On the night of July 4, 2025, a pack of black-bloc activists, otherwise known as social misfits, rolled up to the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, dressed like they were heading to a cosplay riot and armed like they expected one.
They brought fireworks mortars, spray paint, radios, knives and more. Once there, they slashed tires and spray painted “ICE pig” on government property. The other half of what they brought proved much more troubling: fifles, loaded magazines, body armor, trauma kits and more. Then a former Marine reservist named Benjamin Song put a round through Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross’s neck. Gross lived. Meanwhile, the brain trust who thought they were the vanguard of history did not walk away.
They called it a “peaceful protest.” Peaceful protests do not involve a wagon of fireworks used as a diversion, lookouts in masks, and an AR-style rifle with a binary trigger fired on a cop who just rolled up to a 911 call. Peaceful protests do not leave officers saying “I’m hit” on bodycam while suspects chant “I do not consent to a search” as if a mantra is a force field. Consent is cute. Probable cause after an officer is bleeding is better. The black clothes did the rest. The brain trust couldn’t have been more obvious if they wore “F the Police” t-shirts.
Several of the brain trust tried to walk right past cops. Nothing suspicious about a bunch of pedestrians, many wearing backpacks, dressed in all black after a police shooting and an assault on a federal detention facility.
Enjoy the video.
Prosecutors said it was an ambush: draw staff out with noise and vandalism, then shoot them. The defense said it was a noise demo for the people inside, guns brought “just in case,” Song firing only to save a fleeing vandal. A jury didn’t buy that fairy tale. Song got 100 years for attempted murder. Bye scumbag. Hope you like conjugal visits. In your cell.
Others got decades for their dumb stunt. This ain’t the Biden administration’s Department of Justice under AG Soyboy Merrick Garland. Later sentencings pushed the combined total north of five centuries. The YouTube cut of the bodycam calls it 568. However you add it, they will die in federal custody or come out as old men who wasted their lives on a stunt.
That is the punchline they never saw coming. They thought ideology, “peaceful protest” and “I do not consent to a search” made them immune from consequences for their terrorist acts. They thought “abolish ICE” was a sacrament and a detention center full of people with convictions for rape, child sex abuse, murder, and gang membership was a cathedral of oppression worth storming on Independence Day. They thought black bloc, Signal chats named “4th of July Party!,” and a house nicknamed the Big Gay House made them clever. Two of them couldn’t even decide which bathroom to use (they’ll be extra popular during conjugal visit times), but they were sure they were qualified to decide who belongs in America. Brainwashed is the kind word. Useful idiots with rifles is the accurate one.
Nobody died. That is luck, not virtue. A bullet through the neck is not a metaphor. Neither is a jammed rifle that a judge later called a “miracle.” If Song’s gun had kept cycling, this would be a funeral instead of a sentencing calendar. The people who keep insisting this was “just protest” are lying to themselves so they don’t have to admit they cheered a crew that brought war kit to a jail fence and then acted shocked when the state treated it like an attack.
This is the part the sermon-givers hate: consequences. You can hate immigration policy. You can stand on a sidewalk with a sign. You cannot fire on a police lieutenant, stash rifles in a van, hide evidence, and then demand the country treat you as a moral celebrity. The era when that kind of political violence got a press release and a slap is over. Fascists with a circle-A patch still go to prison. They just wear different merch. Five hundred-plus years is a long time to sit in a cell and replay the night they thought they were smart.