Darío Sánchez is facing state charges related to a protest he did not attend. Indictments against the 33-year-old Texas middle school teacher have changed three times. He has also been arrested and released three times, most recently for an online search for how to replace an old Game Boy battery; police alleged he was seeking information on explosives.
“I’ve seen my case as one manifestation of all the different ways the Trump administration is going after people – regardless of if you’ve even been to a protest,” Sánchez said. “The reality is, as long as you disagree with the government, you’re a target.”
Sánchez’s charges of “tampering with physical evidence” and “hindering the prosecution of terrorism” stem from allegedly removing someone from a Discord group and a Signal chat related to a protest at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility on 4 July 2025. Nine of the other 21 people arrested in the Prairieland, Texas, protest have received unusually harsh sentences of up to 100 years in federal prison.
Now, Sánchez is one of the first members of a project called the NSPM-7 Defendants Union, scheduled to launch today. The union plans to offer access to legal clinics, media training, and support for people facing state or federal prosecution under the president’s NSPM-7 memorandum, which directs the FBI to investigate “violent and terroristic activities” associated with “anti-fascism”.
One of the union’s goals is to dismantle this government notion of “antifa”, a label applied to many of the protesters charged by the administration, even though it is not a formal organization.
“Antifa’s not a real thing,” said Alex, an organizer of the project who used a pseudonym for his safety. “The only one who benefits from this is the government, because they can convince people what it is, and a fake organization can’t rebut what the government says.”
Instead, organizers want to connect defendants’ cases and the causes they are fighting for. Early union members include anti-ICE protesters arrested in Minnesota, New Jersey and Texas, and protesters in solidarity with Palestine arrested in Michigan during the second Trump administration, as well as others from the movement against the Atlanta police training center known as Cop City.
But the group also hopes to include those who have taken part in protests across a range of other issues, including Tesla Takedowns against Elon Musk and his company, against the construction of datacenters and in solidarity with Palestine. It also welcomes anyone who publicly opposes “the Trump agenda and want[s] to support those facing repression for doing the same”, according to the union’s website.
“There are things we can learn from each other,” said Sánchez.
The defendants union may be the first effort of its kind in the modern history of political protest in the US, said movement historian Dan Berger, author of the upcoming book Prison: Incarceration and the History of America.
“It fits in with the genealogy of people facing repression trying to find solidarity with other people facing repression,” said Berger, pointing to efforts such as the Jericho movement, formed by former Black Panther party members and others in 1998 to support political prisoners.
By calling itself a “union”, the project shows how collective organizing can respond to the federal government’s expanding surveillance, arrests and court cases aimed at protesters, said Alex. “When the police or the FBI show up at your door, it feels isolating, like it’s happening only to you,” he said. “But the problems people are facing are shared; we want to help de-individualize the experience and create collective leverage – like in a union.”
Unlike a typical union, however, the project will not maintain membership rolls or charge dues. It is centered around taking a pledge to follow a handful of the project’s practices, such as not cooperating with law enforcement, adopting collective legal strategies when there are multiple defendants in a case and, when possible, sharing information learned in discovery.
Another defendant who has joined the project is Isaac Sant, a 36-year-old nursing assistant from St Paul, Minnesota, arrested in June and charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer” as part of the community response to the city’s ICE surge last winter.
Sant’s arrest was trumpeted in a White House press release that called him and the 14 others arrested “antifa operatives”. The federal surveillance leading up to the arrests included spying on unions, churches and libraries – what Sant called “an attack on all of Minnesota’s civil society”.
And yet this attack isn’t contained to one city or state, Sant said. He named other high-profile cases linked to protest: the Broadview Six case in Illinois, in which six people protesting outside an ICE facility were charged with “conspiracy to impede a federal officer”, only to have the federal government drop the case amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct; and the Michigan Eight, a group of students and others who face multiple charges, including “conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce”, for protesting against Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.
Organizers of the union expect to be met with the same repression as protesters, including hacking and other digital threats. The group delayed its launch by several weeks to troubleshoot against possible insecurities after the Intercept reported on Pentagon-related hacks of leftwing websites.
But as a member of SEIU – a national union with 2 million members – Sant sees the spirit of unions as positive for the project: “The federal government would prefer prosecuting each defendant – but at the very least, we should compare notes, come together to increase leverage and create strategies in a more sophisticated way.
“This is new and bold,” added Sant. “That’s one reason I’m hopeful about it.”
Berger, the historian, said that what makes the project exciting is that it centers on being a defendant. “But it’s also a tragic commentary on where we’re at, with a large swath of people and politics under attack right now,” he said. “We’re all defendants.”
