ANJALI KAMAT: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Anjali Kamat.

We are continuing our conversation with Jack Crosbie, senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine. He’s been reporting on the Prairieland Nine, the nine activists in Texas who were sentenced to between 30 to 100 years in prison for taking part in an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas. They were convicted of terrorism-related charges after federal prosecutors accused them of being members of an antifa terror cell. “Antifa” stands for anti-fascist. In his piece, Jack Crosbie profiles Autumn Hill, who’s serving a 50-year sentence.

Jack Crosbie, welcome to Democracy Now! You know, we just heard from Autumn Hill. We heard her voice. You’ve spent a lot of time talking to her. Why did she get a 50-year sentence?

JACK CROSBIE: So, Autumn got a 50-year sentence, in short, because the government was making an example of her. The judge — and I don’t have the direct quote in front of me, but the judge in her sentencing hearing basically said, “I don’t think that a lenient sentence here would establish the deterrent that we need for this to deter acts like this from happening again.”

And it’s significant that he said that, because the acts that Autumn was convicted of are not, in and of themselves — besides the providing material support to terrorism charge, are not, in and of themselves, things that, like, are outside of the norm for protest activity that is prosecuted. I mean, her charges were one count of riot for participating in the protest, one count of conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and one count of using and carrying an explosive. These were the fireworks that these activists had brought to stage a noise demonstration. You know, these were not bombs. These were not — you know, these were commercial fireworks.

ANJALI KAMAT: And explain — 

JACK CROSBIE: Yeah.

ANJALI KAMAT: — what a noise demonstration is.

JACK CROSBIE: So, a noise demonstration is a tactic that has been used in a lot of different protest movements, oftentimes outside of a jail or detention facility. It’s basically — it’s letting the people inside know that there are people on the outside who support them and are — you know, that resistance continues outside.

It’s also, you know, meant to be disruptive to the guards that are working there. It’s another form of sort of civil disobedience that, like, kind of disrupts the everyday machinations of the prison system or whatever sort of government processes they’re trying to disrupt.

ANJALI KAMAT: And this was on the Fourth of July last year.

JACK CROSBIE: Yes, yes.

ANJALI KAMAT: So, you know, bringing fireworks on the Fourth of July — 

JACK CROSBIE: Yes.

ANJALI KAMAT: — was part of their protest.

JACK CROSBIE: Yes, yeah. The protest was very much sort of billed and and discussed, for the most part, in the communities that were planning it, as like this kind of — like, “It’s a Fourth of July celebration. You know, other people are going to be celebrating America and lighting off fireworks in the streets and things like that. Why don’t we do this with more of a purpose?” You know? And Autumn has described a lot of the time as it being sort of a celebratory air. They had gone there to celebrate, and they didn’t expect things to go the way that they did.

ANJALI KAMAT: Can you explain what the terrorism charges were that were brought against Autumn and the other defendants? Material support for terrorism, I mean, this is a law, was primarily used to prosecute Muslims after the September 11th attacks, and it’s now being applied, you know, in a different way under the Trump administration. But even in the post-9/11 era, I mean, the, you know, prosecutors accused hundreds of people under this law of support for terrorism, that could entail anything from translating a magazine to offering nonviolent alternatives to a militant group. It didn’t matter whether you actually carried out, you know, a violent assault or belonged to a terrorist organization. Talk about this law and how it’s been used in this case.

JACK CROSBIE: Right. Like you said, the sort of legal background of this case comes from the post-9/11 era, where there was a law that was put on the books that civil rights advocates at the time were very worried about. And it was mainly used, as you say, in the post-9/11 era to go after Muslim Americans, but specifically to go after organizations often that were doing foreign aid work. I believe one of the major cases was there was an organization that was providing aid, I believe, in Palestine. And, you know, some of that aid, as happens anytime you’re distributing aid in a conflict zone, you know, had made its way into the hands of someone who was linked to Hamas, or Hamas had reappropriated some of this around. And that was used as the basis to prosecute this group and individuals within this group for material support to terrorism.

And, you know, that is sort of — that is sort of one thing, and I don’t — I don’t say that to, you know, excuse the government for using the law in that way, but it is a very different application of it to now be applying this to private citizens who are — the government is trying to establish that there is a wider sort of conspiracy within a group to carry out the act of violence that did occur, the shooting of one police officer. The government’s case for material support to terrorism really rests on some things that they don’t have to prove in court that strongly, that these defendants were linked. And in some ways, you know, they were. They were friends. There were messages in between them, and things like that. But their point was that they were part of this contiguous antifa cell. And when Trump has designated antifa as a terrorist organization, and they’ve also gone to lengths to start looking at antifa groups in other countries and designating them as foreign terrorist organizations — right? — this is like — this is our “global war on terror” very much coming home to people in America. And what we’re seeing now is individuals being tried as part of these greater conspiracies, and that being used to set a precedent for a framework that I think is going to be very dangerous to American society as a whole.

ANJALI KAMAT: So, how does this application of material support for terrorism relate back to, and this designation of antifa as a terror group relate back to, the Trump administration’s NSPM-7?

JACK CROSBIE: Right. So, the Trump administration releases a series of executive orders and memos shortly following the Charlie Kirk shooting, which happens a couple of weeks after the Prairieland ICE protest. And as Autumn’s lawyers have described to me, and other legal advocates have said, the government’s narrative in the Prairieland case kind of hinges on this and changes on this.

So, the consequential things that Trump does in this situation is that he designates antifa as a terrorist organization. Now, as viewers of the show probably know, and as you’ve said, you know, repeatedly on here, “antifa” is a term that means anti-fascist. It can be seen more loosely sort of as an ideology. Maybe it’s — it would be like, you know, designating socialism as a terrorist group, right? Which — who knows? — maybe that’s where we’re heading.

But what Trump is really trying to do is he’s creating a very broad classification. He’s creating a really big box, that anytime there’s an activist or a protester or someone who does something that steps out of line in a way that the government wants to make an example of, he can essentially brand them with this label. He can say that this is a terrorist group. And he can say that the actions of any one person were linked to the actions of any other people, if there’s any — if they were at the same protest, if they were the part of the same nonprofit group, if they had attended the same — in the Prairieland case, some of the links between protesters were proved by the fact that some of them were in the same book club, right?

So, what this is doing is it’s making you culpable for what every other individual that is even loosely linked to you could do. And that’s really what — NSPM-7 does a lot of other very specific things that govern more formal institutions, like nonprofit groups and things like that. But what we’re really doing here is the government is setting out a definition for people who resist them. They will call them antifa, and they will call antifa people terrorists.

ANJALI KAMAT: And can you talk about where Prairieland fits in, you know, coming out of this presidential memorandum? We’ve seen a number of different prosecutions, in different cases, I mean, starting with Cop City, Atlanta, to the Minneapolis 15, to what happened in Chicago, the Broadview Six, to what happened in Prairieland. And how are these all connected? And you talk about this in your latest piece, which is called “Trump’s War on the Left Will Come for the Center.” So, connect this all together. And what we can look forward to, I mean, at this time where we’ve seen recent revelations of, you know, much broader spying on activists in Minneapolis?

JACK CROSBIE: Right. So, it’s funny. This has been a throughline in my reporting for years, in a way that I don’t think I really even realized until recently. I had chosen a lot of these stories just because they — you know, they interested me and appealed to me.

But I spent several days in the forest protests in Atlanta in 2022, which — where activists there were protesting the development of a police training center that they dubbed Cop City. This was during the Biden administration, of course. This was 2022. So, the efforts against the Cop City protesters, obviously, the situation with ICE, as we know it now, did not exist. These were mostly — this was a conflict between the state of Georgia and the city of Atlanta and this protest movement.

And what I started realizing some years later was that a lot of the things that had happened to that protest movement — like other movements, there were several very chaotic protests. There were some protesters who engaged in, you know, very direct sabotage and vandalism. There was violence between protesters and police. Police shot and killed an activist named Tortuguita in the forest in early 2023. And what happened to those networks, as more and more people started getting arrested, was the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the state of Georgia started charging a lot of these activists that were convicted for everything from, you know, very open acts of sabotage, lighting bulldozers on fire, you know, vandalizing a building and things like this, to even just stepping onto the street during a protest. And they started sort of charging every person that they arrested in connection to these movements with the same charge: with domestic terrorism.

This was a statewide charge. It wasn’t the same as the federal charges that were levied against Autumn and her co-defendants. But Georgia has a state domestic terrorism statute, which many states in the nation do. Georgia’s was set up in 2017 after the Dylann Roof shooting, ostensibly to be able to further prosecute, you know, violent mass shooters like Dylann Roof who were committing racially motivated attacks. But even at the time, groups like the ACLU warned that this statute was worded broadly enough that it could sort of be applied to anyone that the government said was a terrorist. And this is exactly what happened in Atlanta.

And I’m speaking a lot about Atlanta because I really see that this is where this playbook was sort of first developed. Georgia gave — handed the Trump administration — on a statewide level, they handed them the federal playbook that we are seeing them use now. And what they did is they charged, basically, everyone that they arrested with domestic terrorism. And now, in Georgia, a lot of those charges didn’t stick, but they didn’t have to, because just by charging someone with domestic terrorism, they could set extremely high bail amounts. They could hold them in pretrial detention in Georgia’s — in Fulton County corrections facility, which is one of the worst jails in the country. You know, I heard horror stories from activists, from sources of mine that were arrested and sent there, right? People were being held for weeks, for months in pretrial detention. When they got out, often they were set with bail conditions that meant they couldn’t speak to anyone else that was — that had been arrested. They couldn’t speak to, and oftentimes — viewers of this show might know how sort of general activism works, you know? Oftentimes, you’re friends with these people. There were — a lot of these activists, they were living together, right? They were going to the same places. They were attending the same concerts. They were, you know, often working together, and things like that. So, Georgia really systematically dismantled this movement, using those laws. And they didn’t even have to get convictions on domestic terrorism charges to do that.

So, what you see when Trump is elected — right? — is, I think, Stephen Miller, whoever it is in the Trump administration, looks at Georgia, and they see the success that the state of Georgia has had. And this is conjecture on my part, but the similarities between the legal frameworks that they’re using in these cases are extremely similar. And they basically see how they can criminalize dissent and how they can break up the logistical structure of these networks.

There are other things in Georgia now that we’re starting to see in Minneapolis, as well: charging nonprofit groups with RICO charges, racketeering, really looking at how Georgia was obsessed with and the Trump DOJ is also obsessed with how these groups are getting funding, right? So, what we’re seeing now more — we’re seeing in Minneapolis, we saw to a certain extent in Prairieland, as well — is they are looking for, you know, financial transactions, donations, which happen a lot in these organizing circles for mutual aid, for buying supplies for people and things like that, and they’re using those to prove sort of a criminal conspiracy.

So — and forgive me if I’m going too long on this. I can keep… So, these charges, they make it out of Georgia, right? And we’d seen, you know, bits and pieces of this framework trying to be applied in smaller protest movements before this. But Prairieland is really — I see this as the first main case where the government realizes — especially after the Charlie Kirk shooting, they realize, you know, this is a perfect test case for us to come down as hard as we can on these people and to start establishing the legal precedent that we want to completely criminalize dissent and say that anyone that is part of one of these activism circles is a member of antifa and can be considered a terrorist.

ANJALI KAMAT: And so, you have the Prairieland defendants getting a combined 450 years in prison?

JACK CROSBIE: Yeah.

ANJALI KAMAT: Meanwhile, you’ve got the January 6th insurrectionists getting pardoned.

JACK CROSBIE: Right.

ANJALI KAMAT: Can you just end by reminding everyone what people were doing at Prairieland? Why did they go there in the first place? What were they protesting? What were they hearing about conditions inside, or what drove them to protest?

JACK CROSBIE: Right. This is something that Autumn has spoken about a lot in our conversations. And, you know, the reason that these protesters were outside of the ICE facility in Prairieland was because they wanted to push back against what they saw as, and what has become, sort of the Trump administration’s singular push to install their version of, you could call it, fascism around the United States. They’re targeting immigrants, and they’re using that to put federal agents on the streets of every city that they can. And then, even when American citizens, like the Prairieland defendants, interact with those federal agents, they’re using that to bring federal charges.

And this system really is what those people went there to protest. Obviously, on a simple level, they were there to show — because they wanted to show detainees inside this facility, which, as most ICE facilities are in the country, you know, has really hard conditions for the people inside. We’ve seen this near where I live, as well, at the Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. So, they’d gone there to show solidarity, right? But they’d gone there on a higher level, you know, because this was the direct thing that they could do to register their discontent with the Trump administration.

And many of them, you know, didn’t mean for it to be violent. This was supposed to be a noise demonstration. It was not a huge protest, you know. It was a couple dozen people. They drove down there. They’re shooting off some fireworks in the dark on the Fourth of July, and then they plan to drive home, you know, and think, like, maybe someone inside that facility — right? — hears those fireworks and thinks, like, “Hey, there are people outside. Like, we’re not forgotten.” And that’s the point of a noise demonstration, right?

And this is something that for, you know, the actions that they took on that night, because there was — one of the protesters who was there was armed and who did fire his weapon towards a police officer. Accounts differ as to why he did that and the circumstances leading around that. But because that happened, all of these people have been effectively put away for life.

ANJALI KAMAT: And Prairieland is run by the private prison company LaSalle Corrections. Jack Crosbie is a senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine. Thank you so much. We will link to your piece, “Incarcerated for Life in Trump’s War on the Left.” This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Anjali Kamat.