alternative that would see public programs and social rights protected while opening up the country further.
Instead, Paz’s first months have been a masterclass in neoliberal shock therapy, looking to privatize energy, cutting public services and subsidies, restructuring debt with American financial institutions, and proposing to reform Indigenous land tenure, which communities correctly interpreted as a prelude to opening communal lands to private extraction. Key subsidies ensuring many citizens’ very survival, including fuel and food subsidies, have also been cut, jump kicking the cost of living for the most vulnerable.
The result is the political destitution of the Bolivian left, which represents the vast majority of the country. The old vehicle, Evo Morales’ MAS, is decapitated and adrift. Evo himself is practically in exile with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. His protege, Andronico Rodriguez, has been a ghost in public life, and his Alianza Popular has not been able to build much momentum.
Former President Luis Arce, Evo’s former minister and now sworn enemy, is in prison, in preventive detention. Other socialist leaders, politicians, and activists have been jailed, while the cabinet has ironically vowed to continue crackdowns “against lawfare.”
The Paz government has been jailing the key leaders of the socialist era while releasing convicted terrorists and far-right racists linked to the 2019 coup government and its subsequent massacres, like Jeanine Áñez, Luis Fernando Camacho, and leaders of far-right youth groups deemed the equivalent of the Proud Boys. It has also brought back the Drug Enforcement Administration, which had been kicked out by the Morales government over alleged election interference.
Despite running as the left’s only option, and as the counter to the right, since taking office, Paz’s policy proposals, rhetoric, and platform have mostly been directed at the white, Christian, conservative elite in the tropics, rather than to the Indigenous majority in the Altiplano.
This betrayal is creating a crisis of representation in a country where trust in institutions and democracy is already very low—and in the poorest country in South America. Most of the activists in the streets voted for Paz, while many unions endorsed the PDC, but are now expressing their discontent at their interests being disregarded. One protester in La Paz told me, “We have to remind these oligarchs who the Casa Grande del Pueblo is for, and reclaim it.”
The government and its allies have worked overtime to criminalize the rage that has come from this betrayal. In the face of this repression, some groups have decided to fight fire with fire, arguing Paz’s repression has made negotiation unviable. The COB itself said it would be willing to do anything, “as in a war,” and has vowed to “increase radical pressure measures.”
As Quya Reyna, a writer, activist, and social leader argued in a manifesto for the protest movements, repression will only bring further suffering, and, if the government refuses to negotiate, this is the social cost it will bring. Another manifesto signed by some indigeneist protest groups now explicitly endorses armed resistance.
When a government disregards the voting blocs that got it into office, blocks every avenue for democratic change, criminalizes dissent, and rules on behalf of a foreign-aligned racist elite, it leaves the people few political options for engagement and representation.
The state is using its monopoly on force not to protect its citizens, but to protect the privileges of the few against the many. It cannot, then, be surprised at the rage it engenders by doing so. As Reyna added, “if you want peace, listen to the people and negotiate, don’t repress.”
Faced with this brick wall, the social movements are left with little choice but to play outside the system. In the long term, this is a terrible development for peaceful, stable, social democracy, as it may create a vicious cycle between faith in political institutions, and political violence. As one piece of graffiti scrawled in La Paz by protesters declares, “Let there be no peace for the oligarchies if there is no bread for the majority.”
Vice President Edmand Lara, a populist former police officer who was crucial to Paz’s election, has broken dramatically with the president, condemning the repression and inviting the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to monitor the country.
The vice president has also denounced the cabinet’s own links to drug trafficking, though he has called for further crackdowns on crime, and Evo Morales. On the right, former president Tuto Quiroga, billionaire Marcelo Claure, Áñez allies, and others have pushed for Paz to step aside and allow security forces to rule, through a state of exception (essentially, martial law), while continuing economic “liberalization.”
Some reports have also indicated the military is interested in pushing Paz out, while embracing further right-wing figures. To satisfy them, Paz has given even more power to the hardliners like Ernesto Justiniano, the anti-drug czar, now minister of defense, while further alienating social sectors and moderate progressives within his cabinet, like José Luis Lupo, Lara, and billionaire Samuel Doria Medina, all of whom have urged for dialogue over repression.
This government is eating itself, while Bolivian democracy has perhaps never looked weaker.
The hard-fought promise of the Plurinational State, a multiracial social democracy with strong rights and constitutional protections, has been hollowed out by a new form of external rule for the elites, far-right racists, foreign states, and the security state. The majorities, meanwhile, have felt betrayed, and are using every means at their disposal to regain representation.
That popular movement now believes the only way forward is a fresh start—calling for Paz to resign, and for fresh elections. Until then, they will continue blocking the country, and forcing the government’s hands, to remind them of their power. Though, the right will continue blaming “dirty leftists” and “indians” for “destroying the country” and “stopping progress,” instead of blaming themselves.
To move forward, the country's leaders will have to realize that, whether in a democracy or dictatorship, they will have to govern with, and for, the Indigenous majorities, not without and against them.
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