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@cdarwin@c.im
2026-06-24 13:50 UTC
It’s the day after Mother’s Day, the first one Elizabeth Soto has spent apart from her three children.
Sitting in jail in Wichita Falls, Texas, her face is washed out by the overhead fluorescent lighting,
and her dingy jumpsuit blends into the cinder block walls surrounding her.
Speaking through a glass separator, she tells me she celebrated the holiday with her children over the jail’s video-call system while they had dinner at their grandmother’s.
“I’ve been a full-time mother all of their lives,” she said. “I’ve never been away from them.”
Soto’s children have not visited her in jail, which lies on Texas’s northern border near Oklahoma, hours from their home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Elizabeth Soto has only seen her husband, Ines Soto, once over the past year, the longest they’ve spent apart since they first started dating more than 20 years ago.
He is being held in a federal prison more than 100 miles away.
🔥On Tuesday, Elizabeth was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison;
Ines’s sentencing is set for 1 July.
All because, as she put it:
“They didn’t like my book club.”
Her laugh doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration,
setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities,
in solidarity with the detainees.
A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post,
slashed the tires on a government van
and broke a security camera.
The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did.
When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun,
an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder.
The officer survived.
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
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Replies (1)
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The #Prairieland case was the first tried and convicted under the Trump Department of Justice’s
“counter-terrorism” initiatives targeting “antifa”
– short for antifascist
– a decentralized movement the administration has officially categorized as a “domestic terrorist organization”.
The federal government argued the Prairieland defendants,
what they called a “North Texas Antifa cell”,
had planned the demonstration as an assassination attempt against a law enforcement officer.
The government alleged this conspiracy even though the defendants were loosely connected,
and some who attended the protest did not even know each other.
In total, 22 people have been charged in connection with the protest:
five others took plea deals,
another five have state charges pending
and three more were indicted last month.
What the federal government has described as
“antifa extremists”
are activists you’d find anywhere in the US:
trans people, tattoo artists, vegans and anti-ICE community members who engage in mutual aid.
The federal government’s focus on the possession of leftwing literature,
including zines,
and other basic security measures common in our modern era
– like owning Faraday bags, meant to block wireless signals to prevent surveillance;
– using the encrypted messaging app Signal;
– or dressing in all-black clothing
– is alarming to activists.
“Zines are a foundational first amendment document”
going back to the Federalist papers,
said Xavier de Janon,
the director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild
and the attorney representing Elizabeth in her state case. “
Zines discussing ideas of revolution, mutual aid, ideas of a world after capitalism, should not be able to be criminalized in and of themselves …
That’s just dangerous to all of us.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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