“I’m absolutely being imprisoned for a political agenda,” activist Autumn Hill tells Democracy Now! in a phone call from Texas’s Johnson County Correctional Facility, where the 30-year-old trans woman is serving a 50-year prison sentence for protesting outside the Prairieland ICE jail last July. Hill is one of nine protesters convicted of terrorism-related charges after federal prosecutors accused them of being members of an “antifa terror cell.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone writer Jack Crosbie, Hill says that she had no intention of committing violence at the protest, which ended when a police officer was shot and wounded by a fellow protester who says he fired in self-defense. No other injuries were reported, and Hill says she had already left when the shooting occurred. “It was my belief that we would go home at the end of the night to continue eating and drinking and be merry. We truly didn’t think that anything was going to go wrong. And we didn’t expect or want any violence to occur.”
For prosecutors pushing the overly broad and poorly substantiated idea that anti-fascist organizing against the Trump administration is violent and dangerous, the Prairieland case was a “gold mine,” says Crosbie. “There’s no real burden of proof. They can just say that you’re ‘antifa,’ and that becomes sort of gospel, according to the government.”
