The Intercept81%
Trump’s Spaghetti-Against-the-Wall Indictment Against ICE Protesters — and How to Fight It 88%
By Natasha Lennard91%
6/17/2026, 3:30:07 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Politically Left Leaning Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 50.3% saturation with 516 hits. Analysis detected 3,569 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,026 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 81.1% and a BS Rank of 88% (2,505 of 20,381 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 87.70% of the article peer group.
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice unsealed a federal indictment on Tuesday announcing hefty charges against 15 antifascist protesters for alleged actions taken in response to the brutal U.S.
Immigration Customs and Enforcement surge in Minneapolis earlier this year.
The federal prosecutor in the case, Minnesota U.S.
Attorney Daniel Rosen, warned that more arrests and charges could follow.
Once again, prosecutors are throwing extreme and overreaching charges at activists in a scrambling effort to criminalize organized, collective opposition to Trump’s most violent policies.
The Minneapolis indictment exemplifies the Trump regime’s escalating strategy: Criminalize whole political movements with claims of collective liability and “conspiracy,” and treat typical acts of protest, constitutionally protected speech, association, and political identification as criminal acts.
Call it the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach.
The indictment, Rosen said, is a part of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, initiative to target and prosecute leftists and antifascists as terrorists.
Minneapolis is not an incidental target for Trump’s Department of Justice.
The city unleashed an oftentimes-inspiring response to the ICE crackdown: mutual aid organizing, confrontational protest, blockades, and strikes in response to brutality set a national example for how to fight back when federal agents descend on a city to kidnap our immigrant neighbors.
“Conspiracy” to What?
The “conspiracy” in Minneapolis according to the government, involves purported antifa activists acting with the aim of impeding ICE operations and injuring officers.
The indictment names no federal officer injuries, and only minor incidents of property damage — like a protester leaving a dent in an ICE vehicle from kicking it.
Among other pieces of evidence cited for the alleged criminal conspiracy are the most basic protest strategies, including self defense, nonviolent tactics, and First Amendment-protected activity.
The use of encrypted Signal chats to communicate protest plans is cited again and again in the indictment.
The government points out that organizers employed phrases like “become ungovernable” — a liberatory slogan so common it has spread to cute animal memes.
Demonstrators are accused of building and advocating for the use of shields at protests outside an ICE detention facility — the sort of protests in which, in Minneapolis and nationwide, federal agents have beaten people and fired rubber bullets and tear-gas canisters directly at heads and bodies.
The indictment even claims that people tracking ICE vehicles and alerting others to their presence, as agents prowled neighborhoods looking for immigrants to kidnap, is evidence of criminal conspiracy.
That certain protest activities may have indeed impeded ICE in its efforts to ruin lives and whiten the country do not make those activities illegal.
Minor violations and property damage may involve unlawful acts, but do not constitute a mass criminal conspiracy.
Certainly, none of it calls for unleashing the vast resources of the federal government against protesters.
The Trump administration, however, has made its own strategy clear: Make the stakes of association with political movements dangerously high.
And if the cases fall apart?
Well then, movements have still been disrupted by lengthy, frightening, and expensive legal processes; antifascist political activity is chilled nonetheless.
Nationwide Assault on the Left
The Minneapolis charges do not stand alone.
Recent weeks have seen an array of federal arrests, prosecutions and raids aimed at Trump’s favored targets: antifascists, Palestine solidarity activists, and voting rights advocates.
Protesters who participated in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement were hit last week with new federal charges under the NSPM-7 initiative — despite the fact that state cases against the movement for the very same incidents have consistently collapsed.
This month, the FBI also raided the homes of numerous Palestine-solidarity activists connected to the University of Michigan, with eight activists indicted on federal charges for allegedly aiming to “intimidate” university officials in protests aimed at ending the school’s investment in Israel’s genocide.
FBI agents also raided the offices of an Ohio voter-registration organization, seizing employees’ phones and computers.
These are unabashed authoritarian tactics to chill whole swathes of political activity, the likes of which have a long history in this country, from multiple Red Scares and the deadly COINTELPRO effort last century against Black-liberation struggle, to the mass repression in response to Black Lives Matter uprisings in the last decade.
Such repression is not the sole preserve of Trump’s regime or Republican administrations, but we are witnessing an escalation in authoritarian efforts to criminalize political resistance.
The assault on the left has been, perversely, carried out in tandem with brazen attempts to lavish Trump’s violent far-right supporters with impunity, government jobs, and even financial rewards.
When the Spaghetti Sticks
Sometimes the spaghetti does stick.
In March, a Texas jury found eight defendants guilty of terrorism charges for simply being present and wearing black at a protest in which a shooting took place outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Northern Texas.
The ruling was a major victory for the Justice Department — a case in a Trump-friendly jurisdiction, presided over by a Trump-appointee judge, the government’s flimsy effort won through.
In Spokane, Washington, three anti-ICE demonstrators were convicted in May on conspiracy charges for impeding federal officers in a case with similarities to the Minneapolis indictment.
The original federal prosecutor in the Spokane case resigned instead of signing indictments against protesters; he did not believe they were warranted, he said.
As is a pattern with Trump’s Department of Justice, however, the prosecutor’s successor moved forward with charges.
Six people took plea deals, but three refused, wanting to defend their First Amendment rights in court.
For typical protest activity, they were convicted of federal conspiracy charges.
They face up to six years in prison.
Trump’s lawyers are not famed as skilled practitioners, but they know how to navigate an unjust system with brute force, willing to pour unending resources into crushing ideological enemies and symbols of resistance.
Trump has ample reason to relentlessly push politically motivated cases, even those thrown out in lower courts.
With an ideologically aligned far-right Supreme Court, Trump has ample reason to relentlessly push politically motivated cases, even those thrown out in lower courts.
The price for failing to stand together against this fascist overreach is, however, far higher still.
Speakers
1speaker3.5%attributed speech990writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageDaniel Rosen
36 attributed words100% of attributed speech96% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.