Prairieland Protester: I’m Absolutely Being Imprisoned for a Political Agenda

“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.

TRANSCRIPT

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.

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 care and tenderness, and sometimes in acts of fierce protection and defense of the bodies and the rights of others from those who would seek to deprive them of those rights.

Being outside of Prairieland on the night of July Fourth was, for me, an act of radical love. You know, it was an act of solidarity with the immigrant community in the United States of America. Scripture talks about this idea that, you know, you love the alien, you love the stranger, you love the sojourner in the land, because that’s who you are, actually. You know, I’m not a Christian, per se, anymore. I am part of what I see as being an interreligious tradition of radical love that includes, you know, Christians like Dr. King and his friend Vincent Harding, and Muslims like Malcolm X and Dr. Omid Safi, and Buddhists like Thich Nhat Hanh. You know, this radical love tradition, to me, is about the idea that justice is bringing love into the public space.

The fact that this happened in Texas, in one of the most, you know, conservative parts of the country, this was the perfect storm for the Trump administration to finally be able to push through a case and to make an example out of activists and to kind of create this warning, you know, that if you resist the Trump administration in any way, if you resist police, if you resist the mass incarceration of immigrants, they are going to bury you. I am — I’m absolutely being imprisoned, you know, for a political agenda.

ANJALI KAMAT: That was Autumn Hill speaking to Democracy Now!’s Nicole Salazar from Johnson County Correctional Facility. Autumn Hill was sentenced in June to 50 years in prison on charges stemming from an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Texas.

We’re joined now by Jack Crosbie, senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine. His recent feature on the Prairieland case is headlined “Incarcerated for Life in Trump’s War on the Left,” and his latest is “How Trump’s War on the Left Will Come for the Center.”

Welcome to Democracy Now! Why did you choose to write about Autumn Hill? And tell us more about her. You had several conversations with her. And she’s been in jail for almost a year now?

JACK CROSBIE: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

I’ve been writing about left-wing movements for a number of years, and I had some experience reporting in the specific communities that Autumn was a part of. I had never met her before, but I had met other activists in the Dallas-Fort Worth scene in past stories that I had done.

But what I really feel like I’ve been tracking for several years now is a sort of organized, growing campaign by not just the Trump administration — some of this started during the Biden years — but by conservative forces in various governments around the country to create kind of a new playbook for criminalizing dissent.

And Autumn’s case, and, I think, more broadly, the case of all of the Prairieland defendants, was one of the most extreme examples of this. It was, you know, if you were a federal prosecutor trying to establish that anti-fascists were all violent, and they — and you kind of — it’s not what the facts of the case said, but if you were trying to push that narrative on an audience that doesn’t understand the full context of everything that is happening, you know, this was a gold mine for those federal prosecutors.

And so, I wanted to look further into that, and I wanted to look at the precedent that they were trying to set and what they might try to do with that precedent, and also what the ramifications of that meant for very normal, politically engaged people like Autumn Hill, who’s now serving, effectively, the rest of her life in prison.

ANJALI KAMAT: And she has been in jail since last July.

JACK CROSBIE: Yes.

ANJALI KAMAT: What’s her life in detention like? And she’s going to be transferred to a federal prison soon, is that right?

JACK CROSBIE: Yeah, the timing on when she’ll be transferred to federal prison and sort of the chain of custody is all kind of up in the air. She often does not know, you know, at all when these things are going to happen. You know, when you’re incarcerated, I think your life depends very much on people coming into your very isolated living situation and just sort of telling you how it’s going to be. And that’s very much been her life for the past year.

For a lot of her time in Johnson County, for some of her time in Tarrant County and some of her time in FMC Fort Worth, which is the only federal facility she’s been in, she’s been held in what’s called administrative segregation. Sometimes there have been reasons put for this. Sometimes it’s been because as a trans woman, because of her gender identity in certain facilities, sometimes they’re held in administrative segregation for security reasons. But what this effectively is, is it’s solitary confinement. And she’s been in different stretches in, effectively, solitary confinement for months at a time. She’s not at the moment, as far as I know. I haven’t spoken to her in a few days, but earlier this week — last week, when I spoke to her, she was in a 26-person pod in Johnson County, so, you know, not a huge general population, but a much more, I guess, normal, given the circumstances, living situation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jack Crosbie, I wanted to ask you, this whole — what did the government have to prove this charge of material support for terrorism? What did it exactly mean? And also, how were these defendants — the impact of the Charlie Kirk assassination, which happened in September of 2025? Did that have any impact on how they were prosecuted?

JACK CROSBIE: Yeah, it had a huge impact. So, one of the — the timing of this case is really interesting. It happens sort of at one of these turning points in American history.

So, the incident at the Prairieland Detention Facility happens on July 4th, 2025. Charlie Kirk isn’t shot until several weeks later. So, Autumn’s lawyer told me that in the beginning, when the charges first came down and they were arrested, this was much more a case that was focused on the shooting of a police officer. Right?

A few weeks after this, Charlie Kirk is shot. And after his shooting, the government kind of goes into overdrive in pushing to further criminalize sort of left-wing organizing within the United States. There’s a presidential memorandum that’s written and some executive orders. The most consequential of this is known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, I believe, or NSPM-7 for short. And in this memo, it basically lays out how the Trump administration, A, considers the umbrella term of “antifa” to not only be an actual contiguous group, which it is not — it is an ideology — but it considers — excuse me — considers that group to be a terrorist organization. And what NSPM-7 does, as well, is it outlines a sort of framework for how the government can go at breaking up that organization.

And what we see in Hill’s case is that after NSPM-7 comes out, the prosecution’s entire sort of narrative about what happened in the case changes, and they start referring to the defendants in Prairieland as an “antifa cell.” And that really becomes the thing that — I would say, that they’re trying to prove in this case. But as Autumn’s lawyer has explained to me, the government doesn’t really have a burden of proof in these things. NSPM-7 is not a legal framework. It’s not something that has been — you know, precedent has been set by any courts on this. It is just something that the president has said and that prosecutors can then rely on to try and push a narrative to a jury, to the public. And 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, if they say it.

ANJALI KAMAT: Jack Crosbie is a senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine. We will link to your piece, “Incarcerated for Life in Trump’s War on the Left.” We’re going to continue this discussion and post it online at democracynow.org, and we’ll learn more about material support for terrorism and how that relates to this case.

And that does it for today’s show. Democracy Now! is produced with Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nicole Salazar, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena. I’m Anjali Kamat. Thanks for joining us for another edition of Democracy Now!