At approximately 10:37 PM on July 4, 2025, a group of roughly eleven people gathered outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, for what cooperating witnesses later described as a planned "noise demonstration" intended to show solidarity with detained immigrants. Participants wore black clothing ("black bloc") and carried fireworks. They set off fireworks, spray-painted vehicles and a guard shack, and chanted outside detainee dorm windows.
When Alvarado police officers responded to the scene around 10:59 PM, Benjamin Song -- a former U.S. Marine Corps reservist whom prosecutors later described as the group's leader -- yelled "get to the rifles" and opened fire with a modified AR-15 rifle from a nearby wooded area. Lt. Thomas Gross was struck in the neck. He was airlifted to a hospital and released less than 24 hours later. Song fled the scene and hid in a sunflower field overnight.
The incident would become the foundation for the federal government's first-ever application of material support for terrorism charges against people labeled as "antifa." While one person fired the shots, the government would ultimately charge 19 people as the "North Texas Antifa Cell" -- including participants in the noise demonstration, people who helped Song flee afterward, zine makers who distributed anarchist literature, and a man who moved boxes of pamphlets after his wife's arrest. The gap between the shooting (committed by one person) and the terrorism charges (applied to everyone present and some who were not) would define the case's significance as a precedent for criminalizing protest activity under domestic terrorism frameworks.
Several participants later testified they had expected only a noise demonstration with fireworks and were shocked by the shooting. Some had found the event through a flyer posted in a Discord chat and drove to Prairieland alone, not knowing anyone else present.