This trial will test new Trump legal strategy

When President Donald Trump declared, in an executive order on September 22, 2025, that antifa is a "domestic terrorist organization," critics attacked the claim as wildly inaccurate — as antifa is a movement, not an actual political organization with a centralized structure.

Moreover, not everyone who identifies as anti-fascist identifies as antifa. And some political scientists complain that MAGA Republicans confuse antifa with Black Bloc Anarchists, who are a separate movement.

According to MS NOW reporter Brandy Zadrozny, a criminal case in Texas will test-drive MAGA Republicans' push to prosecute anti-fascist activists as terrorists.

In an article published on Tuesday, February 17, Zadrozny reports, "On July 4 last year, a few hours after sundown, about a dozen left-wing activists gathered outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Facility in North Texas. Some protesters set off fireworks while others spray-painted cars and a guard booth. As federal officers stepped outside to confront them, local police arrived, and shortly after, shots were fired. Investigators say an Alvarado police officer was hit in the neck by a bullet and released from the hospital the following morning. Most of the activists were arrested."

Zadrozny adds, "Nine of them face serious federal charges, ranging from attempted murder to providing material support to terrorists, in a trial that begins Tuesday. Prosecutors characterize the events that night as an 'antifa attack' on the federal government."

The "implications of this trial," Zadrozny emphasizes, "extend beyond the fate of one group of activists."

"For the first time, federal prosecutors are seeking to convict protesters — most of them American citizens — on charges related to domestic terrorism," Zadrozny notes. "The outcome will test whether President Donald Trump's years-long campaign to brand leftist activists as terrorists can succeed in the courts…. Since charges were filed, senior members of the Trump Administration have held up the Prairieland case as a proof point in their wider campaign against anti-government organizing, arguing that local activism and demonstrations are coordinated attacks by domestic terrorists."

Attorney and former DOJ Tom Brzozowski told MS NOW that "it strains credibility" to call antifa a domestic terrorist organization.

Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, views the Texas case as an example of dangerous overreach by the Trump-era U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Levinson-Waldman told MS NOW, "This indictment stretches far beyond a specific, violent criminal action that might have taken place. It characterizes these people who put together a protest as being in an antifa cell and tars all of them with this label of domestic terrorists…. This is not just about antifa. Anything that somehow feels at odds with this administration's policies could be considered domestic terrorism and will be pursued with the full force of the federal government."