loading . . . The library is seen through a window at the Rensselaer County Jail in Troy, N.Y., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Photo: Lori Van Buren/Albany Times Union via Getty Images
Jeremy Busby is a writer and activist incarcerated in Texas.
American prisons have never been much for the First Amendment, and now, the Trump administration is exporting prison-style censorship to the general population. In tactics that are easily recognizable to incarcerated people like me, they’re doing it in the name of “security.”
This includes claiming antiestablishment ideologies and literature must be punished because they pose nebulous risks to those with government-approved political views. It also includes the logical next step: criminalizing efforts to keep authorities from finding out that one holds those ideologies or reads that literature.
Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada is set to be tried starting Tuesday on charges of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents. He’s been in custody since July and in federal prison since October (save for a brief accidental release before Thanksgiving, during which he spoke to The Intercept). He and his codefendants were recently transferred to county jail to await trial. Supporters report that they’ve been placed in solitary confinement and are dealing with other horrid conditions.
In plain language, Sanchez Estrada is facing up to 20 years behind bars for allegedly moving a box of anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence in his hometown of Dallas. His indictment came on the heels of Trump’s signing an executive order to classify “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” and issuing National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.
Sanchez Estrada’s case originated with a July 4, 2025 anti-ICE protest his wife, Maricela Rueda, attended outside the Prairieland ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, where an officer was shot. (Prosecutors do not allege that Sanchez Estrada or Rueda were involved in the shooting.) The home-spun zines at issue contain no plans for any shooting, and under normal circumstances, they would clearly be deemed constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment. But the government’s concealment theory only makes sense if it views merely having the literature as criminal.
> While this form of censorship might seem brazenly anti-constitutional to most Americans, it has been the reality faced by incarcerated individuals for decades.
Once possessing literature is considered criminal, it opens the door to corollary charges, like transporting literature to conceal evidence or the “offense” of possessing it. That’s what happened to Sanchez Estrada. What other crime could the magazines have incriminated Rueda of?
Last month, activist Lucy Fowlkes became the 19th person indicted in connection with the same Texas protest. Fowlkes’s alleged crime is using Signal, the encrypted messaging app made famous by Pete Hegseth, telling people how to delete messages, and removing people from group chats, which government lawyers argue amounts to “hinder[ing] prosecution of terrorism,” a first-degree felony.
The founders placed a great premium on ensuring Americans had the right to possess and read anything that attracted their interest, even if it challenged the government.
But while this form of censorship might seem brazenly anti-constitutional to most Americans, it has been the reality faced by incarcerated individuals for decades. In the name of “security,” prison officials have punished and even killed people for possessing literature they deemed suspect.
One such case involved Johnson Greybuffalo, a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe who dedicated himself to studying Native American history while in custody at the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. His studies included learning about the American Indian Movement, or AIM, a civil rights organization in the U.S. and Canada that works for equal rights for American Indians. He found information on AIM in the prison’s library and took notes throughout his studies.
A prison volunteer also gave him a copy of a document titled “Warrior Society” that included a code of ethics that required Native Americans to serve the people, be honorable, kind, and not steal or be stingy. A prison guard searched his cell one day in 2005, and confiscated the AIM notes, along with the “Warrior Society” document. Both were classified as “written contraband.” Greybuffalo was written a disciplinary case and sentenced to 180 days in solitary confinement. The disciplinary charge was upheld in part by a federal district court in 2010.
> “Reading, writing, or sharing zines is not a crime.”
In another case, Kenneth Oliver left an article about human rights activist, philosopher, and scholar George Jackson on his bunk while he went to his California prison’s dining hall in 2007. An officer searched his cell and discovered two books authored by Jackson, “Blood in My Eye” and “Soledad Brother.” As Oliver detailed on “Ear Hustle,” the award-winning podcast created and produced from San Quentin State Prison, he came back to officers swarming his cell, which they had yellow-taped off like a real crime scene. Oliver was handcuffed and held in solitary confinement for the next eight years in California. His only offense was “possessing illegal contraband,” which also made him ineligible for new sentence under a 2012 California law easing life sentences on nonviolent “three strikes” convictions. (Oliver was finally freed in 2019 after serving 23 years.)
“The guards said, ‘We’ve been told to get rid of you,'” Oliver said on the podcast. “They want you to go to the SHU [solitary confinement] forever.”
Historically, the U.S. government has always used disenfranchised populations as a test case to develop both strategy and legal precedent for infringing on constitutional rights before exporting them to society as a whole. Before incarcerated people faced retaliation for possessing books, African slaves were frequently punished for reading the Old Testament out of fear that the Exodus story might inspire them to dream of freedom. In some places, proponents of slavery reconciled their desire to convert slaves to Christianity with their fear or rebellion by creating a heavily redacted “Slave Bible.”
Land confiscated from Native populations eventually became eminent domain. Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance of Black leaders during the civil rights movement gave justification for George W. Bush’s invasive Patriot Act and mass surveillance of civilians. Now, the Trump administration is taking a page directly out of oppressive prison authorities’ playbook.
The system that gives those in charge broad power to decide what literature is a dangerous threat to “national security” interests and who they can target, detain, prosecute, and punish criminally for merely possessing it. They may be starting with anarchist magazines, but anyone on the mailing list of Trump’s political enemies, whether in possession of an issue of the New York Times or an op-ed written by Marjorie Taylor Green, could find themselves on the wrong end of the administration’s overreach.
It’s all so circular. When the administration declares a political viewpoint “terrorism,” hiding literature espousing that viewpoint from the government is a perfectly logical response. So is using secure communications technology to communicate with others who share similar politics. But when your thoughts and reading list are deemed illegal, preventing the government from finding out what you think and read becomes a crime in and of itself — obstruction of the thought police.
“Daniel has broken no laws,” Sanchez Estrada’s family said in a statement to The Intercept. “He should not be in jail, should not be threatened to lose his permanent resident status as a part of this case.”
Criminalizing possession of literature is a miscarriage of justice, whether in prison or at a protester’s husband’s parents’ house. If the Trump administration is allowed to send Sanchez Estrada to prison for the crime of possessing literature, members of society at large can be subjected to the same pernicious rules as the incarcerated.
In a letter to his attorney published in “Soledad Brother,” one of the books that landed Oliver in solitary, George Jackson wrote that if prison officials are able to trample upon the rights of incarcerated people unchecked, “There will be no means of detecting when the last right is gone. You’ll only know when they start shooting you.”
Sanchez Estrada, for his part, “has done nothing wrong,” his family said. “Reading, writing, or sharing zines is not a crime.”
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**_I’M BEN MUESSIG,_** The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
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## Contact the author:
Jeremy Busby
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