In another life, Dario Sanchez taught computer science at a Dallas-area middle school. Now, he stays offline as much as possible, for fear that his court-mandated spyware may perceive some activity—a YouTube thumbnail, a Google search—as “violent,” thus breaking his bond agreement. He’s subject to random alcohol and drug tests, though he doesn’t even drink coffee. He wears long socks to dull the chafe from his ankle monitor.

Sanchez is one of 18 defendants in a vast government case surrounding a July 4 protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, Texas, a small city near Fort Worth. A police officer was shot at the protest. But, like more than a third of the other defendants, Sanchez wasn’t even there. Participants and supporters say that the event was intended as a noise demonstration, and that they lit fireworks to show solidarity with the facility’s 1,000-plus detainees. The indictments have so far claimed that the protesters “provided material support” for terrorism, categorizing the fireworks as “explosives.” Five are charged with multiple counts of attempted murder.

This case is the first of its kind since President Donald Trump, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, signed a new national security presidential memorandum, NSPM-7, that instructs federal law enforcement to investigate “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” a staggeringly broad set of “motivations” justifying police action to “disrupt” and “disband” left-wing groups before a crime occurs. After the Alvarado protest, federal officials were unusually quick to circulate mug shots and term the protest a “planned ambush,” levying the defendants’ ties to an anarchist book club and a local chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, a nonprofit gun club, to claim that they belong to an antifa cell and pull more and more people into the investigation’s dragnet.

To Xavier T. de Janon, the director of mass defense for the National Lawyers Guild, the implications of this case are alarming. If you attend a demonstration that becomes volatile due to an action taken by someone in the crowd—or, for that matter, someone in law enforcement—you could now find yourself on trial for something you had little to do with. Even if you aren’t present, as was the case with Sanchez, you run the risk of facing potentially life-ruining federal charges. If Prairieland sets the precedent, de Janon said, “the state could just accuse you of anything and say you ‘conspired’ to do [it].” The trial, in other words, could shape the future of protest under the second Trump administration—and the future of American civil liberties.

Federal prosecutors describe the July 4 demonstration not as a protest but as a deliberate terroristic “attack” carried out by antifa cell members in “black bloc” clothing: black pants and tops with face coverings and hats used to obscure their identities. Their case hinges on protesters’ use of encrypted messaging apps and the presence of firearms and first aid kits to paint the events as a broad anti-government conspiracy. Court documents and hours of CCTV and body cam footage, part of roughly six terabytes of materials that the prosecution has provided to the defense, reviewed by The New Republic, tell a much murkier story.

At approximately 10:37 p.m., a group of 11 people, faces covered, approached the Prairieland Detention Center from an overgrown tree line to the building’s........

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