On July 12, Amber Lowrey arrived at her sister’s apartment in Fort Worth.
The FBI had raided it days earlier, Lowrey said, and she surveyed the wreckage: shattered windows, broken doors, damaged floorboards from a flash bang. Agents seized four “pages of map documents,” according to a property receipt reviewed by The Barbed Wire.
Lowrey’s sister, Savannah Batten, had been arrested a week before for allegedly participating in what federal prosecutors have described as a “coordinated and targeted attack” against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center and an act of terrorism.
But the debris of her sister’s belongings — abandoned hermit crabs in their habitat, clothes laid out for work but never worn, a cherry cobbler left in the microwave to mold over — told Lowrey a different story.
“This is not a person who walked out of her apartment to do what they claim that she went to do,” Lowrey told The Barbed Wire in a phone interview. “Common sense tells us that if she had left her apartment to go and do that, she might not come home alive.”
“None of it makes any sense,” she added.
Batten was part of a protest on July 4 outside Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, that some participants and their supporters said was intended to be a noise demonstration and instead turned violent when a police officer was shot.
Batten is one of 11 individuals charged with multiple counts of attempted murder of a federal officer and of discharging a firearm during a violent crime. Six more individuals are charged with concealing evidence, helping other defendants evade arrest, or hindering the prosecution of terrorism.
The defendants, some of whom have ties to anarchist and anti-fascist circles, were arraigned earlier this week. All remain in custody, with multi-million dollar bonds.
The event — a protest-gone-wrong to defendants, a planned ambush to federal prosecutors — is part of an environment of heightened political violence, and escalating tensions around the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.
Federal prosecutors were still crafting their case against the July 4 defendants when another shooting at a Texas ICE facility happened on Wednesday morning. The Department of Homeland Security said a sniper opened fire on an ICE field office in Dallas. The shooter, who authorities identified as 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, died from a self-inflicted gunshot. Three detainees were shot, according to a statement from DHS. Initially, authorities said that two detainees died and that one remained in critical condition. Later, that changed to one dead and two in critical condition. No law enforcement personnel were injured.
As the number of dead changed, FBI Director Kash Patel suggested the attack was ideologically motivated in a statement on X, accompanied with a photo of bullets — one of which has the words “ANTI-ICE” written on it.
“These despicable, politically motivated attacks against law enforcement are not a one-off. We are only miles from Prarieland (sic), Texas where just two months ago an individual ambushed a separate ICE facility targeting their officers,” Patel wrote. “It has to end and the FBI and our partners will lead these investigative efforts to see to it that those who target our law enforcement are pursued and brought to the fullest extent of justice.”
Vice President JD Vance also posted on X that the “obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said, “The epidemic of leftist political violence must end. Democrats have fostered an environment of evil, emboldening radicals to kill, steal, and destroy.”
Since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier this month, President Donald Trump has stepped up attacks on perceived political foes.
On Monday, he signed an executive order labeling “antifa” — a disparate anti-fascist ideological movement — a domestic terrorist group, even though the U.S. doesn’t have a domestic terrorism law and antifa isn’t a specific organization.
His administration has also been quick to place blame on leftist groups in the immediate aftermath of recent attacks, mirroring finger pointing and misinformation shared from all sides on social media. A Sept. 8 press release from DHS claimed without evidence that ICE officers “are facing a more than 1000% increase in assaults against them.”
Yet, the fact patterns that have emerged in several cases prove more complicated. A Washington Post review of 79 assaults on ICE officers between January and June found that “the vast majority involve verbal threats — in person or online — or physical altercations during ICE arrests of immigrants that turned violent.”
In one example, federal agents — including Border Patrol — set off an explosion, blasting their way into a California home in tactical gear alarming a woman named Jenny Ramirez, her 1-year-old, and her 6-year-old in June. Agents said they were looking for her boyfriend, whom they claimed had rammed his Jeep into federal agents a week earlier during an immigration enforcement operation. Ramirez told reporters that her boyfriend had accidentally bumped the truck in a fender-bender, after which he stopped, and federal agents told him he was free to go. Border Patrol did track him down, and the case against him was dismissed about a month after he was arrested.
The Barbed Wire conducted an in-depth review of the court records and statements thus far in the July 4 Prairieland case and found holes that call into question the government’s narrative.
Though Nancy Larson, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, described the incident during a July 7 press conference as an “ambush” and an “egregious attack,” the state’s initial allegation of multiple shooters has been changed to one. Assertions of 20-30 rounds fired have dropped to less than a dozen. The defendants’ use of Signal, an encrypted app, has been referenced as evidence of organized crime — yet no details of what was said or planned in those messages have been released.
Despite being behind bars for several weeks, none of the defendants have been formally indicted, a requirement for felony cases.
Some of the defendants were at one point members of the Elm Fork chapter of the John Brown Gun Club, an anti-fascist group named for the Civil War-era abolitionist, and several were involved in a Dallas-Fort Worth area anarchist book club. Several are also transgender women.
The way that Lowrey sees it, the felony murder and terrorism charges against them — including her sister, who has a history of protest-related arrests — is a form of political repression.
“When I first got the call that she had been arrested, it wasn’t altogether surprising,” Lowrey said. “She does a lot of activism. So none of this surprised me. I assumed it would be another quick in and out, but it now has turned into the biggest ordeal of our lives as they’ve tried to trump this up into a way bigger and more nefarious sounding thing than it ever was.”
‘Violent Extremists’ or Protest Gone Wrong?
When news of the Prairieland attack first broke, government press releases and headlines in many outlets painted a harrowing picture.
A July 7 article from the Dallas area Fox station repeated government officials’ description of the event as an “ambush” and “planned attack” on an ICE facility. A July 8 press release from ICE stated that “nearly a dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons attacked the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Facility” — a stark contrast to Patel’s use of the word “individual” on Wednesday to describe the same event.
The names and faces of the 11 defendants charged with attempted murder were widely distributed along with descriptions of them as “vandals” and “violent extremists.” Multiple defendants, either in interviews or through their attorneys, have denied any foreknowledge of violence or plans for an ambush.
The glaring divide between prosecutors’ and defendants’ accounts make the story particularly difficult to parse.
According to court records, a dozen protesters arrived outside the Prairieland Detention Center after nightfall on July 4 and began to set off fireworks around 10:37 p.m. Ten minutes later, two individuals broke off from the group and spray painted “ICE Pig” and “Traitor” on cars and a guard structure.
Around 10:56 p.m., ICE officers called local police, and an Alvarado police officer arrived on the scene three minutes later.
According to the original criminal complaint, two unidentified people hidden in the nearby woods began to shoot at the Alvarado officer and correctional officers, firing between 20-30 shots of 5.56 ammo, a caliber used in the high-powered AR-15 style rifles found on the scene.
However, a revised complaint now says: “Based on updated information learned during the course of this investigation, evidence suggest (sic) one shooter.”
Additionally, the complaint was updated with a note that only 11 shell casings were recovered from the scene, “leading investigators to believe the initial 20-30 shell casings to be an inaccurate amount of spent rounds fired.”
Both complaints note that an Alvarado police officer was shot twice in the neck and torso, but they do not specify his name or the severity of his injuries — both details that are usually conveyed to the press in the immediate aftermath of an officer-involved shooting. An Alvarado police officer is named in the probable cause affidavit for the case, but whether he is the officer who sustained the injury is unclear.
Local news reports state the Alvarado police officer was shot in the neck area, treated, released within 24 hours, and is expected to recover. No other individuals were injured during the shooting.
Police stopped one car that was driving away from the scene and arrested its driver. Officers also stopped and arrested seven others, including Batten, around 11:10 p.m. as they were walking a couple hundred yards from where the alleged shooting occurred. Nine were arrested as law enforcement made traffic stops and conducted raids to serve search warrants.
One defendant, Benjamin Song, was identified as the owner of multiple guns found at the scene, and is named in a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office as an “alleged shooter.”
Song, a former Marine reservist with a history of involvement in anti-fascist activism in North Texas, was arrested on July 15. Attorneys for two of the defendants have singled out Song as the likely shooter who had a secret agenda, stating that their clients had no intention to participate in violence.
Six others arrested in the days and weeks after July 4 are charged with allegedly concealing evidence, helping other defendants evade arrest, or engaging in organized criminal activity: John Thomas, a roommate of Song’s, is accused of smuggling Song from Alvarado to Dallas with the help of Lynette Sharp and Susan Kent.
Thomas and Sharp have been charged with accessory after the fact for allegedly helping Song evade arrest. Kent has been charged with engaging in organized criminal activity and hindering the prosecution of terrorism for meeting with Thomas and Sharp at a hotel, according to the criminal complaint.
Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada is accused of tampering with evidence after moving a box of documents from another defendant’s house that included what is described as “a handwritten training, tactics, and planning document for civil unrest with anti-law enforcement, anti-government, and anti-Trump sentiments” and paired with photos of anarchist publications that can be found for free online such as “Another Critique of Insurrectionalism,” “It’s Vacant, Take It” and “War in the Streets.”
Dario Emmanuel Sanchez is accused of tampering with evidence after removing Thomas from Signal group chats; and Rebecca Morgan is accused of hindering prosecution of terrorism.
In total, 17 people have been arrested, including one member of the DFW Support Committee, a group composed of family and friends of the others charged in the shooting, who was arrested weeks after the incident. In public statements and filings, the state suggests it is cracking down on a criminal conspiracy. The DFW Support Committee characterizes it as political repression.
“To arrest someone well over a month after the July 4th event signals the state’s dogged attempt to tear through this community,” the committee said in a statement last month. “We denounce this escalation by the state in its desperate attempts to criminalize people showing solidarity with those being kidnapped by ICE and to undermine dissent against rising authoritarianism.”
‘They Want to Make an Example’
In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, the Trump administration has also spread misinformation about what it has called a rise in “trans violence.” At the White House on Tuesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavett said “it’s worth looking into” and that “anyone who denies that at this point is being willfully ignorant.”
Trans people make up roughly 1% of the American population, and have committed only 0.1% of all mass shootings since 2013, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, an independent organization that tracks gun violence in the U.S. Over that same period, men committed over 95% of those shootings, and over 54% of the perpetrators were white.
Several of the defendants in the July 4 Prairieland attack were transgender women who initially united around trans and queer identity issues, as The Washington Post reported. The trans defendants’ dead names — names they were given at birth but do not use after transition — were entered into the court records.
Forty-one-year-old Meagan Morris told KERA News she parked half a mile away from Prairieland that night to attend the noise demonstration and, while waiting on the people who’d rode with her, played her Nintendo Switch. She hadn’t even gotten out of the car when she heard a gunshot, she told the NPR affiliate.
“I don’t know what happened,” Morris said from the Johnson County Jail. “We sure did not plan for any sort of violence or anything to go wrong like that.”
As a trans woman living in Texas, Morris told the Post, “I feel like there is a target on my back whenever I’m out in public,” which motivated her to dedicate herself to activism. That said, she added, “I have a home, dogs, and a found family I love more than breathing. I would never agree to something so outrageous that would put them in danger.” She’s being held in a segregated room in the jail’s men’s facility, according to the newspaper.
Morris was the driver whose car police stopped near the scene. Police found a pistol, an AR-15 style rifle, and a handheld radio in her car, according to court records. Along with ten others, she faces state charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon on a peace officer and terrorism, along with federal charges of discharging a firearm during a violent crime and attempted murder of a police officer. In court documents, prosecutors claim that Morris’ home in Oak Cliff was the staging location for the alleged ambush.
The charges against her — despite her distance from where the shooting occurred — indicate the government may pursue a conspiracy case against the defendants.
“The original intent was just to show solidarity with the detainees who hopefully lift their spirits with a fun fireworks display and go home,” she told KERA. “If the officer got shot by someone, that person was acting alone. But they want to punish all of us.”
Supporters of the defendants describe the charges — and the treatment of some defendants in state custody in Johnson County, including the failure to conduct checks every 30 minutes on a defendant on suicide watch and holding trans women in men’s jail facilities — as a case of political persecution.
“In the first couple weeks, they weren’t doing strip searches,” Lowrey said. “Then all of a sudden they started doing strip searches. They’re just trying to break everyone. There’s no reason for this. Savannah has been in solitary in a medical cell for over two months with no access to other human beings, no possible way for her to ever have any sort of contraband.”
When asked if she believes her sister is being targeted for her beliefs, Lowrey did not equivocate.
“Absolutely,” Lowry said. “They want to make an example of them. They want people to look at them and see that this is what happens when you speak up and when you show dissent.”
Correction: The Barbed Wire first reported that Savannah Batten’s hermit crabs were dead. In fact, they were left for dead — but survived after burrowing into the sand. The story has been updated to reflect the change. The Barbed Wire regrets the error.