On June 23, 2026, eight people were sentenced in a federal courthouse in Texas for what happened outside an immigration jail on the Fourth of July the year before. One of them, Benjamin Song, shot a police officer in the neck. He got 100 years.
The other seven did not shoot anyone. They got 30 to 70 years each. Added up, the Justice Department announced a combined 450 years — and it led the press release with the fact that this was "the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump's executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025."
Eight months before that executive order existed, Clay Higgins put his name on a resolution asking Congress to do the same thing.
The resolution
H.Res. 26 is one page of "whereas" clauses and one sentence of resolving. Its title says the whole thing: "Deeming certain conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization."
It was submitted on January 9, 2025 by Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Higgins was one of four original cosponsors, alongside Andy Biggs of Arizona, Mary Miller of Illinois, and Wesley Hunt of Texas. A fifth Republican, Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona, added his name on October 21, 2025 — a month after Trump had already signed the executive order, and three months after the Prairieland shooting.
The resolution never got a vote. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee on the day it was submitted and has not moved since. But it tells you exactly what these members wanted, and Trump gave it to them by executive order eight months later.
Here is what that designation turned out to mean in practice.
Fifty years for bringing fireworks
Rolling Stone spent weeks on the phone with one of the defendants, a 30-year-old trans woman named Autumn Hill — listed in Justice Department filings under the name Cameron Arnold. She went to the July 4 protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. She brought fireworks. She left before the shooting.
A jury acquitted her of attempted murder. It acquitted her of the firearms charges. Her lawyer, Cody Cofer, told the court there was no evidence she had ever held a gun, trained with Song, or even carried a can of spray paint.
She was convicted of riot, of two explosives counts for the fireworks, and of "providing material support to terrorists." Chief U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor sentenced her to 50 years.
Another defendant, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not at the protest at all. He moved a box of anti-fascist literature from one residence to another. The Justice Department charged that as corruptly concealing a document. He got 30 years.
Fifty years is 28 years longer than the longest sentence ever handed down for January 6. That record belonged to Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, who got 22 years for seditious conspiracy — and who walked out of prison a free man on January 21, 2025, hours after Trump's clemency order.
What Higgins wrote to Trump
Twenty-seven days before he signed the antifa resolution, Higgins sent Trump a letter. It is posted on his own House website, dated December 13, 2024, addressed to the Mar-a-Lago Club.
In it, he describes the people prosecuted for January 6 as:
"American citizens who had dared to engage their First Amendment right to challenge the oppression of election integrity"
In one page, he uses the phrase "J6 victims" eight times — four of those as "J6 victims of political persecution." And he lays out what he wants done, in order:
"Commute the sentences to time served for every J6 victim who has been adjudicated by the biased Biden administration."
"Dismiss all pending adjudications of J6 victims of political persecution."
"Dismiss all ongoing investigations into J6 victims of political persecution."
Not a review. Not case by case. All pending cases dismissed, all investigations closed, roughly 3,000 of them. He adds: "Personally, I see no problem with a full pardon of all J6 victims of political persecution under Biden."
Trump did it on January 20, 2025 — about 1,500 pardons and commutations, including people convicted of assaulting police officers. Two days later, Higgins was still posting about the mistreatment of what he calls the J6 political prisoners.
He is not shy about any of this. His office keeps a standing page on his House site titled "J6 Investigative Efforts," cataloging four years of letters, hearings and TV hits. It includes a January 2022 letter demanding "Humane Treatment for January 6 Prisoners." In September 2025, Speaker Mike Johnson appointed him to the new Republican-run subcommittee reinvestigating January 6.
The same man, the same month
Line the two documents up.
In December, Higgins argues that Americans who forced their way into the Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election were exercising a First Amendment right, that every case against them should be dropped, and that prosecuting them at all was persecution.
In January, he signs a resolution declaring that an entire political philosophy — anti-fascism — is a terrorist organization, and that people who hold it are terrorists.
Higgins is not a bystander to the first half of that. He voted to throw out Arizona's electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and Pennsylvania's the next day. So did Biggs. So did Mary Miller. All three voted to do by ballot what the crowd outside was trying to do by force, and all three later signed the paper declaring the other side's protesters terrorists.
When U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould announced the Prairieland sentences, he said the defendants' acts "were a far cry from a peaceful protest or First Amendment expression." That is the exact standard Higgins refused to apply to January 6.
Why this reaches past antifa
The Prairieland case had real violence in it. An officer was shot. Nobody has to pretend otherwise.
The problem is what the terrorism label does to everyone standing nearby. Hill was tried not only for what she did but for who she knew. And the framework Trump built around that label does not stop at people who show up to protests.
Three days after the antifa executive order, the White House issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. It directs the government to look for a list of "common recurrent motivations and indicia," which it spells out as "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity" along with "extremism on migration, race, and gender." Those are opinions, not crimes.
It also tells investigators to go after "institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations," to use RICO — the racketeering law written for the mob — and it orders the IRS Commissioner to make sure "no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism."
That is a charity-funding shutoff switch, and Congress has been trying to build its own version of it for two years. We wrote about the bill that would let one official strip any nonprofit's tax-exempt status without ever showing it the evidence — it passed the House in 2024 and was quietly reintroduced in December 2025.
Katherine Tomaszewski of the Charity and Security Network, an NGO founded after 9/11 to track how terrorism law gets used, put it plainly to Rolling Stone: the weaponization of these statutes isn't new, the targets have expanded. "It doesn't matter what your politics are," she said. "Republican or Democrat, you should be worried about that kind of power."
Higgins should know. He has spent four years arguing that a president's Justice Department went after people for their politics. He is right that it is a terrible thing to do to Americans. He simply does not think it counts when the Americans are the other kind.
It is a habit with him. Last September, the day after Charlie Kirk was killed, Higgins promised to use his congressional authority to get people banned from the internet, blacklisted from doing business, and stripped of their driver's licenses over what they had posted — two and a half years after voting for a bill that made it illegal for federal officials to lean on companies to take down speech.
He is not alone in the arithmetic, either. Republicans across the House cheered the January 6 pardons in language they would never extend to anyone else — one North Carolina congressman called the mass pardon "leadership rooted in honesty and accountability" in the same statement he used to condemn Joe Biden's pardons.
Autumn Hill is 30. Her sentence runs 50 years, which means her next taste of freedom could come at 80. Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 and walked out in January 2025.
Source
Trump's War on 'Antifa' Sends Protesters to Prison for Decades, Rolling Stone, August 2026. Illustration by Rolling Stone; images via Mehmet Eser/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images and Adobe Stock.
