The Big Story in today’s edition of The Scroll is reported by Park MacDougald. Park writes (links omitted to all but the quoted press release, which includes photographs):
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In yesterday’s edition of The Scroll, we briefly noted a July 4 ambush-style attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, Texas, in which one local police officer was shot in the neck. On Monday evening, the Department of Justice announced attempted murder charges against 10 members of a revolutionary anarchist cell for their participation in the attack.
According to an account of the attack in the DOJ press release,
The defendants, dressed in black military-style clothing, began shooting fireworks at the facility, as part of an organized attack.
After approximately 10 minutes of convening, one or two individuals broke off from the main group and began to spray graffiti on vehicles and a guard structure in the parking lot at the facility. An Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911 to report suspicious activity. When the Alvarado police officer arrived, one alleged defendant positioned in nearby woods shot the officer in the neck area. Another alleged assailant across the street fired 20 to 30 rounds at unarmed correctional officers who had stepped outside the facility.
After the exchange of fire, the defendants attempted to flee but were arrested by Alvarado police officers. They were captured with multiple AR-15 style rifles, pistols, Kevlar vests, magazines, and a Faraday bag, a primitive electromagnetic jamming device used to prevent police from tracking cell phone signals. The defendants were also carrying propaganda posters with phrases like “Fight ICE terror with class war!” and “Resist fascism—fight oligarchy.” While executing a search on one of the defendant’s apartments in Denton, Texas, police discovered a copy of a pamphlet titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attack!”
According to independent journalist Andy Ngo, the assailants were members of a Denton “antifa cell.” In what has become something of a pattern in violent far-left extremism, at least two of the 10 people arrested are transgender women.
The ambush marks the latest escalation in anti-government violence from groups on the far left, often working in tacit coordination with more “mainstream” elements of the Democratic Party. In June, for instance, The Scroll spent multiple editions focusing on nationwide anti-ICE protests centered in Los Angeles, which featured de facto cooperation between revolutionary anarchist and communist groups, on the one hand, and big-money Democratic pressure groups, such as the Service Employees International Union, on the other hand. Since then, sporadic antifa and communist violence against federal and local authorities has continued more or less unabated in far-left strongholds such as the Pacific Northwest. While the Denton cell was executing its attack in Alvarado on July 4, for instance, hard-left radicals were rioting as part of a “direct action” at an ICE facility in Portland, leading to federal charges against four defendants. That’s in addition to far-left “lone wolf” attacks like the May murders of an Israeli embassy staffer and his girlfriend by Elias Rodriguez, a self-professed “Maoist Third Worldist,” and the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which was praised by left-wing influencers, including the journalist Taylor Lorenz.
For now, the violence looks set to keep escalating. As we noted in yesterday’s edition, Democratic politicians are now reporting that their constituents are promising future political violence while urging their leaders to support it. Few will do so openly, but after nearly a decade of likening Trump and U.S. immigration authorities to Hitler and the soldiers of the Third Reich, praising “antifascism” as a time-honored American tradition, and justifying or excusing violence against “Nazis,” our guess is that it will be hard to pull the plug now. The chickens, as a prominent leftist “organizer” once said in a very different context, are coming home to roost.
