Was ICE Jail Attack More John Brown In Kansas Or Gulf Of Tonkin?

Either way, how about we NOT have a civil war please?

Maybe I shoulda gone with ‘Reichstag Fire’ instead, but I ain’t redoing the picture. Top: ‘Tragic Prelude’ Mural, Kansas State Capitol, 1942, by John Steuart Curry Bottom: USS Maddox, US Navy photo.

Federal charges have been brought against 10 people who allegedly shot up an ICE detention center in Texas late in the evening of July 4, firing semiautomatic rifles at the front of the place and wounding a local police officer in the neck. (The cop was treated and released.) All of those arrested were charged with three counts of attempted murder of a federal officer, plus additional charges of “discharging a firearm during and in relation to a violent crime,” according to the criminal complaint.

Whatever the hell this was, it doesn’t look a protest gone wrong or one of those far more common bullshit arrests where someone is accused of “assaulting” an ICE goon when their arm is being grabbed by said ICE goon. We hope you’ll forgive us for channeling Alex Jones, but the alleged incident seems a little too perfectly constructed to give Donald Trump a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring Marshall Law (he’ll also Hereby Proclaim that’s how it’s spelled now). We’ll eventually find out more about what happened, but at the moment it all stinks.

Let’s be clear here: Trump’s fascist takeover of the US must absolutely be resisted and stopped by all legal means necessary. But that can’t include violence against the government, because Trump is already itching for an excuse to start shooting Americans. That’s how civil wars get started.

According to the complaint, the “ambush” began around 10:37 p.m., when 10 to 12 people dressed in all black met in a wooded area outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where they first shot off fireworks toward the facility. After about 10 minutes, two of the people vandalized cars in the center’s parking lot, spray-painting them with “Ice Pig” and “Traitor.” They also sprayed “FucK you Pigs” on a wooden guard station outside the center. ICE guards called 911 to ask for local police to come.

A DOJ press release helpfully included photos of the cars and the un-American graffiti:

OK, ICE should be all-caps since it’s an abbreviation, and why’d you add a period?

Nancy Larson, acting US attorney for the Northern District of Texas (everyone in this is an actor, maybe?), said in a news conference Monday night that the fireworks and grafitti “seemed to be designed” to get ICE agents to come out of the detention center, “and it worked.”

According to CCTV and body cam recordings, two unarmed ICE guards came out to talk to the people in the parking lot, while a “person wearing a green mask” who was just outside the woods “appeared to be signaling to the vandals with a flashlight,” according to the complaint.

At roughly the same time, a cop from the Alvarado Police Department arrived, and after he got out of his car, somebody in the woods started shooting at him, wounding him in the neck. The flashlight person also opened fire at the ICE guards, but didn’t hit them. The complaint said a total of 20 to 30 rounds from AR-15 rifles were fired; two AR-15s were found at the scene, one of them jammed, along with bullet casings and a discarded pistol magazine.

Conveniently, when the attackers fled after the gunfire, they left behind a flag saying “Resist fascism, fight oligarchy,” and some flyers that said “FIGHT ICE TERROR WITH CLASS WAR!” and “FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS.”

Image: DOJ press release. You can find these flags (false or otherwise) for sale all over the internet.

Deputies from the Johnson County Sheriff's Office nabbed seven people a few hundred yards from the site of the shooting, Larson said at the presser, saying that “Some were wearing body armor, some were covered in mud, some were armed, and some had two-way radios on them. […] It was a planned ambush with the intent to kill ICE corrections officers.”

Another man, Bradford Morris, was arrested after a traffic stop by a sheriff’s detective; the van Morris was driving contained a pistol, two more AR-15s, two bulletproof vests, a helmet and other stuff. Per the complaint, Morris said he’d “met some people online and transported some of them down from Dallas to the Prairieland Detention Center to ‘make some noise.’” Two other people were arrested after the incident, and the FBI is trying to find an eleventh person who’s still at large.

All told, including what was found at the scene and in searches of suspects’ vehicles and homes, investigators collected 12 sets of body armor as well as a whole bunch of guns, ammo, radios, and some “anti-government propaganda” including the flyers and flag found at the scene, and in one suspect’s residence, materials about anarchy, insurrection, and “Organising for Attack!” (with the British spelling), as seen in this PDF of the complaint.

Is it just us, or does some of this look like it’s only photocopies of the covers of revolutionary-style books and stuff?

According to the charging document, those arrested and charged were:

• Cameron Arnold, aka Autumn Hill, 29, of Dallas

• Savanna Batten, 32, of Fort Worth

• Nathan Baumann, 20, of College Station

• Zachary Jared Evetts, 35, of Waxahachie

• Joy Abigail Gibson, 32, of Dallas

• Bradford Morris, aka Meagan Elizabeth Morris, 41, of Garland

• Maricela Rueda, 32, of Dallas

• Seth Sikes, 22, of Kennedale

• Elizabeth Andrea Soto, 39, of Fort Worth

• Ines Houston Soto, 40, of Fort Worth

Has Trump’s DOJ busted a cell of leftwing domestic terrorists?

Again, call us crazy conspiracy theorists, but so much of what the DOJ has released seems incredibly well-suited to supporting MAGA perceptions of the Left. The black outfits, the spray-painted slogans, the anarchy -n- revolution propaganda, all of it. Six of the suspects are women, including apparently two trans women — the official documents take great care to misgender them, obviously — which isn’t impossible but also aligns incredibly well with rightwing confirmation bias about the “violent Left” being full of radical feminists, Marxists, and trans activists.

But who knows? The administration’s increasingly violent and militarized mass deportations are clearly designed to provoke reactions, and it’s not beyond belief that some people might decide that violence is the right course of action. WE DISAGREE, OBVIOUSLY.

Prior to January 20 of this year, we’d have said we’re sure to eventually learn a lot more about what the hell is going on here. There will be journalists digging into every aspect of the story, and the suspects are still, at least on paper, entitled to due process.

We’d like to assume the administration won’t simply whisk American citizens off to a foreign prison, or onto an Air Force transport plane bound for South Sudan before they get to trial, or that First Amendment protections for journalists won’t be suspended by an emergency order. The fact that we can no longer simply take either as a given is terrifying.

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[NBC News / Justice Department press release / Criminal Complaint / AP]

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