DOJ says a “North Texas Antifa Cell” attacked a Texas ICE facility on July 4, two men now indicted with a terrorism offense

Federal prosecutors have charged two North Texas men accused of helping orchestrate a violent July 4 attack on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Alvarado, alleging the pair were part of an “Antifa cell” that plotted to target law enforcement officers with gunfire and explosives.

Cameron Arnold and Zachary Evetts were federally charged with providing material support to terrorists, attempted murder of officers and employees of the U.S., and discharging a firearm in relation to a crime of violence, according to the indictment from the Department of Justice.

The charges come after President Donald Trump signed an executive order labeling antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.”  

The night of July 4, several masked individuals dressed in black, some of them armed, arrived at the Prairieland ICE detention facility, vandalizing vehicles and security cameras in the parking lot, according to authorities. When an Alvarado police officer tried to engage with a person from the group, an unknown number of people opened fire. At least one bullet struck the officer in the neck, police said.

What is antifa? 

The DOJ said in the indictment that “Antifa is a militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to a revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology, which explicitly calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government, law enforcement authorities and the system of law.”

The indictment claims the group that Arnold and Evetts were a part of did extensive preplanning before the incident, and that Arnold trained others on firearm use and close-quarters combat.

The group was heavily armed with over 50 firearms that were purchased in Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, Dallas and elsewhere, according to the indictment. The document also noted that Arnold allegedly built numerous AR-platform rifles, some of which he distributed to his co-defendants, and at least one of which featured a binary trigger, allowing the gun to shoot at a higher rate by causing two bullets to fire with each trigger cycle.

Arnold, Evetts and others also used an encrypted messaging app to coordinate their moves, according to the DOJ. The investigation found that one member of the group wrote “I’m done with peaceful protests” and “Blue lives don’t matter” as part of those conversations.

A federal judge in Fort Worth previously decided that Arnold and Evetts must remain behind bars, along with six others tied to the case.

Short for “anti-fascist,” antifa activism can be traced back to antiracists who opposed the activities of members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, according to a June 2020 report from the Congressional Research Service. The report describes antifa as “decentralized” and lacking a “unifying organizational structure or detailed ideology,” consisting of “independent, radical, like-minded groups and individuals” who largely support principles of anarchism, socialism and communism.

“There is no single organization called antifa. That’s just not the way these activists have ever organized themselves,” Michael Kenney, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied antifa, recently told CBS News. “There’s tremendous variation inside that movement, even on issues like political violence.”

The FBI has warned about violence perpetrated by antifa adherents, and in 2017, then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress that the bureau was looking into “a number of what we would call anarchist extremist investigations, where we have properly predicated subjects who are motivated to commit violent criminal activity on kind of an antifa ideology,” according to CRS.

Defense argues “antifa thinking” is not a crime

Defense attorneys for Arnold and Evetts argued that anti-government beliefs and “antifa thinking” are not grounds for a crime.

They downplayed their clients’ role in the Fourth of July incident, discounting the certainty of gunshot residue evidence, arguing that owning guns is legal, and laying the majority of the blame on Benjamin Hanil Song, one of 17 people initially arrested in connection with the attack.

One defense attorney argued that their client did not know what was going to happen that night, thinking they were just driving to protest. 

July 4 attack at a Texas immigration detention

The attack occurred around 11 p.m. on July 4 outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility, which houses between 1,000 and 2,000 immigration detainees.

According to the Alvarado Police Department, officers responding to the scene saw a person carrying what appeared to be a firearm. When one officer attempted to engage, multiple suspects opened fire

Body camera footage captured the chaos as gunfire erupted. One officer was struck in the neck and flown to a Fort Worth hospital. He was treated and later released.  

Authorities said more than 50 weapons were seized in connection with the group. Additional firearms were recovered days later when Song was found hiding in a Dallas apartment.