Darío Sánchez, a 33-year-old Texas middle school teacher, faces state charges of "tampering with physical evidence" and "hindering the prosecution of terrorism" — for allegedly removing someone from a Discord group and a Signal chat related to a protest he did not attend. His indictments have changed three times. He has been arrested and released three times, most recently for an online search about replacing a Game Boy battery, which police alleged was research into explosives. His case is one data point in a pattern. The pattern is NSPM-7, a presidential memorandum directing the FBI to investigate "violent and terroristic activities" associated with "anti-fascism." Under this framework, the federal government has arrested and prosecuted protesters across multiple states — anti-ICE demonstrators in Texas, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Illinois; Palestine solidarity activists in Michigan; opponents of the Atlanta police training center known as Cop City. Nine of 21 people arrested at the Prairieland, Texas ICE facility protest on 4 July 2025 have received sentences of up to 100 years. A White House press release described 15 arrested in Minnesota as "antifa operatives." The federal surveillance leading to those arrests included monitoring unions, churches, and libraries. The NSPM-7 Defendants Union, launching today at nspm7union.com, is the structural countermove. It offers legal clinics, media training, and coordination for anyone facing state or federal prosecution under the memorandum. Unlike a traditional union, it maintains no membership rolls and charges no dues. Members take a pledge: no cooperation with law enforcement, collective legal strategies for multi-defendant cases, and shared discovery information. The organizing logic is explicit — the federal government prefers prosecuting each defendant in isolation, so collective infrastructure is the asymmetric response. The cases the union connects reveal the scope of the prosecution campaign. The Broadview Six in Illinois — six people protesting outside an ICE facility charged with "conspiracy to impede a federal officer" — saw their case dropped amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. The Michigan Eight face charges including "conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce" for protesting Israel's assault on Gaza. Isaac Sant, a 31-year-old nursing assistant from St. Paul, was charged with "conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer" as part of community response to ICE operations. Each case applies terrorism-adjacent charges to acts of political dissent. Movement historian Dan Berger calls the project potentially the first of its kind in modern US protest history, placing it in the lineage of the Jericho movement formed by former Black Panther Party members in 1998 to support political prisoners. The structural novelty is centering the identity of "defendant" itself as an organizing category — not the specific cause (immigration, Palestine, policing) but the shared condition of facing state prosecution for political activity. The union's organizers expect to face the same repression as the protesters they represent. They delayed their launch by several weeks after The Intercept reported on Pentagon-related hacks of leftwing websites, troubleshooting against digital threats. One organizer uses a pseudonym. The operational security posture tells you everything about the environment in which this project is being built. The deeper question is whether collective legal infrastructure can meaningfully alter the cost-benefit calculus of a federal government wielding terrorism statutes against political dissent. The union creates information-sharing, reduces isolation, and may generate public attention — but it does not change the underlying power asymmetry between a presidential memorandum backed by the FBI and individual defendants facing century-long sentences. What it does is make the pattern visible as a pattern, rather than a series of isolated local cases.
