On the morning of July 6, 2025, Maricela “Mari” Rueda called her husband, Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada, from the Johnson County Jail in northeastern Texas. On the call, they touched base about day-to-day family responsibilities while she was in custody, like retrieving her car and taking care of the couple’s pets and the home they shared with Mari’s daughter. But according to federal prosecutors, this conversation was nothing less than a criminal plot, ensnaring the couple in the first counter-terrorism case in U.S. history brought against purported members of antifa.
Two days prior, Mari, a poet training to be a postpartum doula, had attended a noise demonstration outside Prairieland Detention Facility, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Alvarado, Texas. The action—at which protesters are said to have spray-painted anti-ICE messages on vehicles and a guard structure and set off fireworks—was meant to show solidarity with the detainees inside. By the end, nine people, including Mari, had been arrested for the alleged attempted murder of a local police officer who sustained a minor injury during the demonstration. Officials claim that attendee Benjamin Hanil Song, a former Marine reservist, opened fire, hitting the officer in the neck. The officer’s supposed injury required only a few hours of treatment in a local hospital.
By the time of Des and Mari’s phone conversation—two days after her arrest, one day before his—the demonstration and alleged attack against the police officer had already attracted the attention of the Trump Administration and its orbit. Less than twenty-four hours after the protest, the FBI used flash-bang grenades and a vehicle-mounted battering ram to raid the shared house where co-defendant Meagan Morris lived, arresting another alleged protest attendee. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said protesters who perpetrated an “attack” on the ICE facility would face the “full weight of the law.” Far-right influencer Andy Ngo characterized the action at the Prairieland Detention Center as the work of “Antifa and far-left extremists” who have been “urging people to murder police and ICE agents.”
Federal prosecutors labeled the entire protest a coordinated “ambush” by a shadowy “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives”—similar to how the President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice accused Alex Pretti and Renée Good of domestic terrorism. All alleged protest attendees were hit with firearms, riot, and attempted murder charges, carrying a maximum penalty of life in prison. According to the federal government, the protesters at Prairieland and their alleged associates are also domestic terrorists, with Mari one of eight protesters charged with providing material support to terrorists. In November, five of the defendants pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges.
Free Des Support Committee
Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada
Des, a thirty-nine-year-old tattoo artist and former Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who received lawful permanent resident status through his marriage to Mari, has now become a target of federal prosecutors as well. In October, they charged him with corruptly concealing a document or record as well as conspiracy to conceal documents, for which he now faces the possibility of forty years and prison and deportation. His criminal activity, prosecutors allege, amounts to having moved a box of zines from his parents’ house to a residence in Dallas after getting off the phone with his wife on July 6. According to prosecutors, when Mari talked to Des about household maintenance during their phone call, she was providing surreptitious instructions for him to conceal evidence by moving the box—an allegation Des denies. And the box of zines, they allege, constitute nothing less than nefarious “Antifa materials.” Following his arrest, ICE posted on X that he had been found with “literal insurrectionist propaganda,” characterizing forms of anarchism as “the most serious form of domestic (non-jihadi) terrorist threat.”
The political education zines—which covered a variety of topics, including ecological resistance at Standing Rock, post-Occupy Wall Street protest tactics, and anarchist politics—are all widely available online and at community spaces and bookstores. But the FBI claims they constituted evidence of “insurrection planning”—which is why on July 7, an FBI surveillance team that had been following Des pulled him over and arrested him at gunpoint for conspiring with Mari to conceal the evidence and then carrying out the plan.
Of the nearly two dozen people targeted by the Department of Justice in relation to the noise demonstration, Des is one of several who didn’t even attend. Dario Sanchez is accused of tampering with evidence by removing someone from Signal and Discord chats. Janette Goering gave someone a Faraday bag, a signal-blocking device, weeks before the action; she is now charged with aiding in the commission of terrorism. After the DFW Support Committee formed in solidarity with the arrestees, member Susan Kent was arrested for providing material support to terrorists. Lucy Fowlkes became the nineteenth Prairieland defendant in early January, six months after the demonstration. After refusing to assist prosecutors, she was arrested for hindering prosecution of terrorism.
“These defendants, many of whom were not even there that night, are now being faced with terribly oppressive charges that are basically life-ruining,” Meagan Knuth, president of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, tells The Progressive.
“The whole thing feels like anyone in its orbit gets sucked in,” adds Alma, a friend of Des and member of a support committee dedicated to him who asked to be identified by first name only.
Federal prosecutors’ emphasis on the political content of the zines in particular has raised alarm bells across the United States. For moving the box of supposed “Antifa materials,” the Justice Department is seeking to incarcerate Des for up to forty years before deporting him from a community where he has deep ties. As in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump Administration is threatening to revoke Des’s immigration status because of dissenting political speech. Prosecutors have told him he will be stripped of his green card and deported—even if he’s acquitted in court.
“The Trump Administration is signaling that if you possess political writings in your home or vehicle—such as a ‘No Kings’ anti-Trump poster or a pamphlet critical of capitalism and demanding its end—there is a chance you could get thrown in federal prison and placed in removal proceedings,” the National Lawyers Guild stated in a November news release.
The effective criminalization of dissident political literature portends nothing less than what incarcerated writer Jeremy Busby called “prison-style free-speech censorship” for the nation at large.
“This includes claiming antiestablishment ideologies and literature must be punished because they pose nebulous risks to those with government-approved political views,” Busby wrote in The Intercept. “It also includes the logical next step: criminalizing efforts to keep authorities from finding out that one holds those ideologies or reads that literature.”
Des, Mari, and seven co-defendants were supposed to go on trial starting on February 17. But the judge declared a mistrial after Mari’s defense attorney, MarQuetta Clayton, wore a shirt honoring the late Reverend Jesse Jackson to the first day of jury selection. Wearing a shirt honoring the civil rights leader was just as inappropriate, according to Judge Mark Pittman, as wearing “a shirt with Donald Trump riding an eagle.” Jury selection began again on February 22.
Des had been planning on working at a new tattoo shop that opened the month after his arrest. He is the stepfather to Mari’s twelve-year-old daughter, who he describes as a “really cool kid” who has been living full-time with her father while both her other parents are incarcerated. While working as a teacher’s assistant in a public school in Plano, Texas, Des says he founded the only hip-hop club for kids in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area. After a local ICE raid following Trump’s first Inauguration, Des organized a workshop for immigrant parents to assign temporary guardianship status for their kids should they get deported.
“The perfect way to describe Des is that he’s just extremely selfless,” says Stephanie Martinez, a close friend who visited the unfinished tattoo shop with Des the day before the demonstration at Prairieland. “He just looked like he was in a place where he was ready to excel moving forward. And then, sadly, everything happened.”
More than 160 organizations have signed on to a letter demanding Des’s immediate release. As the trial approaches, supporters are fundraising to pay for an immigration attorney for Des and legal representation for all of the Prairieland defendants. The stepfather, artist, and lover of nature and animals will remain incarcerated until then, and perhaps for decades afterwards.
“It’s not the best place,” Des says of the facility he is being held in, “but we get to see the sunlight once a day. Sometimes five days a week.”