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“I’m absolutely being imprisoned for a political agenda,” activist Autumn Hill tells Democracy Now! in a phone call from Texas’s Johnson County Correctional Facility, where the 30-year-old trans woman is serving a 50-year prison sentence for protesting outside the Prairieland ICE jail last July. Hill is one of nine protesters convicted of terrorism-related charges after federal prosecutors accused them of being members of an “antifa terror cell.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone writer Jack Crosbie, Hill says that she had no intention of committing violence at the protest, which ended when a police officer was shot and wounded by a fellow protester who says he fired in self-defense. No other injuries were reported, and Hill says she had already left when the shooting occurred. “It was my belief that we would go home at the end of the night to continue eating and drinking and be merry. We truly didn’t think that anything was going to go wrong. And we didn’t expect or want any violence to occur.”

For prosecutors pushing the overly broad and poorly substantiated idea that anti-fascist organizing against the Trump administration is violent and dangerous, the Prairieland case was a “gold mine,” says Crosbie. “There’s no real burden of proof. They can just say that you’re ‘antifa,’ and that becomes sort of gospel, according to the government.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

ANJALI KAMAT: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Anjali Kamat in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.

Democrats Probe Trump Administration’s Fascist Persecution of Left-Wing Groups

We end today’s show with Autumn Hill, an activist who was sentenced to 50 years in prison earlier this summer on charges stemming from an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas. In June, a federal judge in Texas handed down prison sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years to Hill and eight other protesters, who are collectively known as the Prairieland Nine. They were convicted of terrorism-related charges after federal prosecutors accused them of being members of an antifa terror cell. “Antifa” stands for anti-fascist.

During the July 4, 2025, demonstration, fireworks were set off, and a police officer was shot and wounded. Former U.S. Marine Corps reservist Benjamin Song, who was convicted of the shooting, received a hundred-year sentence. In a statement, he said he only fired his rifle because he believed the officer was about to shoot another activist. One activist who wasn’t even at the protest was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of anti-fascist magazines and pamphlets.

Our guest, Autumn Hill, says she left the protest before the police officer was shot, but she was still charged and convicted of rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiring to use and carry explosives, and using and carrying explosives. Hill and other activists had brought fireworks to stage a noise demonstration to show support for people detained in the ICE jail. She’s profiled in a recent piece in Rolling Stone headlined “Incarcerated for Life in Trump’s War on the Left.”

In a few minutes, we’ll speak to Rolling Stone reporter Jack Crosbie. But first, let’s turn to Autumn Hill in her own words. Democracy Now! spoke to her by phone last week from the Johnson County Correctional Facility.

AUTUMN HILL: Growing up Christian, I was deeply moved by, like, the radical love tradition of Jesus Christ. And I saw civil rights leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr., in American history and, like, the abolitionists of the Civil War era as being inheritors of that. I’ve always seen those as being — you know, those political goals as having a basis in a spirituality that is founded in radical love, and that is founded in seeing every human being as equal, as equally worthy of love, as equally worthy not just of love in kind of a lovey-dovey, like, feeling sort of a way, but real material love, love that works itself out in actions of........

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