The leader of a group of protesters accused of being members of the far-left movement antifa was sentenced on Tuesday to 100 years in prison after a jury found him and seven other demonstrators guilty of supporting terrorism while taking part in an armed assault last summer against an immigration facility in Alvarado, Texas.
The extraordinary sentence against the protester, Benjamin Song, was only one of the harsh penalties meted out in the case during separate hearings in Federal District Court in Fort Worth by two judges who castigated the defendants for using violence and attacking the democratic process during the protest.
Nine young demonstrators, including Mr. Song, were found guilty in March of an array of charges stemming from the attack on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, which resulted in a police officer being shot in the neck.
Six of the defendants who were convicted of terrorism charges along with Mr. Song were sentenced to between 50 and 70 years in prison. Another, who was found guilty of lesser crimes and was not even present at the protest, was given a term of 30 years in prison. A final defendant is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
The remarkably stiff penalties, issued by Judge Mark T. Pittman and Judge Reed O’Connor, were significantly longer than the lengthiest sentence handed down to any of the more than 1,500 rioters who were prosecuted — and then given clemency — for joining in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The most severe sentence faced by a Jan. 6 defendant was the 22-year term given to Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys.
The sentencings in Fort Worth appeared to be a clear signal that, at least in Texas, the courts would deal aggressively with ICE protesters — especially those accused of adhering to the leftist ideology of antifa, a contraction of the word “antifascist.” Activists who have demonstrated against ICE have faced a concerted crackdown from the Trump administration, including 15 people said to be affiliated with two Minnesota antifa groups who were indicted last week on charges of conspiring to impede federal agents during immigration sweeps in the state over the winter.
Both Judge Pittman, who was appointed by President Trump, and Judge O’Connor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, have reputations as staunchly conservative jurists. Judge Pittman oversaw the trial of Mr. Song and his co-defendants, which was the first time terrorism charges had been brought against purported members of antifa. Judge O’Connor was brought in after the verdicts were returned to help with sentencings.
While the jurors who heard evidence during the trial clearly believed the prosecution’s theory that most of the defendants had supported an act of terrorism when they took part in the attack on the ICE facility, five of the government’s own cooperating witnesses — people who were part of the supposed antifa cell — denied under oath that they or their compatriots thought of themselves as belonging to antifa. The far-left movement has no central structure or formal membership.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche celebrated the sentences in a post on social media, saying that “violent extremism has no place in our country.”
“The sentences handed down today make clear that antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice,” Mr. Blanche said.
But the relatives of some of the defendants assailed the sentences as overly punitive at a news conference outside the courthouse.
“In the face of this grotesque distortion of anything that could ever have called itself a process, I am livid,” said Lydia Koza, the wife of one of the defendants, Cameron Arnold.
Hope Song, Mr. Song’s mother, said her son would never accept responsibility for what she described as “a government lie made to prosecute innocent people in order to get political persecutions.”
Mr. Trump has long prioritized bringing criminal charges against antifa activists and other left-wing demonstrators who have protested his immigration raids in cities across the country. In September, he issued an executive order declaring antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” — a designation that does not actually exist under U.S. law.
He also issued a sweeping directive known as National Security Presidential Memo 7, which ordered a whole-of-government approach to going after antifascist groups. The memo greatly expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include a list of political beliefs traditionally protected by the First Amendment — among them “anticapitalism,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and even “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”
The episode in Alvarado unfolded after nightfall on Independence Day last year, when a group of about a dozen people arrived dressed in black at the ICE facility, known as the Prairieland Detention Center. Some began to vandalize the property, spray-painting graffiti on a guard shed and a car, and damaging a surveillance camera, prosecutors said. Others set off fireworks in what they later described as a “noise demonstration,” hoping that the immigrants detained inside would be encouraged by the spectacle.
Mr. Song, a former Marine reservist, stood at a distance with an AR-15-style rifle. And when Lt. Thomas Gross of the Alvarado Police Department responded to a call for help at the facility, Mr. Song yelled, “Get to the rifles!” and opened fire, prosecutors said. Lieutenant Gross was struck by a bullet above his collarbone as the rest of the group fled. He was treated for his wounds and eventually released from the hospital.
