This week, Minnesota federal prosecutors handed down a blockbuster indictment of 15 activists involved in efforts to resist Operation Metro Surge, part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that flooded 2,700 federal agents into the Twin Cities to target Somali communities. Eleven of the 15 activists are charged only with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer.
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This article was originally published by Truthout on June 23, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
On Tuesday, eight Texas anti-ICE protesters convicted on trumped-up terrorism charges earlier this year received decades-long sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years.
Five of the defendants received 50-year sentences after being convicted of rioting and “providing material support to terrorists.” One received a 30-year sentence, and another a 70-year sentence. And Benjamin Song, convicted of attempted murder of an officer in addition to rioting and “providing material support to terrorists,” was sentenced to 100 years in prison.
The eight protesters were convicted based on a July 4, 2025 protest at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where the activists used fireworks and noise-making to protest the immigrant jail and Trump’s anti-immigrant detentions. Police arrived at the scene, and later claimed that one of the protesters opened fire on an officer, who also shot at protesters. The next day, the FBI began raiding homes, and arresting and detaining protesters.
One of the defendants, sentenced to 30 years in prison, was not even present at the July 4 protest.
These sentences are far longer than any of the prison sentences given to January 6 rioters, the longest of which was 22 years for a member of the Proud Boys, a far right, neo-fascist militant group that embraces white nationalism, Islamophobia, and misogyny. The 22-year sentence was commuted to time served after President Donald Trump pardoned the Proud Boys member, along with some 1,500 other January 6 rioters.
But the Prairieland defendants, on the other hand, have been smeared by prosecutors as part of an “antifa
Mamuka Artmeladze, a 43-year-old Georgian national, was found dead on June 4, 2026, in federal immigration custody. Though his name did not appear in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) online death records by the time this article was published, Artmeladze was reported as the 50th person to die in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office. One of two recent deaths at a…
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Republicans are quietly constructing a punishment regime to prepare for post-democratic governance. They just don’t want you to know about it yet.
That was our takeaway from a recent exchange with Republican Congressman Mike Lawler on the steps of Capitol Hill. We asked him why Republicans were proposing an additional $70 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol—funding that the party eventually passed through a process called reconciliation, a maneuver that allowed them to bypass the filibuster in the Senate without Democratic support.
The funding, now approved, was proposed without any details. A perplexing omission, given that the Big Beautiful Bill had already bestowed an eye-popping $140 billion on the controversial immigration agencies, at least $100 billion of which remains unspent, according to a report by the Senate Budget Committee Democratic staff.
So, we asked him, “What was all this money for?”
“Are you for abolishing ICE?” Lawler shot back. We ignored his question and tried to push for specifics. He offered none.
But his non-answer was revealing. The lack of details could be written off as politics as usual, but our recent reporting suggests something more insidious.
That’s because the plan to provide nearly unlimited funding to ICE and CBP without explicit justification is just one part of a broader project that we have watched unfold on Capitol Hill. All together, it’s a push to construct the most expansive punishment regime in recent American history. And it’s a necessary component of the authoritarian overhaul pursued by the Trump administration.
The funding for ICE is just a down payment on critical infrastructure necessary to make it work.
Punishment, as we’ve observed, is currently at
Damon Hininger, the former CEO of Tennessee-based private prison operator CoreCivic, is interested in being Tennessee’s next U.S. senator when the seat opens up. Hininger publicly acknowledged for the first time that he wants to replace U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn if she wins her bid for governor this year, according to the Nashville Business Journal. Since 2024, when he chaired the state…
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We sit down with Dr. Steven Thrasher to talk about his new book, The Overseer Class; how our police state today evolved from yesterday’s slave plantations; and why Dr. Thrasher has been blacklisted from academia after defending his students at Northwestern University during the Palestine encampment movement in 2024.
Guests:
Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, is the author of The Overseer Class: A Manifesto and the award-winning book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, which was a New York Times’s Paperback Row Editors’ Pick, named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews, was longlisted for both the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Literature, and won the 2023 POZ Award for Best in Literature. He is also the inaugural Daniel Renberg Chair for Social Justice in Reporting at the Medill School of Journalism and a faculty member of Northwestern University’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. An internationally renowned scholar on race, gender, and infectious disease, Dr. Thrasher’s writing has been published by the Guardian, Atlantic, New York Times, Scientific American, Literary Hub, and in many academic journals.
Credits:
Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
So I did stand between the students and the cops. I got beat up for it and I survived. It wasn’t that bad at the time and the students had an encampment for five days. But then a few weeks later, Congress called our president to the Hill and Congressman Jim Bank