loading . . . A detail view of the badge worn by Matthew Elliston during an ICE hiring event on Aug. 26, 2025, in Arlington, Texas. Photo: Ron Jenkins/Getty Images
Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.
There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasnât even at the protest. Daniel âDesâ Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained âAntifa materialsâ after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.
But the boxed materials arenât Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim âAntifaâ uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas â one was titled âInsurrectionary Anarchyâ â but theyâre fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administrationâs intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating âAntifaâ as a âmajor terrorist organizationâ â a legal designation that doesnât exist for domestic groups â following the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Sanchez was first indicted in October on charges of âcorruptly concealing a document or recordâ as a standalone case, but the new indictment merges his charges with those against the other defendants, likely in hopes of burying the First Amendment problems with the case against him under prosecutorsâ claims about the alleged shooting.
Itâs an escalation of a familiar tactic. In 2023, Georgia prosecutors listed âzineâ distribution as part of the conspiracy charges against 61 Stop Cop City protesters in a sprawling RICO indictment that didnât bother to explain how each individual defendant was involved in any actual crime. I wrote back then about my concern that this wasnât just sloppy overreach, but also a blueprint for censorship. Those fears have now been validated by Sanchezâs prosecution solely for possessing similar literature.
Photos of the zines Daniel Sanchez is charged with âcorruptly concealing.â Photo: U.S. District Court, Northern District of Texas
There have been other warnings that cops and prosecutors think theyâve found a constitutional loophole â if you canât punish reporting it, punish transporting it. Los Angeles journalist Maya Lau is suing the LA County Sheriffâs Department for secretly investigating her for conspiracy, theft of government property, unlawful access of a computer, burglary, and receiving stolen property. According to her attorneys, her only offense was reporting on a list of deputies with histories of misconduct for the Los Angeles Times.
> If you canât punish reporting it, punish transporting it.
Itâs also reminiscent of the Biden administrationâs case against right-wing outlet Project Veritas for possessing and transporting Ashley Bidenâs diary, which the organization bought from a Florida woman later convicted of stealing and selling it. The Constitution protects the right to publish materials stolen by others â a right that would be meaningless if they couldnât possess the materials in the first place.
Despite the collapses of the Cop City prosecution and the Lau investigation â and its own dismissal of the Project Veritas case â the Trump administration has followed those dangerous examples, characterizing lawful activism and ideologies as terrorist conspiracies (a strategy Trump allies also floated during this first term) to seize the power to prosecute pamphlet possession anytime they use the magic word âAntifa.â
Thatâs a chilling combination for any journalist, activist, or individual who criticizes Trump. National security reporters have long dealt with the specter of prosecution under the archaic Espionage Act for merely obtaining government secrets from sources, particularly after the Biden administration extracted a guilty plea from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the rest of the press â and everyone else, for that matter â understood that merely possessing written materials, no matter what they said, is not a crime.
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## **Guilt by Literature**
At what point does a literary collection or newspaper subscription become prosecutorial evidence under the Trump administrationâs logic? Essentially, whenever itâs convenient. The vagueness is a feature, not a bug. When people donât know which political materials might later be deemed evidence of criminality, the safest course is to avoid engaging with controversial ideas altogether.
The slippery slope from anarchist zines to conventional journalism isnât hypothetical, and weâre already sliding fast. Journalist Mario Guevara can tell you that from El Salvador, where he was deported in a clear case of retaliation for livestreaming a No Kings protest. So can Tufts doctoral student RĂŒmeysa ĂztĂŒrk, as she awaits deportation proceedings for co-writing an opinion piece critical of Israelâs wars that the administration considers evidence of support for terrorism.
At least two journalists lawfully in the U.S. â Yaâakub Ira Vijandre and Sami Hamdi â were nabbed by ICE just last month. The case against Vijandre is partially based on his criticism of prosecutorial overreach in the Holy Land Five case and his liking social media posts that quote Quranic verses, raising the question of how far away we are from someone being indicted for transporting a Quran or a news article critical of the war on terror.
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### âAntifaâ Protesters Charged With Terrorism for Constitutionally Protected Activity
Sanchezâs case is prosecutorial overreach stacked on more prosecutorial overreach. The National Lawyers Guild criticized prosecutorsâ tenuous dot-connecting to justify holding 18 defendants responsible for one gunshot wound. Some defendants were also charged with supporting terrorism due to their alleged association with âAntifa.â Anarchist zines were cited as evidence against them, too.
Sanchez was charged following a search that ICE proclaimed on social media turned up âliteral insurrectionist propagandaâ he had allegedly transported from his home to an apartment, noting that âinsurrectionary anarchism is regarded as the most serious form of domestic (non-jihadi) terrorist threat.â The tweet also said that Sanchez is a green card holder granted legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The indictment claims Sanchez was transporting those materials to conceal them because they incriminated his wife. But how can possession of literature incriminate anyone, let alone someone who isnât even accused of anything but being present when someone else allegedly fired a gun? Zines arenât contraband; itâs not illegal to be an anarchist or read about anarchism. I donât know why Sanchez allegedly moved the box of documents, but if it was because he (apparently correctly) feared prosecutors would try to use them against his wife, thatâs a commentary on prosecutorsâ lawlessness, not Sanchezâs.
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Violent rhetoric is subject to punishment only when it constitutes a âtrue threatâ of imminent violence. Even then, the speaker is held responsible, not anyone merely in possession of their words.
Government prosecutors havenât alleged the âAntifa materialsâ contained any âtrue threats,â or any other category of speech that falls outside the protection of the First Amendment. Nor did they allege that the materials were used to plan the alleged actions of protesters on July 4 (although they did allege that the materials were âanti-governmentâ and âanti-Trumpâ).
> We donât need a constitutional right to publish (or possess) only what the government likes.
Even the aforementioned âInsurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attackâ zine, despite its hyperbolic title, reads like a think piece, not a how-to manual. It advocates for tactics like rent strikes and squatting, not shooting police officers. Critically, it has nothing to do with whether Sanchezâs wife committed crimes on July 4.
Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We donât need a constitutional right to publish (or possess) only what the government likes, and the âanti-governmentâ literature in Sanchezâs box of zines is exactly what the First Amendment protects. With history and leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor OrbĂĄn as a guide, we also know itâs highly unlikely that Trumpâs censorship crusade will stop with a few radical pamphlets.
## The Framers Loved Zines
Thereâs an irony in a supposedly conservative administration treating anti-government pamphlets as evidence of criminality. Many of the publications the Constitutionâs framers had in mind when they authored the First Amendmentâs press freedom clause bore far more resemblance to Sanchezâs box of zines than to the output of todayâs mainstream news media.
Revolutionary-era America was awash in highly opinionated, politically radical literature. Thomas Paineâs âCommon Senseâ was designed to inspire revolution against the established government. Newspapers like the Boston Gazette printed inflammatory writings by Samuel Adams and others urging the colonies to prepare for war after the Coercive Acts. The Declaration of Independence itself recognized the right of the people to rise up. It did not assume the revolution of the time would be the last one.
One might call it âliteral insurrectionist propagandaâ â and some of it was probably transported in boxes.
The framers enshrined press freedom not because they imagined todayâs professionally trained journalists maintaining careful neutrality. They protected it because they understood firsthand the need for journalists and writers who believed their government had become tyrannical to espouse revolution.
For all their many faults, the framers were confident enough in their ideas that they were willing to let them be tested. If the governmentâs conduct didnât call for radical opposition, then radical ideas wouldnât catch on. It sure looks like the current administration doesnât want to make that bet.
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_ITâS EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT._
What weâre seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trumpâs assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as âunconventional,â âtesting the boundaries,â and âaggressively flexing power.â
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