Copyright truthout
On the night of July 4, 2025, Meagan Morris and Autumn Hill departed the Dallas home they shared with several others to go to an immigrant solidarity protest. This was no small thing for either of the two housemates. A 41-year-old transgender woman, Meagan had been out of work since her collapsed neck vertebrae forced her to leave her job at UPS. Autumn had little political experience save for volunteering for a local nonprofit and once marching in a Pride parade. But with the Trump administration conducting violent immigration raids across the country in service of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, both Morris and Autumn Hill wanted to head to Alvarado for a “noise demo” outside the 700-bed Prairieland Detention Center. Noise demonstrations, or noise demos, are loud, raucous protests held outside jails, prisons, or detention centers. Participants try to make enough noise to let those inside know they aren’t forgotten, using anything from loudspeakers to fireworks. They’re an attempt to disrupt the isolating, carceral logic of the state. They do not, however, typically lead to terrorism charges — until now. Some attendees at the July 4 noise demo are now facing charges including “providing material support to terrorists” and multiple counts of “attempted murder,” with FBI Director Kash Patel trumpeting unprecedented action against “Antifa-aligned anarchist violence extremists” days before President Trump signaled willingness to label Antifa a foreign terrorist organization. But before they found themselves on the front lines of Trump’s crusade against anti-fascism, the future defendants thought they were going to attend a run-of-the-mill, if boisterous, protest. “It all sounded pretty normal to me. They were going to make a lot of noise in solidarity with the ICE detainees in the Prairieland Detention Center,” said Stephanie Shiver, Morris’s wife. “This was a normal protest being planned.” “I wanted to watch some fireworks, make sure the detainees knew people on the outside cared about them. I wanted to come home,” Morris told Truthout. But she never did. According to the government’s narrative, laid out in court documents, the protest was in fact an “attack” against the Prairieland Detention Center. Correctional officers responded to vandalism and fireworks by calling on law enforcement from the Alvarado Police Department. The state alleges that someone then opened fire from a wooded area on a responding officer, who was struck in the neck and returned fire. However, a member of the DFW Support Committee who attended a federal preliminary hearing on September 30 tells Truthout that an FBI agent declined to answer a question regarding who actually shot first. The officer’s injury was apparently superficial, since local news reports said an officer suffered from a gunshot and was “treated and released” from the hospital by the following morning. This minor injury was enough for law enforcement to paint the entire protest as an “ambush” designed to lure out and open fire on police officers, as the state alleges a mysterious “assailant” did. If the entire protest was a murderous ambush, the state’s argument effectively goes, each protester should be charged with attempted murder. According to the government’s case, the defendants’ all-black clothing, handheld radios, and use of encrypted messaging apps serve as evidence, not of their being security-conscious protesters in a period of escalating political repression but, rather, of being members of a “militant enterprise.” Further evidence includes “anti-government literature” discovered at a residence that the DFW Support Committee member reports in fact functioned as a zine print shop. Right-wing media immediately labeled the participants in the autonomous action as the members of a shadowy, terroristic “Antifa cell.” Trump’s Department of Justice followed this reasoning when federal indictments were finally filed against some of the defendants this month, alleging their membership in a “North Texas Antifa Cell of at least eleven operatives.” The day after the demonstration, Shiver, Autumn Hill, her wife Lydia (who asked to be identified only by her first name), and their remaining housemates were startled by a blaring megaphone announcing the start of a raid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Lydia tells Truthout that law enforcement broke down the front door with a battering ram attached to an armored personnel carrier. They threw deafening flash-bang grenades into the single-story residential home. One narrowly missed a resident who is a new mother and her one-month-old child. Officers ransacked the house looking for items specified in the no-knock warrant including “flyers, printed materials, social media posts, and communications” expressing “anti-government ideology.” The residents were forced outside, handcuffed for hours, and taken one-by-one into patrol cars for identification. Autumn Hill was identified as a protester from the night before and taken alone into a van. “That was the last time I saw her in person,” her wife Lydia told Truthout. Morris, Autumn Hill, and nine other alleged participants in the noise demo now stand accused of attempted murder, with Hill and co-defendant Zachary Evetts now the first people to receive terrorism charges for alleged membership in Antifa. The partner of one arrestee was charged with obstruction for supposedly moving a box of political pamphlets. One of the defendants, Champagne Song, evaded police during a weeklong manhunt; four individuals were accused of helping her escape capture. Chillingly, after a support committee was organized to support the defendants, one of its members was herself arrested. An eighteenth individual was arrested on charges of aiding in the commission of terrorism earlier this week. The defendants, each of whom is being held for millions of dollars of bail, are now known collectively as the Prairieland Defendants. The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) released a statement denouncing what it described as “unchecked state repression,” emphasizing that “people present at the noise demonstration are now facing decades of prison time and years of pre-trial detention, regardless of their actions or knowledge … Multiple people arrested were not even at the demonstration on July 4th. Most defendants remain detained without formal charges … and in limbo between state and federal jurisdiction.” According to the NLG, this made finding legal representation for defendants extraordinarily difficult. Federal charges would not be filed until over three months after the alleged shooting. Lydia describes the notion that her wife, Autumn Hill, or housemate Meagan would have participated in an organized ambush of law enforcement officers as “completely ridiculous.” “They have too much to live for,” she said, “and on top of that, nothing about the state’s case makes any sense.” The state’s evidence against the defendants includes the aforementioned references to anarchist literature, standard anti-surveillance equipment, and protest banners. It also references the fact that protesters were in possession of guns — in a state with permitless carry laws where the majority of households have a firearm. Though the state’s indictment alleges that the shooting was captured on camera and that spent casings were found at the scene, absent is any apparent evidence connecting any of the defendants in particular with pulling the trigger of a weapon pointed at a police officer. Morris was arrested after a firearm was found in her vehicle away from the scene of the alleged crime, though her wife emphasizes that she carries a weapon only in self-defense. “My wife would often carry a pistol with her, even on basic dog walks,” Shiver told me. “She’s a transgender woman in the state of Texas. She’s very concerned for her personal safety; it’s a very threatening state to be a transgender person.” Additionally, Morris is “actually a very disabled woman,” Shiver told me. “She’s got 95 percent collapsed vertebrae in her neck, and the conditions that she’s in in jail are causing her excruciating pain.” Morris was denied access to painkillers or a pillow, and only began receiving hormones after she had been detained for over a month. Prevented from accessing showers and the commissary, she reports being strip-searched by male guards, sometimes multiple times a day, despite being held alone. “The conditions that she’s in in jail are causing her excruciating pain. They’re refusing to let anybody have even a basic pillow. She’s getting very little sleep, waking up multiple times in the middle of the night, feeling excruciating pain down her arm. She’s being refused her medications by the Johnson County Jail. She’s being held alone and essentially in solitary confinement,” Shiver said. Xavier de Janon, director of Mass Defense for the National Lawyers Guild, said the NLG is “very concerned” with the treatment of the Prairieland 17 given the large number of individuals charged, the surveillance and raids conducted to arrest them, and the “extreme nature of the charges” — all stemming from a political protest. He told Truthout in August that while the defendants faced serious state charges, they were yet to be federally indicted, despite the federal government publicly threatening prosecution. This left the defendants in a “legal limbo.” “This is state terror,” Lydia told me. “I don’t think we should mince words.” She and Shiver have joined the support committee that seeks to raise $50,000 for legal defense. “We on the support committee believe very strongly that this is meant as an intimidation tactic against anyone doing any kind of mutual aid work or any kind of activism in Dallas-Fort Worth,” Lydia said. “I struggle to believe that they’re going to stop at any given point. They’re not going to be satisfied.” “What this case tells people is that if they go to certain protests, a rally, a noise demo, and something happens, they will be arrested too and charged with very serious felonies,” de Janon told Truthout. “It silences dissent. It makes people scared of even showing up to a noise demonstration out of this threat that if you go, you could be arrested, disappeared, and charged with very serious charges.” “The government narrative of a big ambush? That’s baloney,” said Morris. “I have a wife, I have a house, I have found family, I have dogs. I wouldn’t put all of that at risk.”
