Lawyers representing alleged Antifa members who set off fireworks outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas and who later shot a police officer tried to discredit an anti-Antifa witness by citing a group that carries water for Antifa.
Federal prosecutors have charged nine defendants with various crimes for their July 4, 2025, riot outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. A federal grand jury convicted eight of them on the charge of riot and providing material support to terrorists on Friday. While most charges did not rely on the claim that rioters were part of Antifa, the indictment describes the defendants as an “Antifa Cell.”
During the trial, prosecutors brought in Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, as an expert witness on Antifa. Defense lawyers objected, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left activist group that has carried water for Antifa, to delegitimize his testimony.
Patrick McLain, the defense attorney representing Zachary Evetts, confirmed to The Daily Signal that he objected to Shideler’s testimony, and he referenced a lengthy report written by Anne Speckhard, a retired adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center.
“I objected, on behalf of my client, to Mr. Shideler rendering opinions on matters at issue which only a court-recognized expert could do,” McLain told The Daily Signal. “The court overruled most of my objections,” he admitted. (Per his request, the entirety of McLain’s comment to The Daily Signal appears at the bottom of this article.)
He referenced Speckhard’s report, which, among other things, notes the SPLC’s accusation that the Center for Security Policy is an “anti-Muslim hate group,” and claims the organization “engaged in fear-based advocacy, not objective science.”
Defense attorneys also cited the SPLC while objecting during the trial.
“An attorney for another defendant, in his cross-examination of Mr. Shideler, brought up that Mr. Shideler’s employer, the Center for Security Policy, had been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center,” McLain added. “That evidence came in without objection.”
Shideler contested the accusation in court, however.
“Yes sir, the Southern Poverty Law Center has mislabeled many people as a hate group,” Shideler said in response to a question from defense lawyer Phillip Hayes, The Intercept reported.
SPLC’s Ties to Antifa
The SPLC, a public interest law firm that gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan chapters into bankruptcy, and now condemns mainstream conservative and Christian groups by putting them on a “hate map” with Klan chapters, has refused to put Antifa on the map. It calls the Center for Security Policy a “hate group” because it warns against the threat of radical Islam.
A terrorist confessed to using the map to target the conservative Christian Family Research Council in 2012.
While the SPLC’s former president, Richard Cohen, condemned Antifa violence once in 2017, the SPLC has not condemned Antifa since.
In June 2020, the SPLC attacked President Trump for announcing his intention to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization. It warned that “those who identify with” the Antifa label “represent a large spectrum of the political left” and that “far-right extremists use similar tactics” to the Trump administration in condemning Antifa.
Although Antifa agitators took part in the Black Lives Matter riots between May 28 and June 8, 2020, which resulted in more than $2 billion in insurance payouts and cost the lives of at least 26 Americans, the SPLC minimized Antifa violence as “skirmishes and property crimes,” adding that “the threat of lethal violence pales in comparison to that posed by far-right extremists.”
Megan Squire, whom Wired profiled as “antifa’s secret weapon against far-right extremists” in 2018, reportedly worked closely with the SPLC, feeding the organization data on white nationalist and other groups. She said she does not consider herself antifa but is “sympathetic to antifa’s goal of silencing racist extremists.” She passed along information “to those who might put it to real-world use. Who might weaponize it.”
Squire joined the SPLC full-time in 2022 before leaving the organization in March 2025, according to her verified LinkedIn profile.
Neither the SPLC nor Squire responded to requests for comment.
Other Criticisms of Shideler
In addition to the SPLC attack, Speckhard raised other concerns about Shideler. She claimed that he lacks “academic training for expertise in “social-movement analysis.” She claimed his analysis of Antifa materials did not use “any coding schema, sampling framework, data verification protocol, or analytical model.” She faulted him for “ideological bias.”
Speckhard cited previous government reports claiming that “Antifa is a way of thinking, perhaps a philosophically aligned social movement to resist fascism in all its forms, but no national Antifa organization exists.”
The judge ultimately allowed Shideler’s testimony.
Both Shideler and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment for this story.
The Defense Attorney’s Statement
McLain’s full statement appears below.
I am one of the attorneys for Zachary Evetts, one of nine defendants in Northern District of Texas Case No. 4:25-cr-00259-P USA v. Arnold et al. They are charged with federal crimes regarding their conduct surrounding a noise demonstration at an ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas on 4 July 2025. The federal prosecutors called Mr. Kyle Shideler, an employee of the Center for Security Policy, to testify about something he called Antifa.
Though the prosecutor had filed notice that they intended to offer Mr. Shideler as an expert at trial, in an unspecified topic, the prosecutor never made the requisite request, under the Federal Rules of Evidence, to have the Court to recognize Mr. Shideler as an expert in any area, and the Court never recognized Mr. Shideler as an expert. Thus, I objected, on behalf of my client, to Mr. Shideler rendering opinions on matters at issue which only a court-recognized expert could do. The Court overruled most of my objections.
An attorney for another defendant, in his cross-examination of Mr. Shideler, brought up that Mr. Shideler’s employer, the Center for Security Policy, had been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That evidence came in without objection. There was much testimony elicited from Mr. Shideler that challenged his qualifications and his assertion that there is an organization called Antifa which he called a terrorist organization.
Of note, the US government and many other contemporary Western governments have investigated the question of whether there is an organization called Antifa and, if so, whether it meets the definition of a terrorist organization. Until President Trump elected, on his own in September 2025, to issue an Executive order stating that there is a terrorist organization called Antifa, neither the US government or any other government had made such a pronouncement. For a better discussion of this issue, I commend to you Georgetown University professor emeritus Dr. Anne Speckhard who, as a forensic psychologist, has interviewed over 800 domestic and international terrorists for our government and other governments and has much helpful to say about Antifa.
