Understanding the Implications of the Michigan and Prairieland Prosecutions
A Primer from the MESA Task Force on Civil and Human Rights
July 2026
This primer provides MESA members with an account of two recent federal prosecutions that may have implications for the legal risks that may attach to campus speech, protest, and association. The first arises from a protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Texas. The second, in Michigan, arises from a pro-Palestinian divestment campaign at the University of Michigan. Both prosecutions use lawful expression and association—what the defendants read, wore, published, posted, and said to one another—as the connective tissue binding individuals into a criminal conspiracy. Both unfold against the backdrop of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), and understanding that backdrop is important to assessing the significance of the cases.[1]
MESA cannot and does not provide legal advice or resources and nothing in this primer should be construed as legal advice. The basic information in this primer, drawn from trustworthy public sources, is, instead, designed to be a starting point for better understanding your rights, to assess risks, and to take precautions as needed.
Understanding NSPM-7
For some time, there has been interest on the right in using terrorism law to crush various forms of left-wing dissent, especially under the label of “antifa.” But U.S. terrorism law has long relied on a distinction between foreign and domestic groups, with the government enjoying far more latitude in dealing with the former. For example, outlawing domestic groups would run afoul of rights to association under the First Amendment, but courts have held that these protections do not apply with regard to foreign groups. Nonetheless, existing terrorism laws always had the potential to be used against domestic activists in ways that threaten First Amendment rights. For example, the crime of material support to terrorists (18 USC § 2339A) criminalizes various forms of assistance given to others in connection with carrying out specific federal offenses.[2] Such material support can include activities like fundraising, purchasing food or medicine, lending equipment, or offering a place to sleep. Moreover, convictions related to terrorism crimes in general are subject to a “terrorism enhancement” that dramatically lengthens prison sentences.
Against this backdrop, the Trump administration issued NPSM-7 (titled, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”) on September 25, 2025, a proclamation that does not create any new legal authority, but directs federal agencies, including the FBI, Department of Justice, Treasury, and IRS to push their existing powers as far as possible to target nonprofits and civil rights groups.
What gives NSPM-7 its reach is the breadth of the views it targets, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” These are descriptions of views that should be protected under the First Amendment. They are also elastic enough to encompass a vast range of ordinary political dissent. As the ACLU notes, “NSPM-7 is a deliberate attempt to sow fear and intimidate and silence opposition to the president’s abuses.”
In accordance with NSPM-7, the Department of Justice issued a memorandum in December 2025 that directed prosecutors to prioritize investigation of “anti-fascist” actors and those holding “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” The FBI and IRS have since announced a joint command center through which IRS criminal investigators examine nonprofit organizations. The FBI’s budget request for 2027 disclosed a new NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, drawing personnel from ten agencies to identify and prosecute domestic networks. The two prosecutions described below are early products of this environment.
The Prairieland Case
The Prairieland case arose from a protest on July 4, 2025 outside an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas. Participants described the event as a nighttime noise demonstration intended to express solidarity with the people detained inside. They brought a bullhorn and fireworks; some also carried legal firearms, body armor, and medical equipment. During the protest, participants damaged vehicles and a guard structure. When police arrived, one protester fired an AR-style rifle and wounded an Alvarado police officer.
The government has charged 22 people in connection with the protest. The protester accused of shooting the police officer was sentenced to 100 years. So far, eight other defendants convicted at trial have been given prison sentences of 30 to 70 years for material support, while others pleading guilty have received lesser sentences. The government has trumpeted these as the first post-NPSM-7 convictions of individuals “affiliated with Antifa.”
Defendants were convicted on charges including providing material support to terrorists and explosives-related offenses, with ordinary fireworks presented as the explosives in question. The material-support theory rested heavily on the facts that the defendants wore black clothing and communicated using the encrypted application Signal. Prosecutors described the group as a “North Texas Antifa Cell,” and presented their black clothing, encrypted communications, legally possessed firearms, political slogans, participation in an anarchist book club, and antifascist pamphlets and magazines as evidence of a coordinated terrorist enterprise, even as they offered little direct proof of antifa affiliation. Although several defendants were acquitted of the charges that would have held them responsible for the shooting of the officer, the sentences imposed under terrorism enhancements were extraordinary. Protestors Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, Ines Soto, and Elizabeth Soto each received fifty years, terms that exceed the longest sentences handed down for the January 6 assault on the Capitol.
The two sentences that best capture the prosecution’s logic were imposed on people who were not present at the shooting. Maricela Rueda received seventy years, and her husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, received thirty—both for conduct that occurred after the fact. Sanchez Estrada was not charged with rioting, material support, or the shooting. After Rueda’s arrest, he moved a box containing antifascist magazines and pamphlets from their home to another location. Prosecutors charged him with concealing documents and conspiring with Rueda to conceal evidence. Moving evidence with intent to obstruct an investigation is a crime regardless of the content of that evidence. In this case, it is difficult to separate the outcome from the content because the box mattered to the government precisely because it contained antifascist and anti-government literature that it used to portray proof of a terrorist identity. The issue is not that the obstruction was punished, but that the severity and political meaning of the punishment are inseparable from the protected material that was moved. As the assistant U.S. attorney put it at one sentencing, “the very crux here is their firm belief that the use of violence is justified,” a formulation that locates the offense in belief as much as in conduct.
The Michigan Case
On June 10, 2026, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Michigan unsealed a sixty-three-page indictment charging eight pro-Palestinian activists, current students and alumni of the University of Michigan, with conspiring to transmit threats as part of a campaign demanding that the university divest from companies connected to Israel. The indictment alleges that members of the group researched university officials, vandalized homes and businesses, left simulated corpses on the lawn of one regent (Sarah Hubbard), spray-painted the home, car, and law office of another regent (Jordan Acker), and discussed in private messages harming officials and their families. The alleged conduct spans from late 2023 onward. Two defendants face a witness-tampering conspiracy charge, and one is accused of destroying electronic evidence. These are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent.
Two features of the procedural history deserve emphasis. First, the case was brought federally after earlier state-level prosecutions were reportedly dropped by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel amid concerns about the evidence and about political pressure. The federal indictment thus revived, under federal law, conduct that state authorities had declined to pursue. Second, at the bond hearings on June 12, 2026, prosecutors sought pretrial detention but acknowledged under questioning from Magistrate Judge Anthony Patti that there was no evidence the defendants had taken concrete steps to carry out the violent acts discussed in their messages, and that no additional criminal conduct had been identified since 2025. Judge Patti released four defendants on bond under strict conditions, noting that they were not charged with terrorism. “It was terrorizing,” he said, “but not terrorism.”
What makes this case unusual is the government’s decision to transform conduct that could ordinarily be addressed under state vandalism, trespass, or harassment law into a sweeping federal threat-conspiracy case. The indictment charges no terrorism offense, no assault, and no hate crime, yet it repeatedly invokes Hamas, “martyrs,” the Weather Underground, and other terrorism-associated imagery. The case also folds lawful divestment advocacy, protest slogans, social-media posts, and campus organizing into its account of the alleged conspiracy. This approach risks allowing political affiliation and rhetoric to substitute for proof that each defendant knowingly agreed to communicate a legally actionable threat. The line between a true threat, which the First Amendment does not protect, and protected (even if militant) political speech is being blurred by the prosecutors in the case.
Implications for Students, Scholars, and Institutions of Higher Education
Taken together, the two cases describe a method whose consequences have the potential to reach well beyond these particular defendants. Vandalism and true threats are not protected by the First Amendment, and nothing here suggests otherwise. But advocacy, protest organizing, reading and publishing, and associational activity are protected, even when the government regards them as controversial or extreme. When prosecutors present protected expression as evidence of participation in a criminal conspiracy, they make membership, association, and belief into elements of criminal exposure, and they allow political identity to stand in for individualized proof. Although material support prosecutions require alleging a connection to some alleged crime (for example, in the Prairieland case, the shooting provided the hook for the prosecution), the problem is that the government has enormous latitude to treat various protest actions as potentially criminal. The potential implications below should be considered with this in mind.
For students, scholars, and faculty who are US citizens, this may have an unduly chilling effect. The government has used NFPM-7 in two cases where the activist cause is one the government disfavors, such as opposition to immigration enforcement or support for Palestinian rights, to recast engagement in a lawful activit— like joining a protest group, using militant rhetoric, attending a demonstration, belonging to a reading group, associational activity, or communicating with other activists—as evidence of a conspiracy. The conspiracy and material-support theories on display in these cases are capacious enough in principle, and in the way they focus on networks rather than actors, to reach those who advise student organizations, sign divestment or solidarity letters, speak at rallies, or occupy institutional roles connected to campus organizing. While it is important to be informed about this developing prosecutorial strategy, it is also important to remember that the Prairieland case involved the shooting of an officer, and we do not yet know the outcome in the Michigan case. Students, scholars, and faculty should be aware of these cases while also keeping in mind that it is too soon to assess the long-term implications of the memorandum.
For international students and scholars, these prosecutions may be more worrying in light of the additional complication of immigration status. Several defendants in these cases are entangled with travel and immigration collateral effects. For non-citizens the consequences of investigation, charge, or even association can include visa revocation and removal, layered atop any criminal jeopardy and triggered at a far lower evidentiary threshold. Moreover, this dimension of concern intersects with a separate set of federal initiatives aimed specifically at pro-Palestinian campus speech.
For institutions, these cases arrive amid intensified pressure on colleges and universities. Disciplinary processes increasingly run alongside, and can feed, criminal investigations in ways colleges and universities must take into consideration. Federal task forces operate on and around campuses and decisions about cooperation, data-sharing, and discipline may now carry consequences for community members’ legal exposure If university and college administrators frame controversial speech and associational activity as a security threat to be managed—as when the University of Michigan used private investigators to surveil pro-Palestine student activists—they place members of their community at further risk and undermine the necessary conditions for scholarship and teaching on the Middle East, as well as on every other subject deemed contested by the government.
Trump’s Orders Targeting Anti-Fascism Aim to Criminalize Opposition (Brennan Center for Justice, October 9, 2025)
How NSPM-7 Seeks to Use “Domestic Terrorism” to Target Nonprofits and Activists (ACLU, October 15, 2025)
Civil Society Rights & Resiliency Resources (Charity & Security Network)
Red State Governors Are Designating Civil Rights Groups as Terrorists (Knight First Amendment Institute, February 2, 2026)
[1] The Michigan case is at an early, pretrial stage—meaning that the allegations are not proven facts and the defendants are presumed innocent. The Prairieland defendants have been convicted and sentenced, but their cases are on appeal. The factual circumstances concerning the cases, sentences, and procedural postures described here reflect the record as of June 2026 and may change.
[2] This should not be confused with the better-known offense of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations (18 U.S.C. §2339B), which does not require linking that support to any specific crime.