8 sentenced to 450 years in prison over anti-ICE riot where officer was shot + "We Will Find You and We Will Kill You"

[Celerity]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo



Eight people who US prosecutors say have ties to Antifa have collectively been sentenced to 450 years in prison for their roles in a riot outside an immigration detention centre in Texas. A former US Marine Corps reservist, who was convicted of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, was sentenced to 100 years in prison. The others' sentences range between 30 to 70 years, according to the justice department.

Last year President Donald Trump designated Antifa - short for anti-fascist - a "domestic terrorist organisation" . A US judge called their actions on 4 July "an assault on democracy", while their families condemned the length of their sentences. "The sentences handed down today make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice," Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement, condemning violent extremism.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) said the North Texas Antifa Cell operatives began shooting off and throwing fireworks at the facility in Prairieland, just south of Dallas, on the Independence Day holiday last summer, as well as vandalising vehicles and a guard kiosk on the property. The eight were convicted on an array of charges, including rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, and obstruction.

Benjamin Hanil Song, the purported leader of the group, was sentenced to 100 years in prison. According to the justice department, he had faced a minimum penalty of 20 years. Song said in a written statement on Tuesday that he fired his gun because he believed the police officer was preparing to shoot a protester, according to multiple media outlets and an advocacy group for the defendants.

snip



https://theintercept.com/2026/05/15/podcast-trump-counterterrorism-strategy/



IN 16 pages, the Trump administration’s new official counterterrorism strategy outlines in broad terms who it views as terrorist threats and priority targets, ranging from anti-fascist activists to ISIS and so-called narco-terrorists. The line “We will find you, and we will kill you” appears in the memo. “[The] strategy brings together Trump’s war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse.

“It combines it with the administration’s war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. … We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.” This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Turse and Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement, dissect how the Trump administration is painting anyone it wants to go after — state and non-state actors — as terrorists. “Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration’s enemies and a promise of what they’re going to do to them,” says Hurowitz. “This anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent.”

“We’re not just talking about rhetoric here,” says Washington. “We’ve seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.” “The actual legal justification for the strikes is, like so much else, secret,” says Turse, who has been covering the attacks on so-called narco-terrorists. “We’re talking about a fake war in which the enemies aren’t even read into the fact that they’re in an armed conflict with the United States.” He adds, “It’s really built on a quarter-century of executive overreach and targeted killings around the world.

It’s the price of Congress allowing Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump to hunt and kill people by drone from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. It took this legally dubious, at best, post-9/11 drone war and laid the groundwork for a completely illegal one in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.” “Say what you will about the people around President Trump,” Hurowitz notes, “but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies.”

snip

[walkingman]

1. This is not what Democracy looks like....☮

[struggle4progress]

2. I wonder what progress the feds are making with the cold-blooded killers of

Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti

[Celerity]

3. making progress on how to give their killers awards

[NJCher]

4. HCR

Heather Cox Richardson had quite a bit to say on this on her show tonight. Iircc, she doesn’t think these sentences will hold.

[struggle4progress]

5. I hdo ope she is correct but I am typically of the "Hope is Infernal" school