By ERWIN FREED
Frame-up cases are mounting against activists and Muslims. In the crosshairs are all of the targets of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, virtually everyone that is not an unmovable supporter of the Trump regime. Agents of repression in these cases include everyone from private investigators, university administrators, local police, and the “Feds.” Swept up as victims of so-called “lawfare” are students, teachers, and workers from many backgrounds.
On July 16, MAGA megamind Stephen Miller openly stated that NSPM-7 is activating “all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, prosecute these [left-wing] political terrorists that are operating within our country.” Miller’s remarks were made alongside other top-level administration officials and new visa restrictions against members of progressive organizations that function outside of the United States.
On a similar theme, the U.S. State Department released a document on July 20 charging that a number of named left, socialist, Black Lives Matter, and other civil liberties groups and activists—as well as coalitions acting in solidarity with Cuba’s right to self-determination—are acting as “front groups and fellow travelers” of “communist” Cuba. The 99-page report echoes the Red Scare of the early 1950s, while specifically mentioning the government’s “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions and a slate of anti-communist laws” as being responsible for a vast fall in membership in the Communist Party USA during that period.
Severe prison sentences against eight Texas residents convicted in a crooked conspiracy case centered around a noise demonstration at the Prairieland ICE facility last July are rightfully rattling activists around the country. Defendants are accused of being in a made-up “Antifa terror cell,” despite many only knowing each other casually or not at all. Some were in the same reading group, named after the working-class icon Emma Goldman.
The highest sentence related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in DC was 22 years, yet the lowest in the Prairieland case is 30 years. Daniel “Des” Rolando Sanchez Estrada, is sentenced to three decades for moving boxes of political literature and being married to a co-defendant who was at the noise demonstration. Other astronomically high sentences range from 50 to 100 years.
While Prairieland has been a prominent discussion on the left and among broader society interested in combatting the developing, bipartisan red scare, there are a number of other important cases of political policing and racist FBI and ICE frame-ups deserving to be exposed and organized against. The circumstances of each case are extremely educational in understanding what the stakes are in our current political moment as well as the methods of today’s red squads—the historic name for police units assigned to surveil and harass left-wing and working-class organizations.
Three particularly important cases within the movement deserve attention and support for defense campaigns. These are the Spokane 3, Michigan 8, and Minneapolis 15. All three are overtly politically motivated, meant to silence dissent, disorganize movements of the working class class and oppressed, and create narratives that the pro-immigrant and pro-Palestine movements are inherent threats to “national security.”
In addition, FBI agents door-knocked and harassed at least half of the over 60 people arrested by Newark police and New Jersey State Police for demonstrating outside of the Delaney Hall federal detention facility since the end of May. Chicana activist Nadia Topete, supported by the Committee to End FBI Repression, continues fighting a federal grand jury indictment meant to chill immigrant defense organizing. The Prairieland and Spokane arrests have been explicitly stated as operationalizing NSPM-7, signed days after Trump formally declared “antifa” a “terrorist” organization.
Alongside the politically motivated repression against the left, several fake, FBI informant, and undercover-constructed “plots” and other sting operations targeting Muslim men are in the headlines. Entrapment both terrorizes and disciplines Muslim communities to the white supremacist social order and also functions to split the movements against authoritarianism, as otherwise genuine activists begin to think that there must be a “grain of truth” to terrorism charges. Such is the state of U.S. society 25 years into the “Global War on Terror,” although scapegoating and police harassment of Muslims obviously predates our current century by many decades.
Much less analyzed than the attacks against the political left, the ongoing stings against Muslims include those of Reda Sabassi, arrested in San Diego on June 16, indicted on five counts including wire fraud and conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists; Mohamed Sagha, arrested in Wayne, N.J., on June 8, accused of attempting to provide material support to terrorists; and Bisaam Ghafoor, Bareen Dzayee, and Elias Shamsaldeen, arrested on June 5 in California and Kentucky on conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists charges.
That is, in the month of June, at least five Muslim men have had their homes raided and been accused very publicly of being “terrorists.” In the latter two cases, those of Sagha and Ghafoor et al., “confidential human sources” and undercover FBI agents played crucial roles in creating so-called “material support.”
On July 8, 22-year-old Michael Sam Teekaye, Jr. was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to material support charges after having been in correspondence with an FBI “online covert employee” since he was 16 years old. In charging documents, the government admits that Teekaye “has a history of mental illness, and has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, mild intellectual disability, obsessive compulsive disorder, unspecified depressive disorder, and early onset schizophrenia.”
This is the method of “counter-terrorism” that is being directed explicitly at progressive movements. The ability to defend the right to political speech is inseparable from the struggle against the longstanding practices of police infiltration, harassment, and provocation against Muslim communities.
Cooperating witnesses and informers
The guilty verdicts that came down for the Prairieland and Spokane defendants were products of two related circumstances. On the one hand, prosecutors, judges, and the state organized conspiracies of their own to make the trials as one-sided and unfair as possible. In the Prairieland case, obviously prejudicial jurors were selected, Judge Pittman aggressively pressured defendants from retaining well-known defense attorney George Lobb, and the sentencing was explicitly meant as a warning to others who stand in political opposition to ICE’s system of concentration camps.
Another striking example of obvious judicial bias in the Prairieland case was that the court held under seal evidence that completely contradicts the government’s case until after extreme sentences were handed out. On July 20, 2026, surveillance and police bodycam footage was released that shows how cops, not protesters, created a violent situation. The footage shows that things were “relatively calm” until Alvarado Police Department Lt. Thomas Gross arrived on the scene. The lieutenant got out of his car and almost immediately squares up and shot at a protester running in the opposite direction.
The Prairieland Defense Committee’s analysis of the recently unsealed evidence indicates that defendant Benjamin Song fired warning shots away from the police who were actively shooting to kill protesters. According to the committee, camera footage and injury photographs are more consistent with the fact that Gross was hit by his own bullet ricocheting off something, rather than having been hit by Song, as the government claimed. The defense team was barred from making any arguments based on potential self-defense.
For the Spokane 3, the charges were so spurious that acting District Attorney Richard Barker resigned rather than sign the indictments. Originally, nine people were indicted on federal conspiracy charges, among dozens of others arrested by local police, after a protest in defense of two community members being transferred by ICE. One of the defendants, former city council president Ben Stuckart, made a post on Facebook encouraging people to stand in solidarity with the men being transferred. Hundreds of people spontaneously showed up to stop the transfer, but there was no conspiracy. Neighbors simply felt compelled to stand in solidarity against a kidnapping in their community.
Both detainees, Joswar Rodriguez Torres and Cesar Alexander Alvarez, were in the country legally. Torres was eventually released after a judge found that his Fifth Amendment rights had been violated. Alvarez, despite being in the same legal situation as Torres, self-deported due to misinformation from a lawyer and the horrific conditions of ICE detention. Alvarez was told by an immigration lawyer that if he self-deported, he would be sent to Colombia, where he has family. Instead, he was sent back to Venezuela, where he is in fear for his life. The witnesses against the Spokane 3 included a cop who was “itching” to attack protesters and an ICE agent who regularly made white supremacist posts on social media. Before the trial, the Feds unsuccessfully attempted to silence independent journalist Erin Sellers.
On the other hand, the fraudulent guilty verdicts were made possible by defendants who became cooperating witnesses. The courts and cops have tremendous ability to pressure people caught up in legal dragnets. Prairieland defendants were held in pre-trial detention where they were misgendered, put in solitary confinement, denied medical treatments, and physically and psychologically tortured. Spokane defendants were offered effectively slaps on the wrist in exchange for pleading guilty to lesser-charges. The purpose of both situations was for the state to get critical testimony admitting the existence of “conspiracies.” Ultimately, this strategy was successful despite gaping contradictions between even the coerced testimony and prosecutors’ arguments.
Choosing to cooperate with police narratives creates horrible precedents against fellow defendants and other victims of state repression down the line. Not snitching is a basic principle of solidarity. Not only does the decision to “cooperate” hurt the cause of free speech and Black and Brown communities, but it also does not really “protect” the cooperating witness.
Police at every level are known to continue to endanger cooperators. The examples of Rachel Hoffman and Andrew Sadek are instructive. Hoffman and Sadek were pressured to become informants for Tallahassee Police Department in 2008 and South East Multi-County Agency Narcotics Task Force in 2014. Both had been caught with relatively small amounts of marijuana and were shot dead shortly after becoming CIs. The sheer amount of collected messages and other personal correspondence in all of the cases indicates the presence of undercover operatives and paid informants in the various group chats and organizing spaces named in the DoJ’s indictments.
The reality of “confidential human sources” can not be over-emphasized. Recently, activists have surfaced exposing attempts to flip them into informants. This includes offering $200,000 to a Texas activist, dubbed “Doberman” in the press, after raiding her house in connection with the Prairieland indictments. In Minneapolis, probably hundreds of community supporters were held at DHS’s Whipple detention center in special cells for citizens. Despite not being charged with any crimes, these Twin Cities residents were brought into interrogation rooms, where they were offered protection and money to become informants. Filipino DACA recipient Ya’akub Vijandre had his DACA revoked and has been in ICE detention since late 2025 after refusing to become an FBI informant in 2023 and making posts in solidarity with the Holy Land and Fort Dix defendants.
Defending against the new red scare
The movements for workers’ rights, immigrant defense, Queer liberation, and Black and Indigenous self-determination need to be aware of the current escalation of corporate, police, and intelligence agents projected by the Trump administration. There also needs to be awareness that the basic targets and methods of these attacks are bipartisan. Democratic Party-controlled police forces were the vanguard of smashing Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and the Biden administration’s FBI organized the intense crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists that saw over 4000 arrests, largely on college campuses, in April 2024 alone.
Working-class and oppressed people must be vigilant in defense of our democratic rights. Our ability to organize and advocate for a better world depends not on the goodwill of this or that politician but on our organizational and political strength, in the unions and in the streets. That means taking attacks on our movement seriously, and building the largest possible political defense campaigns to expose the attacks on democratic rights by the state and to publicize the ideas the government is trying to silence.
The recent example of Tom Alter’s nationwide tour that reached dozens of cities and towns large and small is modest but instructive. Alter was fired from his tenured position at Texas State University without due process after a self-described fascist presented doctored footage to his university administration. In response, a broad coalition was established that launched an ongoing defense campaign. All over the country, attendees of local events have been activated, as unionists and community activists have become excited by the possibility of fighting back against repression through mass action.
The lessons of Alter’s defense campaign must be taken up by everyone currently in the streets organizing in defense of immigrants, Queer people, and all of the oppressed. As the bipartisan anti-speech crackdowns deepen, the best means that social movements have to resist is by taking to heart the central slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all.” The only way to protect everyone’s rights is to stand together in the face of every new attack, whether that be against Muslims targeted by FBI stings or left-wing activists accused of belonging to “antifa cells.”
Repression is meant to scare people away from advocacy. Or movements must show that any attack from the state will lead to hundreds of thousands taking up the cause of the victims of repression.
Photo: Posters supporting the Prairieland defendants outside the courthouse in Fort Worth, Texas. (Sara Van Horn)
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