Why the Prairieland case is more about disproportionate justice than it is the First Amendment

Draconian sentences handed down against protesters at an ICE facility in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are being characterized as an abridgment of their First Amendment rights. The reason: Among the bill of particulars used against them in court were anarchist zines in their possession that they tried to hide from authorities.

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But though the case raises serious questions about the proportionality of their sentences, it’s also a lot more complicated than that given that a police officer who responded to the scene was shot in the neck by one of the protesters. Benjamin Song, who was convicted of attempted murder, was sentenced to 100 years in prison. The officer recovered.

The protest, held at the Prairieland detention facility last July, became something of a social media sensation recently as the result of an article in The Guardian. Reporter Lex McMenamin focused on Elizabeth Soto, who was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Her husband, Ines Soto, will be sentenced on July 1. “They didn’t like my book club,” she told McMenamin, who wrote:

After a three-week trial, a jury found eight of nine protesters guilty of “providing material support to terrorists”, among other crimes. For the Sotos, this “material support” included owning a “printing press” used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club, the federal government argued. The couple had already left the scene by the time guns were drawn. All eight of the defendants sentenced so far have received unusually harsh sentences — 30 to 100 years — essentially life in prison.

The Sotos were not on the scene when the shooting took place. But according to a press release by the U.S. Department of Justice, they were convicted of riot, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and using and carrying an explosive. And this: providing material support to terrorists, “including property, services, training, communications equipment, weapons, explosives, personnel (including themselves), and transportation.”

That last charge would appear to cover the zines. As I said, it’s complicated. The Guardian story offers some disturbing details about governmental overreach in the Trump regime’s crackdown against the loose coalition of left-wing activists that it calls “antifa.” But I couldn’t find any direct evidence suggesting that this is truly an outrage against the First Amendment. David A. Graham put it this way in The Atlantic:

Some of the Prairieland charges are ones that any administration in American history would have brought, and rightly so. Anyone who vandalizes government property, fires guns around an ICE facility, or attacks a police officer can and should be charged with crimes. Whether one believes that the activists’ motivations were righteous is more or less irrelevant. Dissent is not without risks; that’s the point.

Yet Graham rightly points out that the government’s case leans too hard on the zines in the protesters’ possession in making its case, writing, “Federal prosecutors’ attempts to criminalize materials critical of the government because of an alleged nexus to terror is troubling no matter how one feels about the content or cause.” In other words, this is a gray-area situation with regard to free speech.

There’s one other aspect to the Prairieland case that is truly outrageous: the matter of proportionality. The insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, received far lighter sentences, and of course they’ve now been released by Donald Trump. Many of them have committed new crimes since receiving their undeserved freedom.

“Violence directed against anyone demands justice, but it demands justice that is equal and proportionate,” Graham writes. “The sentences in Texas make it extremely difficult for anyone to pretend that that’s what exists in the United States right now.”