Trial opens over Texas immigration detention center shooting

A federal trial began Tuesday over a July 4, 2025 shooting outside the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas, where an Alvarado police lieutenant was shot in the neck and survived, according to The Independent. Nine defendants have pleaded not guilty; eight face a charge of providing material support to terrorists, alongside counts that include attempted murder of a law officer.

Prosecutors describe the incident as a coordinated attack: people dressed in black and wearing masks allegedly fired fireworks toward the facility, vandalised a guard shed and vehicles, and then, as police arrived, someone shouted “get to the rifles” before shots were fired. The government says Benjamin Song opened fire, but it is also charging others with attempted murder and firearm offenses on the theory that violence was foreseeable from the group’s planning. Defense lawyers counter that each defendant must be judged on individual actions and that some were present for what they call a “noise demonstration” intended to signal support for detainees.

The legal hook is the terrorism statute. The material-support charge follows President Donald Trump’s order designating the decentralised “antifa” milieu as a domestic terrorist organisation, a move that converts a label into a prosecutorial category. The Independent reports FBI Director Kash Patel has called the case the first time material-support charges have been used against people he says were antifa members. That matters because it shifts the state’s options from ordinary conspiracy, weapons, and assault charges toward a framework built for networks and organisations—useful when the alleged participants include a book club, friends, and loose activist circles rather than a formal hierarchy.

Detention facilities are an unusually combustible setting for that escalation. Immigration enforcement has expanded into a mixed public–private industry of holding contracts, transport, medical vendors, and local policing support, with predictable political spillover into protest. Once the venue is a detention centre, a protest becomes, in the government’s telling, an attempt to disrupt custody; once a single participant allegedly fires a rifle, the entire event becomes a test case for collective liability. The material-support theory then gives prosecutors a way to treat proximity, planning, and association as elements of the crime, even when defendants argue they neither carried firearms nor intended violence.

In court, the first witness was the wounded officer, Lt. Thomas Gross, who testified that the scene was “extremely chaotic” and that he saw a masked individual carrying a rifle moments before he was shot. The trial is expected to last more than three weeks, and several defendants face sentences of up to life in prison if convicted.

The indictment turns a July 4 protest at a detention centre into a terrorism case, and the jury will be asked to decide how much of the gunfire can be assigned to people who did not pull the trigger.