Texas jury convicts all nine defendants in Antifa attack on ICE detention facility

A federal jury in Fort Worth returned guilty verdicts on all nine defendants charged in the July 2025 armed attack on the Prairieland ICE detention facility near Alvarado, Texas. Nine people stood trial. Nine were convicted. The cell that organized, armed, and executed the assault on a federal detention facility is now facing the legal consequences that years of progressive permissiveness never delivered.

The 12-day trial, which began February 23 at the Eldon B. Mahon United States Courthouse in downtown Fort Worth, featured testimony from more than 45 witnesses and more than 210 evidentiary exhibits. The jury found eight defendants guilty on charges of riot and terrorism. The ninth, Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada, was found guilty of concealing and removing evidence. Deliberations on one additional charge were still ongoing at time of reporting.

The man who handed out the guns

Benjamin Hanil Song wasn't just a participant. Evidence presented at trial revealed that most of the cell looked to Song as their de facto leader, and that he personally acquired the firearms used in the attack and distributed them to his co-defendants.

The jury found him guilty of attempted murder for his role in the shooting of an Alvarado police officer. Court documents allege that law enforcement officers were fired upon during the attack, with approximately 20 to 30 rounds discharged at them, as Breitbart reports.

An armed assault on a federal facility, a police officer shot, rounds fired at law enforcement. This wasn't a protest. It was an ambush.

Eight defendants, one coordinated attack

Alongside Song, the remaining defendants convicted include Savanna Batten, Cameron Arnold, Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, Maricela Rueda, Bradford Morris, and Zachary Evetts. The prosecution successfully established that these individuals were not lone actors but part of a North Texas Antifa cell operating as a piece of a larger militant enterprise, one that, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.

The charges they faced at trial reflect the severity of what occurred:

• Attempted murder of a federal officer
• Discharging a firearm during, in relation to, and in furtherance of a crime of violence
• Rioting
• Providing material support to terrorists

Detention officers at Prairieland sent out calls for assistance, describing themselves as under attack. That call was answered, and one officer paid for it with a bullet.

What accountability actually looks like

Attorney General Pam Bondi did not mince words after the verdict came in:

"Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities — not under President Trump. Today's verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America's streets."

That word "flourish" is doing real work in that sentence. For years, Democratic mayors and prosecutors in cities across the country looked the other way as Antifa attacked federal courthouses, assaulted police, and intimidated communities. Some called them an "idea." Others dismissed them as a right-wing fantasy. Local prosecutors declined charges. Charges that were filed were dropped. The message sent was clear: this behavior has no serious consequences.

Texas just sent a different message.

The pattern the left built

The left's posture on Antifa has always contained a contradiction it could never resolve. On one hand, progressive politicians insisted Antifa wasn't a real organization, just a loose, leaderless concept. On the other hand, whenever federal authorities moved to treat Antifa violence as organized, coordinated terrorism, those same politicians cried overreach.

The Fort Worth verdict demolishes both arguments simultaneously. A jury, after 12 days of trial, 45 witnesses, and more than 210 exhibits, found that a structured cell, with a leader who procured and distributed weapons, coordinated a targeted armed assault on a federal law enforcement facility. That is not a concept. That is a conspiracy.

The Alvarado police officer who was shot is a real person. The detention officers who called for help from inside a facility under attack are real people. The abstract ideological debate the left preferred to have about Antifa's nature was always a way to avoid reckoning with the concrete violence being committed in service of it.

This isn't the last one

Bondi made clear that this prosecution is part of a broader effort, not a one-off case. The Trump administration has explicitly framed Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and has moved to treat affiliated violence with the legal severity that designation demands.

Nine guilty verdicts in a Texas federal court is not the end of that effort. It's a proof of concept. Organized political violence, regardless of the ideology behind it, can be investigated, prosecuted, and punished under federal law. The machinery exists. The will to use it now exists.

What changed wasn't the law. What changed was who was willing to enforce it.