Federal agents pepper-spray a protester holding a sign during an enforcement operation outside the Whipple Building ICE facility in Minneapolis on Jan. 11, 2026. Photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice unsealed a federal indictment on Tuesday announcing hefty charges against 15 anti-fascist protesters for alleged actions taken in response to the brutal U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement surge in Minneapolis earlier this year.
The federal prosecutor in the case, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, warned that more arrests and charges could follow.
Once again, prosecutors are throwing extreme and overreaching charges at activists in a scrambling effort to criminalize organized, collective opposition to Trump’s most violent policies.
The Minneapolis indictment exemplifies the Trump regime’s escalating strategy: Criminalize whole political movements with claims of collective liability and “conspiracy,” and treat typical acts of protest, constitutionally protected speech, association, and political identification as criminal acts.
Call it the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach.
The indictment, Rosen said, is a part of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7 , initiative to target and prosecute leftists and anti-fascists as terrorists .
Minneapolis is not an incidental target for Trump’s Department of Justice. The city unleashed an oftentimes-inspiring response to the ICE crackdown: mutual aid organizing, confrontational protest, blockades, and strikes in response to brutality set a national example for how to fight back when federal agents descend on a city to kidnap our immigrant neighbors .
“Conspiracy” to What?
The “conspiracy” in Minneapolis according to the government, involves purported antifa activists acting with the aim of impeding ICE operations and injuring officers. The indictment names no federal officer injuries, and only minor incidents of property damage — like a protester leaving a dent in an ICE vehicle from kicking it.
Among other pieces of evidence cited for the alleged criminal conspiracy are the most basic protest strategies, including self defense, nonviolent tactics, and First Amendment-protected activity.
The use of encrypted Signal chats to communicate protest plans is cited again and again in the indictment.
The government points out that organizers employed phrases like “ become ungovernable ” — a liberatory slogan so common it has spread to cute animal memes .
Demonstrators are accused of building and advocating for the use of shields at protests outside an ICE detention facility — the sort of protests in which, in Minneapolis and nationwide, federal agents have beaten people and fired rubber bullets and tear-gas canisters directly at heads and bodies.
The indictment even claims that people tracking ICE vehicles and alerting others to their presence, as agents prowled neighborhoods looking for immigrants to kidnap, is evidence of criminal conspiracy.
That certain protest activities may have indeed impeded ICE in its efforts to ruin lives and whiten the country do not make those activities illegal. Minor violations and property damage may involve unlawful acts, but do not constitute a mass criminal conspiracy.
Certainly, none of it calls for unleashing the vast resources of the federal government against protesters. The Trump administration, however, has made its own strategy clear: Make the stakes of association with political movements dangerously high.
And if the cases fall apart ? Well then, movements have still been disrupted by lengthy , frightening , and expensive legal processes ; anti-fascist political activity is chilled nonetheless.
Nationwide Assault on the Left
The Minneapolis charges do not stand alone. Recent weeks have seen an array of federal arrests, prosecutions and raids aimed at Trump’s favored targets: Anti-fascists, Palestine-solidarity activists, and voting rights advocates.
Protesters who participated in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement were hit last week with new federal charges under the NSPM-7 initiative — despite the fact that state cases against the movement for the very same incidents have consistently collapsed .
This month, the FBI also raided the homes of numerous Palestine-solidarity activists connected to the University of Michigan , with eight activists indicted on federal charges for allegedly aiming to “intimidate” university officials in protests aimed at ending the school’s investment in Israel’s genocide. FBI agents also raided the offices of an Ohio voter-registration organization, seizing employees’ phones and computers.
These are unabashed authoritarian tactics to chill whole swathes of political activity, the likes of which have a long history in this country, from multiple Red Scares and the deadly COINTELPRO effort last century against Black-liberation struggle, to the mass repression in response to Black Lives Matter uprisings in the l…
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