A group of activists gathered outside the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas last July 4 with fireworks and plans to mount more than a polite protest.

They were there for less than an hour before things took a turn: A police officer was wounded by a gunshot.

Only one member of the group is accused of pulling a trigger, but 19 people went to jail on state and federal charges. Attorney General Pam Bondi labeled the defendants terrorists, and FBI Director Kash Patel bragged that it was the first time alleged antifa activists had been hit with terror charges.

Months later, the Trump administration recycled the label to smear Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Minneapolis residents who were shot and killed by federal immigration agents. They were supposedly dangerous left-wing agitators, in Pretti’s case legally carrying what the government said was a “dangerous gun.” The videos of Good and Pretti’s killings disproved the administration’s lies.

Unlike the Minneapolis shootings, the full events at Prairieland were not caught on video. Instead, a jury in federal court will hear evidence against nine defendants at a trial starting next week, which will serve as the first major courtroom test of the Trump administration’s push to label left-wing activists as domestic terrorists.

“I wonder how they are going to make it stick when their attempts at framing Alex Pretti didn’t work.”

Court hearings in the case have taken place under heavy security, with police caravans whisking defendants to and from an Art Deco courthouse in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. Inside the courtroom, straight-backed officers maintain a perimeter.

The odds once looked long for the Prairieland group given the conservative jury pool and the seven defendants who pleaded guilty before trial, including several who are cooperating with the prosecution. The protests, crackdowns, and killings in Minneapolis, however, may have shifted perceptions of what happened seven months earlier in Texas.

“When they were crafting this indictment, they came up with that there is such a thing as a ‘north Texas antifa cell,’” said Xavier de Janon, a lawyer representing one defendant in state court. “I wonder how they are going to make it stick when their attempts at framing Alex Pretti didn’t work, fell flat on its face.”

Jurors in the Prairieland case will be faced with key questions about protest in the Trump era. Are guns at protests a precaution or a provocation? Can the government succeed in using First Amendment-protected literature, such as anarchist zines, to win convictions? And how far can activists go when they believe their country is sliding into fascism?

Making Noise

Federal investigators and a support committee for the defendants offered starkly different takes on the purpose of the late-night gathering at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.

For the feds, it was a planned ambush of........

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