Months of violent left-wing anti-ICE rhetoric achieved its apparently desired end state this week as an alleged Antifa cell conducted an attempted assassination of police officers outside the Praireland Detention Center, being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a detention facility for illegal aliens.
On July 4, 11 black-garbed individuals, some equipped with body armor, ammunition, and firearms, conducted what the Department of Justice described as a “planned ambush.” Two of the attackers allegedly opened fire on ICE officers after their comrades initiated a disturbance to lure officers out of the building and into the line of fire by launching fireworks and spray painting anti-ICE slogans on nearby property. A police officer was shot in the neck but is expected to live. According to the criminal complaint filed by the Department of Justice, pamphlets on insurrectionary anarchism and propaganda materials, including a “Resist Fascism” flag, were recovered by law enforcement.
The equipment, tactics, political literature, and target selection are all consistent with Antifa, short for Anti-Fascist Action, a networked movement of anarcho-communist groups that use violence against political opponents.
For a decade now, I have been a student of this network, its origins, and ideology. As I told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution in 2020, Antifa is the direct linear descendant of the violent communist urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s like the Weather Underground.
Like its predecessors, which also began with campus protests and street riots, Antifa has over the past several years evolved to the use of bombings, especially firebombings targeting police vehicles, pregnancy resource centers, and more recently Tesla dealerships. And to this escalation, we can now add the planned ambush of federal officers.
This was a totally foreseeable development. As a 2021 German Ministry of the Interior report noted, Antifa and related left extremists were demonstrating:
…an obvious shift away from the ‘mass militancy’ of demonstrations and towards violent acts by small groups acting covertly. Their violence has shifted to the sidelines of gatherings or is entirely independent of these events.
Hellbound and Down 