Hridindu Roychowdhury is an anarchist from Madison, Wisconcin who was sentenced to 90 months in federal prison for attacking a building with a Molotov cocktail in the wake of the leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruling Roe v. Wade.
He targeted the building because it was occupied by an anti-choice organization (Wisconsin Family Action). Roychowdhury acknowledged spray-painting the message “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either” on the outside of the building. No one was in the office at the time. Roychowdhury pleaded guilty on Dec. 1, 2023. He was was ordered to pay nearly $32,000 in restitution and received a 7.5 year sentence.
In May 2025, he was shipped to Wisconsin to go before a grand jury. After the judge found him in contempt for refusing to answer questions within the grand jury room, he sat in this county jail without earning any good time—in essence his federal time was frozen until contempt is purged. Hridindu was released from contempt and returned to the Bureau of Prisons in September 2025.
Originally from the U.S. Southwest, he is a diligent academic and enjoyer of word puzzles and Terry Pratchet novels. Earlier in federal detention, he had been keeping himself busy by taking courses in advanced mathematics, tutoring other people in prison to complete their GED tests, and participating with a dog training program.
Write:
Hridindu Roychowdhury #51111-510 FCI Marion PO Box 1000 Marion, IL 62959
For many of the prisoners NYC ABC supports, we have tri-fold pamphlets. Some are our own design, others taken from the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. Feel free to download and distribute as you see fit– there’s even space on the back to add your local group’s contact information.
NOTE: When two-sided/duplex printing, select “print on short edge.” This way you avoid one side being printed upside down.
Peppy is an anarchist serving 60 months after accepting a noncooperating plea agreement for conspiracy and obstruction of law enforcement during a civil disorder. The case against Peppy arose out of an April 18, 2023, demonstration against a University of Pittsburgh-sanctioned event that promoted hatred toward transgender people and communities. The speaking event features notorious transphobes Brad Polumbo and Michael Knowles, and posed the question, “should transgenderism be regulated by law?” It is important to note that in the affidavit for a search warrant, the FBI described their following of Peppy beginning a week before the April 18th protest–that is, a week before any allegation of any law being broken–on the pretext of having found a pamphlet about the movement to Stop Cop City in an unwarranted search of Peppy’s trash.
Marius Mason is a transgender environmental and animal rights activist and anarchist. In 1999, in the name of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) he set fire to a lab at the University of Michigan that was conducting research on genetically modified organisms (GMO). After Marius’ husband turned state’s-evidence, Marius was threatened with a life sentence for the arson and other acts of sabotage. With little financial stability and fear of dragging his family into a costly legal battle, Marius pled guilty and was given an extreme sentence of nearly 22 years. No one was ever harmed in any of his actions.
On January 6, 2021, right-wing agitators gathered outside the New York State Capitol in support of the Stop the Steal rally in Washington DC. A handful of counter protesters spoke out against them and a melee broke out after a Proud Boy tased a Black man in the neck.
Alex Stokes was watching from the sidelines and ran to help others. Police did not intervene until the violence had ended, arresting three Black activists. Alex was charged with several felonies. The Proud Boys were not arrested at the scene. Alex’s family and friends maintain that he was railroaded by the system. He was a journalist under a court-ordered gag-order for over a year. His previous work and experience with dangerous hate groups were inadmissible for his defense, but the prosecution picked apart his social media accounts and portrayed his actions as premeditated.
He was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison, despite the fact that no one died and neither of the victims received life-altering injuries.
Alexander Contompasis 22-B-5028 Upstate Correctional Facility PO Box 2001 Malone, NY 12953
Indigenous rights activist serving 55 years for bank robbery, aggravated assault on the FBI, escape and firearms charges. Oso Blanco is a wolf clan Cherokee/Choctaw raised in New Mexico, whose Cherokee name is Yona Unega. He became known by the authorities as “Robin the Hood” after the FBI and local gang unit APD officers learned from a confidential informant that he was robbing banks in order to acquire funds to support the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico throughout 1998-99.
Oso Blanco* #07909-051 USP Atwater Post Office box 019001 Atwater, California 95301 *Address envelope to Byron Chubbuck.
Bill Dunne is an anarchist political prisoner who was sentenced to 90 years in 1979 for the attempted liberation of comrades from Seattle’s King County Jail in downtown Seattle, Washington. During the escape a shootout occurred and eventually Bill and two of his comrades were arrested. In 1983 Bill tried to escape from USP Lewisburg and for that was sentenced to an additional 15 years, 7.5 years of imprisoned in the notorious control units at USP Marion. Bill had his first parole hearing in 2014, which was denied. The parole board‘s reasoning was due to the fact that Bill still maintains communication with anarchist groups and individuals. Not only has Bill been in solidarity with the anarchist movement and the individuals and groups that take part in it, but also Black liberation movements and indigenous resistance movements. Through the years Bill has also taught GED classes at almost every prison at which he has found himself, helping many prisoners get their GED
Bill Dunne #10916-086 FCI Butner Medium II Po Box 1500 Butner, NC 27509
As the Trump administration ramps up its targeting of left-leaning people and groups, the prosecution and harsh sentencing of Casey Goonan may provide a glimpse of things to come.
By the standards of the San Francisco Bay Area’s hard left, Casey Goonan’s crimes were unremarkable. A police SUV partially burned by an incendiary device on UC Berkeley’s campus. A planter of shrubs lit on fire after Goonan unsuccessfully tried to smash a glass office window and throw a firebomb into the federal building in downtown Oakland.
But thanks to a series of communiques where Goonan claimed to have carried out the summer 2024 attacks in solidarity with Hamas and the East Bay native’s anarchist beliefs, federal prosecutors claimed Goonan “intended to promote” terrorism on top of a felony count for using an incendiary device. Goonan’s original charges notably did not contain terrorism counts. In late September, US District Court Judge Jeffrey White sentenced Goonan, whom they called “a domestic terrorist” during the hearing, to 19 and a half years in prison plus 15 years probation. Prosecutors also asked that he be sent to the Bureau of Prisons facility that contains a Communications Management Units, a highly restrictive assignment reserved for what the government claims are “extremist” inmates with terrorism-related offenses or affiliations. Although Goonan’s case began under the Biden Administration, it offers a glimpse of the approach the Department of Justice may take in President Donald Trump’s forthcoming offensive against the “left,” formalized in late September in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), an executive order targeting anti-fascist beliefs, opposition towards Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids, and criticism of capitalism and Christianity as potential “indicators of terrorism.” Featured Video
In addition to Goonan’s purported admiration for Hamas—a designated terrorist organization since 1997—and cofounding of True Leap, a tiny Anarchist publisher, the 35-year-old doctorate in African-American Studies’ biography includes another trait being targeted by the Trump administration and its allies: Goonan identifies as a transgender person. While NPSM-7 cites “extremism migration, race, and gender” as an indicator of “this pattern of violent and terroristic tendencies,” the Heritage Foundation has attempted to link gender-fluid identity to mass shootings and is urging the FBI to create a new, specious domestic terrorism classification of “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” or TIVE.
The executive order, meanwhile, directs the American security state’s sprawling post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus to be reoriented away from neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and other extreme right-wing actors that have been overwhelmingly responsible for the majority of political violence in the past few decades, and towards opponents of ICE, anti-fascists, and the administration writ large. Along with potentially violent actors, NSPM-7 instructs federal law enforcement to scrutinize nonprofit groups and philanthropic foundations involved in funding organizations that espouse amorphous ideologies, from “support for the overthrow of the United States Government” to expressing “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
“NSPM-7 is the natural culmination of ‘radicalization theory’ as the basis for the American approach to counterterrorism,” says Mike German, a retired FBI agent who spent years infiltrating violent white supremacist groups and quit the Bureau in response to its post-9/11 shift in terrorism strategy. German explored radicalization theory’s trajectory in his 2019 book, Disrupt, Discredit and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy.
Radicalization theory attempts to establish a logic of progression by terrorists from introduction to a particular ideology through political and social activism, ending with targeted violence.
“When I worked domestic terrorism in the 1990s, the ‘radicalization’ theory was discredited, and it was resurrected after September 11,” German says. The theory centers on excising “bad ideas” from the broader political body and neutralizing the voices of dissident figures who may inspire and possibly radicalize others—which, according to sentencing filings, is precisely how federal prosecutors view Goonan. “Thanks to that framework, they can target anyone they choose,” German says. “And because of this logic, they’ve constructed where bad ideas necessitate mass surveillance, financial scrutiny, and disruption. The paradigm that was initially aimed at Al Qaeda is now being directed towards mainstream Americans, mainstream ideas, and mainstream political parties.”
Sentencing records make clear that Goonan’s political convictions began moving away from the American mainstream long before their weeklong spree of direct action in the late spring of 2024. The former high school baseball standout began to get immersed in the East Bay’s radical political circles after suffering an injury in junior college, then continued their intellectual journey during their undergraduate studies at UC-Riverside and in a doctoral program at Chicago’s Northwestern University.
Israel’s brutal response to the October 7, 2023 attacks, deemed genocidal by an independent commission at the United Nations, appalled Goonan, and they went headfirst into Palestinian solidarity activism in the East Bay. The Gaza solidarity encampment at UC Berkeley caught Goonan’s attention in spring 2024, and they became an active participant in that movement. Court records indicate this was a particularly challenging time, with Goonan suffering serious hypoglycemic episodes from their Type I diabetes and also being involuntarily hospitalized on a mental health hold and formally diagnosed with bipolar disorder, according to court documents.
“I am not an arsonist but an activist who in a manic fit of rage and desperation committed arson,” Goonan wrote in a September 13 letter to Judge White ahead of sentencing.
When the UC Berkeley solidarity encampment quietly disbanded in late May—a stark contrast to violence inflicted on other campuses by police and pro-Zionist vigilantes—Goonan, per court records, decided to mount a one-person direct action campaign they entitled, “Operation Campus Flood.” Federal prosecutors claim Goonan made explicit reference to Hamas’ name for the October 7 operations (al-Aqsa Flood) and referenced a propaganda pamphlet FBI agents found in Goonan’s family residence narrating Hamas’ justification for their decision to attack Israel.
These factors, outlined in the government’s sentencing memo plus Goonan’s online communiques after the arsons urging others to follow their example, their desire to publish writings on the rationale behind their actions, and their purported attempt to use legal mail to conceal communications from the authority underpinned the prosecution’s request that Goonan be housed in BOP’s highly restrictive unit.
“Even after being arrested and pleading guilty to his crimes, he has refused to show any remorse and in fact has taken substantial steps to continue to publicize his actions and recruit others to his cause,” assistant US attorney Nikhil Bhagat wrote in a September 18 filing. “The defendant is a highly educated, unrepentant domestic terrorist who sought to use violence against law enforcement officers and the federal government.” The Communications Management Units, created by the George W. Bush Administration, have been criticized for contributing to the ongoing radicalization of inmates. There is only one such unit left in the federal prison system, at FCI Cumberland, where a combination of radical Islamists, neo-Nazis, and left-affiliated prisoners are currently being held. The two other CMUs, at FCI Marion and FCI Terre Haute, were closed within the past year, according to court records.
Sarah Potter, Goonan’s defense attorney, tells WIRED that the government’s demands for a heavy sentence came once Goonan had reached a plea agreement on January 14, 2025 (Before Trump’s inauguration) that limited their sentence to 20 years. When they got hold of Goonan’s jail correspondence, Potter says, they had expanded their concept of his radicalization from earlier anarchist beliefs to Islamist terrorism. “By the time we got to sentencing, they were drawing a much closer and clearer connection to Hamas,” Potter says. “The main core of their beliefs is anti-oppression in various aspects, whether that’s racial oppression, prisons, or other marginalized groups.” The potential assignment to a CMU—which will be a unilateral decision by federal prison authorities—alarms Potter considering Goonan’s Type I diabetes and documented history and episodes, per court documents, of severe mental health episodes. “Their comments at sentencing were designed to paint Casey as a dangerous ringleader, who if allowed to have free communication would continue to present a true threat of violence to the country,” Potter says.
In addition, Potter believes federal law enforcement’s ongoing attempt to unseal Goonan’s correspondence with the Transgender Law Center, which could represent Goonan should they decide to become party to the TLC’s class action lawsuit brought by transgender inmates against BOP and the Trump Administration, represents a unique and undefined threat. Even though Goonan’s case is formally closed and he is already in FCI Mendota awaiting assignment to another prison, Potter and federal prosecutors are still sparring in court filings about divulging Goonan’s confidential legal correspondence with the TLC to USDOJ.
“TLC has filed a class action over gender-affirming healthcare against BOP, and the government knows that Casey might well become a client when they go into Bureau of Prisons custody,” Potter says. “The TLC and transgender Americans are clearly on the government’s radar, and not in a good way.”
Should the legal services organization be targeted for promoting extremism by the Trump Administration, German, the former FBI agent, maintains that the grounds for the overarching counterterrorism strategy originated long before 2024.
“There’s been a bipartisan acceptance of this kind of theory of terrorism that is often unconnected and unrelated from acts of violence,” German says. “NSPM-7 is a natural culmination of the adoption of this radicalization theory over 20 years as the basis for counterterrorism, and the government can target anyone they choose.”
Mumia is an award winning journalist and was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party chapter in Philadelphia. He has struggled for justice and human rights for people of color since he was at least 14 years old ~ the age when he joined the Party. In December of 1982, Mumia, who moonlighted by driving a taxi, happened upon police who were beating his brother.
During the melee, a police officer was shot and killed. Despite the fact that many people saw someone else shoot and then run away from the scene, Mumia was convicted and sentenced to death by what can only be called a kangaroo court.
During the summer of 1995, a death warrant was signed, which sparked one of the most effective organizing efforts in defense of a political prisoner ever. Since that time, Mumia has had his death sentence overturned, but still has a life sentence with no opportunity for parole. More information: freemumia.com
Smart Communications/PA DOC Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM8335 SCI Mahanoy PO Box 33028 St Petersburg, Fl 33733
After shots were fired at a protest against ICE, federal prosecutors pursued guilt-by-association charges against two protesters. by Natasha Lennard
The entrance of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4, 2025. Photo: Mark David Smith/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Federal prosecutors are making good on the Trump administration’s threat to treat antifa-related activity as terrorism.
On Thursday afternoon, prosecutors in Texas announced that terrorism charges had been filed against two people for alleged involvement in a shooting during a July 4 protest against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, in which a local police officer was injured.
The Prairieland case is setting a chilling example for how the government will use so-called counterterrorism efforts to crush anti-fascist dissent. Neither of the people named in the indictment are accused of shooting the gun. Instead, Zachary Evetts and Autumn Hill are accused of “providing material support to terrorists” and having “aided and abetted” the alleged attempted murder of government officers.
The federal indictment accuses Hill, who prosecutors dead-named, and Evetts as being part of an “antifa cell.”
The terrorism charges are an escalation of government efforts to criminalize protest movements by attempting to attribute collective guilt.
With tactics like using RICO laws built to combat organized crime, the government has made a habit of mass-prosecuting activists for individual, individuated crimes alleged to have taken place in the context of legal protest activity — even when there is no direct link between those charged and the alleged crimes. Though such charges frequently don’t stick, the lengthy prosecutions hamper protest movements and chill dissent.
“The framing of the case by the federal government should worry all of us,” a support committee for arrested protesters said in a statement on its website. “The glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative and the alarmist accusations are a clear attempt to bolster the Trump administration’s claims that the United States is on the verge of chaos, and to excuse a dramatic increase in militarized police action.”
“Investigation by Proclamation”
On the night of July 4, protesters from Dallas-Fort Worth held a noise demonstration and set off fireworks outside the ICE facility. Federal officers called local police to the scene. There was an exchange of gunfire between an Alvarado police officer and one other person, in which the officer was injured. The cop was taken to a hospital and released within a few hours.
In a lengthy preliminary federal hearing in September, an FBI official told the court that he could not say for certain whether or not the police officer shot first.
Nine people were arrested that night in the area, and numerous others were arrested in the days that followed, including during aggressive multiagency raids on homes and community spaces. Seventeen people in all now face a mixture of state and federal charges relating to the event, including state terrorism charges.
Neither of the two people now charged with federal material support for terrorism were arrested at the detention center. Members of a support committee for friends and loved ones of the arrestees fear that further federal terrorism and other hefty charges are in the pipeline.
While there is no such thing as a terrorism designation for domestic organizations, and while there is no centralized formal organization known as “antifa,” by associating the antifa label and anti-fascist activism with terrorism, Trump’s administration can marshal and direct vast law enforcement powers and resources into investigating and targeting networks of left-wing activists.
Even though there are no designated domestic terrorism organizations, only “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” there are domestic terrorist offenses under U.S. law. The government is attempting to portray the Prairieland Detention Center shooting as one such act.
The “terrorism” label has, after all, always been a tool for the government to categorize ideological enemies and deploy extraordinary resources to target them. At another preliminary hearing in July, prosecutors said that as many as 200 FBI agents were working on the Prairieland case — a massive overreach for a singular shooting incident leading to a minor injury in the context of a protest.
“This appears to be investigation by proclamation instead of investigation by sound intelligence,” Thomas Brzozowski, a former Justice Department lawyer working on domestic terrorism, told the New York Times on Thursday in reference to the government’s treatment of the Texas defendants as an “enterprise.”
“That’s what happens,” he said of Trump’s targeting of antifa, “when you open such a broad investigation into what is essentially an idea.”
Testing Ground for Repression
The Prairieland case has so far provided a convenient testing ground for state repression.
Gunshots were fired, and a police officer was injured. The government has pitched the activists as “heavily armed” even though, aside from a small number of guns found near the detention center, the guns found were in the cars or homes of the defendants — in Texas!
The case, however, has not been lifted up as a national cause célèbre against Trumpian overreach, possibly because a gun was indeed fired and acts of vandalism were reportedly carried out against ICE property.
Yet the Texas case reveals precisely the strategies the Trump administration will use, with the assistance of state forces, to target whole movements and communities with prosecutorial overreach and a logic of guilt by association. Government action here has been extreme in its treatment of an array of normal First Amendment-protected activity as evidence of terrorism; the blunt force effort to treat anti-fascism as terrorism should worry us all, even those who may want to distance themselves from any notion of protest militancy.
“What happened July 4th was a normal protest,” the support committee noted. “Regardless of what transpired that night, it’s clear that the scale and aggression of the police response is a fear tactic to send a message not only to DFW” — the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area — “but across the country of how this administration will treat anyone standing against their rising authoritarianism.”Read our complete coverageChilling Dissent
During preliminary hearings, prosecutors have pointed to the flimsiest of grounds to describe organizers as a terroristic enterprise, including references to typical and legal activist activities like making zines and using encrypted messaging apps.
Thursday’s indictment explicitly cites the use of encrypted, disappearing messages — a practice that is common for activists and gossiping friend groups alike.
The prosecutors also note that activists discussed bringing firearms to the scene, which is completely legal in Texas. According to the indictment, one message described the plan to bring rifles to the protest as a way to have police “back off” — that is, a defensive tactic. According to the support committee, “the state has provided no evidence that there was coordination to fire at police.”
Draining Resources
Thus far, other significant efforts to collectively prosecute activists have failed. Overreaching RICO charges against 61 participants in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement charges were dismissed by a judge last month; the government’s efforts in Trump’s first term to mass prosecute over 200 “J20” protesters with hefty felony riot charges also fell apart.
As I’ve noted, both these recent examples of failed mass prosecutions illustrate that malicious cases don’t need to be successful to drain movement energies and resources, and spread fear. The Atlanta and J20 examples also highlighted the need for collective defense campaigns.
The same is true for the now grimly precedent-setting North Texas case.
