Earlier this summer, a federal judge sentenced a group of eight anti-ICE activists to a collective 450 years in prison after what has become the first “test case” for the Trump administration’s crackdown on left-wing activism.
The government’s case is built on events that occurred in front of the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, on the Fourth of July last year. That night, activists set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with the people detained inside. Then a few separated from the group, vandalizing cars, slashing tires on a government van and breaking a surveillance camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and pointed his weapon, one of the demonstrators, Benjamin Song, fired an AR-15-style rifle, injuring the officer in the neck.
The government referred to the group of demonstrators as a “Northwest Texas antifa cell,” suggesting the activists were part of a coordinated effort to commit a terrorist attack on the ICE facility.
What Mr. Song and the others did that night are crimes, to be sure. Mr. Song injured a police officer. Some damaged federal property. All of them were convicted of riot. But civil rights advocates who watched the case expected those protesters to get sentences of a handful of years. Instead, even people on the periphery of the action — whose worst offense was spray-painting a guard post — got anywhere from 30 to 70 years in prison.
The decades-long sentences in the Prairieland case were only possible because prosecutors brought forth an unusual charge: “material support” for terrorism. This law, which has been used to prosecute primarily Muslims in the years after 9/11, is being broadly applied under the Trump administration against people President Trump characterizes as his political enemies. Who and what constitutes “terrorism” could have broad implications for our civil liberties. If Mr. Trump’s statements are any indicator, what happened at Prairieland is not likely to be an isolated incident.
The law that prosecutes material support to terrorism, created in 1994 and expanded two years later in the wake of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, is two-pronged: one part prosecutes support for a terrorist organization and the second prosecutes support for specific acts of terrorism. Both come with lengthy minimum sentences and a possibility of a lifetime in prison. But what could constitute “support” is so ambiguous that, shortly after the law was created, it had confused even senior government officials. During an interagency background briefing, one Clinton administration official wondered if even “$25 of dues” to a group could count as material support.
As it turned out, prosecutions for small donations and increasingly vague definitions of support would happen in a few years. In the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, prosecutors accused hundreds of people of supporting terrorism this way. “Support for terrorism” could entail anything from translating a magazine to even offering nonviolent alternatives to a militant group. It did not matter if the defendant directly helped carry out an assault or belonged to a terrorist organization: They could be prosecuted as if they were.
The post-9/11 years were a time of a single-minded effort to quash threats of Islamic terrorism before an attack could be carried out. But the ambiguity of the law, in particular its focus on prevention, made the material support statute ripe for abuse by overzealous prosecutors. Take the case of a Kurdish imam in Albany, N.Y., named Yassin Aref, who was arrested in 2004 and charged with both parts of the material support law.
Prosecutors alleged that Mr. Aref witnessed a man (who turned out to be a government informant) “loan” money to a member of Aref’s mosque. The informant fabricated a story, telling Mr. Aref and the man that he had acquired the funds he was offering them by selling ammunition to a terrorist group that was planning to assassinate a Pakistani envoy. Mr. Aref nodded along with the vague details of the informant’s tale, and in keeping with Islamic customs of money-lending, agreed to witness the loan. According to prosecutors, that was enough to show his support for terrorism, a crime of which Mr. Aref was eventually convicted, serving 15 years in prison. A Human Rights Watch report later highlighted Mr. Aref’s case as one of many showing dubious uses of antiterrorism laws.
Mr. Aref’s case was not a lone example. In those years, law enforcement swept through Muslim communities, goading young men — including those with no criminal record — toward making statements in support of terrorist plots, then slapping them with material support charges. Of the nearly 1,000 defendants prosecuted by the United States on charges of international terrorism after 9/11, more than half were convicted of material support for terrorism, including cases when no act of violence occurred.
An Albany Times Union columnist who was following Mr. Aref’s trial at the time wrote, “Someday we’ll look back on the present national paranoia over terrorism and the excesses done in its name with the same national embarrassment that Americans feel for Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts of the 1950s and our appalling treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.”
Twenty years later, the witch hunt appears to have only expanded, albeit with a different political focus. Last September, two months after the demonstration at the Prairieland ICE facility, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. After the murder, the president’s adviser Stephen Miller described left-wing political organizations as a “vast domestic terror movement.”
Weeks later, Mr. Trump issued a memo directing the F.B.I.’s Joint Task Terrorism Force — a network expanded in the aftermath of 9/11 — to investigate and disrupt “domestic terrorism” and political violence. He also signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization,” describing it as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government.” But antifa, short for “antifascist,” is a leaderless political movement composed of disparate strategies and aims.
The U.S. government has no legal designation for “domestic terrorist groups.” Yet even when it is just talk, the Trump administration’s use of the term had an impact on the Prairieland case. In the original indictment, released in July 2025, prosecutors had not leveled any charges of material support for terrorism. By November, after filing two rounds of indictments, prosecutors charged all eight defendants with the crime.
As a deeply reported Texas Monthly story detailed, the Prairieland defendants were hardly members of a cohesive terrorist cell. Some were part of a Signal chat that was used to plan the demonstration. Several of them were attached to various organizations, like the Democratic Socialists of America and an anticapitalist reading group.
Even if one reads these loose associations as proof of a coordinated attempt, legal experts told me it would not rise to a terrorism charge. The demonstrators were already faced with a cocktail of severe charges after their arrest, including attempted murder. (Mr. Song would be convicted of attempted murder; the other four defendants charged with it were acquitted.) But the material support charge allows the court to impose some of the harshest sentencing in its legal arsenal. “It’s an act of judicial terrorism, designed to keep people from coming to protest,” Shayana Kadidal, a senior attorney for the Center of Constitutional Rights who has worked on material support cases, told me.
This law has not only been used against individuals; prosecutors have also turned it against nonprofits, ultimately shutting down a major Muslim charity and complicating the work of others. “Once terrorism laws are in place, they are hard to roll back,” Katherine Tomaszewski, a lawyer who has helped charities in such cases, told me. “No one wants to be seen as ‘soft on terror.’” But, she pointed out, the danger of the law being so “overbroad and unchecked” is that it can be manipulated.
We’re already beginning to see the Trump administration building on such precedents. In the aftermath of Mr. Kirk’s murder last year, the White House called for investigations of liberal foundations and donors, like the philanthropist George Soros and the businessman Reid Hoffman, for their role in what they claim is fomenting political violence (read: financing liberal nonprofits). The Justice Department instructed federal prosecutors to explore possible charges against Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations, including racketeering, wire fraud and material support for terrorism.
It could well get worse from here. “The label of ‘terrorism’ is a powerful political tool,” Sufia Khalid, a lawyer representing one of the Prairieland defendants, told me. For the last two decades, the “terrorism” charge was leveled almost exclusively at a religious minority, lulling some into believing that such laws would not affect them. Now, the domestic use of the terrorism charge threatens to cast its net even wider.
Rozina Ali is a journalist who covers conflict, Islamophobia and immigration. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.