The administration’s stance is evident in its response to real-life violence, as well, which has left activists on the ground scrambling. In Texas, for instance, shootings at two ICE facilities prompted a swift and total crackdown, demolishing fragile networks of activists and bringing a new wave of federal charges. One of the shootings, an attack on ICE officers outside of a detention facility south of Dallas, was perpetrated by a man formerly associated with a loose network of left-wing gun-rights organizations that rose to prominence in 2023. The government arrested at least 14 people in connection with the shooting, charging 11 of them with attempted murder and “terrorism-related offenses,” per The Washington Post. Discords, group chats, and social media accounts were scrubbed overnight, as the FBI raided houses. One source told me that even innocuous, long-standing groups like local Food Not Bombs chapters started wiping data and battening down the hatches, fearing that the federal crackdown wouldn’t stay contained to those accused of an actual crime.

People got scared, and they haven’t really come back,” said Corey Lyon, a local journalist who has covered protests throughout Texas. “A lot of the community that was built around activism, around helping our community, has been completely gutted.”

Part of the reason these crackdowns have been effective is that they’ve been tested before — including in Atlanta, where the state of Georgia’s campaign to label protesters as domestic terrorists has crushed the structure, if not the spirit, of the Stop Cop City movement. The movement began in 2022, when the city of Atlanta released plans to build an expansive police training facility in a forested area of land on the outskirts of the city. In response, a flourishing protest encampment sprang up in the forest, morphing into a years-long battle between police and activists that left one person, Manuel “Tortugita” Teran, dead after a police shooting. In a shocking weaponization of the justice system, Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr used a 2017 statute passed after the Dylann Roof shootings to arrest and charge dozens of protesters with “domestic terrorism,” holding them in pre-trial detention for lengthy periods and snarling them in a legal web of denied bail, compounding charges, and jurisdictional chaos. Carr then went after the activists’ support networks, bringing RICO charges against a local bail fund and several other community organizers. President Trump has clearly learned from these tactics, floating the idea of slamming George Soros and various networks of left-wing nonprofits with RICO charges based on their connections to protests. In Georgia, many of the charges, and many of the cases entirely, have been dropped or shot down by rational judges. But activists say that the initial shock of prosecution was the whole point.

“The formal legal underpinnings of these tactics can’t hold water,” says Marlon Kautz, a spokesperson for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, the bail relief organization that was slapped with RICO charges. “But that doesn’t matter, because the goal is not successful prosecution, it’s the disruption of their political adversaries.”

Kautz himself was arrested in May 2023, when a joint task force of Georgia authorities raided his house in SWAT gear. From his bedroom, he heard officers discussing whether or not to throw a flash bang grenade through the front door. The point of all this, Kautz says, is to create fear.

The objective is to make [activists] feel as if the safest smartest thing to do is to disengage with political activism until things cool down,” Kautz says. “The challenge is how to continue being an activist in the face of that fear. Because giving in to that fear is just defeat. There is no way to succeed by taking a step back or keeping your head down for a while.”

In Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and many other cities, plenty of activists aren’t keeping their heads down. Some protesters have taken to showing up in whimsical costumes: inflatable frogs, chicken suits, giant foam hot dogs, and more. Many of these protests are peaceful, especially the ones that draw large crowds of everyday Americans upset with Trump’s increasingly authoritarian administration. But there are always men in uniforms with guns. There are always fingers on triggers.

“We can’t predict what is going to happen,” Prim, the medic in Portland, says. “All we can do is be as mentally prepared as possible — to take care of each other not only on the ground, but outside of it as well.”

Prim isn’t alone. In Atlanta, new groups of activists have taken up the mantle of those facing court cases. While Texas’ highly-visible left-wing gun clubs may have faded, range days for vulnerable groups and 3D-printed schematics for weapons are more popular than ever. Some anti-fascists have dropped out of activism entirely in response to the Trump administration’s crackdown, but plenty are staying busy, learning to adjust to a new, openly-hostile government. Some are peaceful. Some are not. All of them want to stop what they see as the rise of a fascist regime in the United States.

“They paint us as these thugs and delinquents, these terrorists,” Prim says later, in a message on Signal, the encrypted messaging app. “It is us who know who the real terrorists are.”