'This is injustice': how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison [View all]

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

“It is not only an attempt at chilling speech,” said Chip Gibbons, policy director at the advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, “but an indication that the [the Trump administration is] going to continue going after protests extremely hard.”

(snip)

The Sotos’ crimes largely stem from a “printing press” that the FBI noticed during the initial raid of their home: a standard office printer, a paper cutter and a book binder. During the raid, one of the Sotos’ children told Elizabeth’s attorney that police put a bag over their head and brought them in for an interrogation; another child was interrogated in the home. Elizabeth only found out about their child being taken for interrogation from an article published by the anarchist collective Crimethinc that was later made into a zine. The justice department did not return the Guardian’s request for comment on the raid of the Sotos’ house, its attacks against the first amendment or its unusual use of counterterrorism law.

The federal prosecution argued the Sotos used the printing press to produce anti-government zines for a book club they and some of the other defendants were part of, named for the celebrated 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman, who 99 years ago this month was arrested on conspiracy charges for organizing against the first world war draft.

At the book club, the group read political zines on subjects like “a journal of materialist feminism” and “a call for the eradication of artificial intelligence from the face of the earth” – perhaps niche, but nothing illegal, an FBI agent testified in court. Still, the FBI seized these zines, along with the printing press and a collection of poetry about losing a sibling to cancer.