A Johnson County grand jury indicted Melanie Estes, Steven Reyna, and Andrew Smith on first-degree felony charges for allegedly helping convicted ringleader Benjamin Song flee after the July 4, 2025 armed assault on the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, bringing the total number of defendants charged in the case to 22.
The indictments, confirmed by the Washington Examiner and Department of Justice records, accuse the three of engaging in organized criminal activity and hindering the prosecution of terrorism. Both charges are first-degree felonies under Texas law. Reyna's attorney confirmed his client entered a not guilty plea.
The underlying attack was not a protest that got out of hand. On the night of July 4, 2025, a body-armored North Texas antifa cell ambushed corrections officers and local police outside the Prairieland Detention Center, a DHS facility housing illegal aliens awaiting deportation. They used fireworks as cover, tagged the facility with graffiti, then opened fire with semiautomatic rifles. Song, whom prosecutors identified as the cell's leader, can be heard on police bodycam footage yelling "get to the rifles!" before he pulled the trigger. Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross was struck in the neck. He survived and has since returned to active duty.
Song fled the scene and evaded law enforcement for eleven days. The FBI placed him on a wanted list and warned he should be considered armed and dangerous, a former U.S. Marine Corps reservist who knew how to move. A SWAT team finally captured him in a Dallas apartment on July 15, 2025.
Prosecutors say Estes, Reyna, and Smith worked alongside two other defendants, Lynette Sharp and Susan Kent, to make that eleven-day run possible. Sharp and Kent already pleaded guilty in federal court to transporting Song from the fields near Prairieland to Dallas in the hours after the shooting. The new indictments allege Estes, Reyna, and Smith were the next links in that chain, concealing Song as federal agents closed in.
The case has methodically expanded since last July. Seven defendants pleaded guilty early. A 12-day federal trial beginning February 23, 2026 ended March 13 with a jury convicting nine members of the cell, including Song, Cameron Arnold, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Bradford Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada. Charges ranged from riot and conspiracy to use explosives to providing material support to terrorists and attempted murder of federal officers.
The three new indictments signal that prosecutors are not treating this as a case of lone actors who happened to show up in body armor carrying rifles. They are prosecuting the network: the shooters, the planners, and the people who ran the escape route after the shooting failed to achieve whatever the cell was after.
One defendant the DOJ has not yet finished with is Dario Sanchez, a former Dallas Independent School District teacher. Sanchez faces trial in Johnson County on June 22. He is accused of deleting messages from Signal and Discord that showed the cell's attack planning in the hours after the shooting, specifically removing Song and co-defendant John Thomas from group chats. He was indicted a third time on two counts of hindering the prosecution of terrorism and one count of tampering with physical evidence. He turned down an offer from the state to testify against co-defendant Janette Goering in exchange for immunity. Sanchez told KERA News he is innocent. The jury will decide that on June 22.
The Prairieland prosecution is shaping up as the most consequential domestic terrorism case the DOJ has brought in years, and arguably the clearest test of whether federal law enforcement will treat organized left-wing political violence the same way it treats other terrorism. Twenty-two defendants charged. Nine convicted at trial. Seven guilty pleas already in hand. The obstruction charges against Estes, Reyna, and Smith matter because they close the loop on a question prosecutors want answered on the record: who helped a convicted domestic terrorist walk away from the scene of a shooting?
The June 22 Sanchez trial is the next date to watch. If he is convicted, the DOJ will have demonstrated that it can prosecute not just the people who pulled triggers, but the entire infrastructure of a cell, from the planners down to the digital cleanup crew.
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