T he battering ram took down the door first. A column of steel bolted to the front of a tactical vehicle slammed through Autumn Hill’s front entryway. Then the windows shattered. FBI agents threw flash bang grenades through the glass, their concussions rattling the house’s front rooms. Hill was in the shared office space, in a thin red dress, puttering around on her computer. She heard screams from the other rooms. Then, the buzzing of a drone, as the police flew a quad-copter in through the splintered doorframe. A voice from the drone shrieked out, telling the residents of the house to come out with their hands up. Hill was terrified. She edged out of the door and immediately stared down a wall of gun barrels, masked agents screaming orders, the drone screaming in the air behind her.
“I remember thinking, ‘If I don’t do exactly what I’m told for the next minute of my life I’m going to die right now,’” Hill says.
Through its loudspeaker, the drone called repeatedly for one name: “Benjamin Song.” Song wasn’t in the house, and no one inside knew them by that name. To Hill and her chosen family — an eclectic mix of personalities who lived together in what they called the “Big Gay House” — Song was “Champagne,” a gender-fluid, politically radical activist who had, the night before, led a group to a demonstration outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility near Prairieland, Texas. The protest, on July 4, 2025, was loosely organized in a collection of local activism group chats, and attracted a few dozen attendees, all of whom had their own idea of what they wanted to accomplish. Many, like Hill, planned a “noise demo,” or a loud protest involving fireworks and loud chants, aimed at disrupting the guards’ routine and letting the detainees inside know that they had supporters outside the fence.
But when they arrived, any sense of cohesion broke down. After making some noise, Hill left. Song, meanwhile, stayed, and he was armed with more than fireworks. As the FBI battered down her door the next morning, Hill knew why they were there. The night before, Song had shot a cop, hitting a local police officer in the upper torso before fleeing into the dark. The officer survived, but Song was still at large. The FBI thought he might be at the Big Gay House, and came in force.
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“It was very clear to me instantly that something crazy was going on here,” Hill says.
The wall of guns and screaming police were terrifying. She was told to turn one way, then another, to walk in conflicting directions — moments of terror when she misunderstood instructions — and eventually walked backwards into the arms of an FBI agent who immediately slapped her with cuffs.
She watched, furious, as the police pointed their guns at one of her housemates, a young mother carrying her infant child. Eventually, they threw Hill in the back of a police car. She told a detective nothing more than her name and that she wanted a lawyer. They let her out, briefly, to pee on the side of the road, and then eventually drove her away. The last thing she saw was her partner Shelby, handcuffed, sitting on the curb outside of their home. It was her first time being arrested. She didn’t know it then, but that morning would be her last as a free woman.
TODAY, AUTUMN HILL is a prisoner in Johnson County Correctional Facility. She has been sentenced by a federal judge to 50 years in prison after being convicted on charges stemming from the July 4 protest. Hill was convicted by a jury on one count of riot, for participating in the protest; one count of conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, for bringing fireworks to the protest; one count of using and carrying an explosive for using said fireworks; and a single count of “providing material support to terrorists.”
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The federal government’s case in the Prairieland shooting investigation eventually swept up over a dozen protesters and people connected to them.
“These sentences justly punish the vicious, armed attack that these Antifa cell members planned and executed,” the lead prosecutor, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Ryan Raybould said after the sentencing in June, citing an executive order President Donald Trump signed in September designating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization.
“Their terrorist acts, attempted murder, vandalism, and explosives launched at a detention facility were a far cry from a peaceful protest or First Amendment expression,” Raybould continued. “We will continue in this mission to hold others accountable who perpetrate such violence and fund these ANTIFA groups.”
Of the nine defendants who have been convicted and sentenced thus far, Song was the only person convicted of attempted murder. The other defendants, like Hill, were tried not just on the basis of their actions on the night of July 4 but for their associations with Song, and their actions before and after leaving the detention facility. What began as an attempted murder investigation tied to a single shooting became the poster case for a new era of federal prosecution of alleged left-wing terrorism, a legal battle in which the government decided to make a brutal example of nearly everyone involved.
Hill was found not guilty of attempted murder, but received maximum sentences for the charges that did stick. So, too, did many of her co-defendants, regardless of the severity of their crime. In one extreme case, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, a defendant who was not present at the protest, received a 30-year sentence for allegedly “concealing a document or record” when he moved a box of anti-fascist literature and files from his partner’s house to a friend’s apartment. Other defendants who pleaded not guilty received between 15- and 50-year sentences. Song was sentenced to 100 years. Hill, and many of the other defendants, maintain their innocence. Song was the only one who had fired a gun. When he pulled the trigger, Hill wasn’t there.
The severity of the charges — and the very public example that has been made of their perpetrators — is the most stark example of a new trend in American society, one that has been designed, tested, and deployed over many years of government crackdowns on protesters and activists across the country. All of this began long before Trump’s second term, but the president is now taking full advantage of tools meant to be used against foreign terrorists, weaponizing them to punish and repress homegrown activists he views as his enemies.
“The weaponization of these statutes isn’t new,” Katie Tomaszewski, a senior legal adviser at Charity and Security, an NGO founded after 9/11 to monitor the application of U.S. terrorism law, says. “It’s just the targets have expanded.”
The result is a new class of political prisoner: activists branded domestic terrorists and sentenced to hard time with little chance of pardon or parole. In Prairieland, Song’s trigger finger gifted the Trump administration a perfect justification for amping up his legal war on dissent. This draconian crackdown is now being applied in federal policy, messaging, and in a number of new cases against activists in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities. Trump’s policies — in particular a singular executive action known as National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) — have struck more extreme activists first, but could soon expand to persecute even the most mundane forms of political organizing. You may think that what happened to Autumn Hill could never happen to you — that in the United States, the First Amendment still shields citizens from the brunt of a vengeful administration. But that era, Trump and his advisers say, is dead. Step a toe out of line, and your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are all in jeopardy, if the president and his administration decide to brand you as a terrorist.
“It doesn’t matter what your politics are,” Tomaszewski says. “Republican or Democrat, you should be worried about that kind of power.”
I MET AUTUMN HILL more or less by chance. In late June, I started calling sources I knew in protest movements and anti-fascist organizing circles around the country to try to establish how much Trump’s new policies were affecting their way of life and methods of activism. A lawyer put me in touch with Lydia Koza, Autumn Hill’s wife, who also lived in the Big Gay House but was not arrested or charged in connection to the events on July 4. Koza agreed to speak with me on the phone, and midway through our talk, got a call on a second phone. It was Hill, calling from Johnson County. Koza put her on speaker phone, so the three of us could all talk.
At the time, Hill was being held in what is called “Administrative Segregation,” or AdSeg, which is essentially solitary confinement. Her only outlet was relatively unfettered access to a phone, which she could use to place collect calls. Hill told me she was on the phone as much as possible, speaking to friends and family from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m. almost non-stop. She added me to her list of phone numbers and we have spoken several times a week, sometimes for more than an hour, ever since. On the phone, Hill speaks slowly and eloquently, slipping back and forth between complex discussions of gender, philosophy, and politics. On one call, we ended up spending upwards of 10 minutes discussing The Locked Tomb, a fantasy series about lesbian necromancers in a spacefaring dystopian empire. Hill, when passionate about something, is a compelling saleswoman: I bought the first book in the series as soon as we hung up.
Autumn Hill (left) and her wife Lydia Koza. Courtesy of Lydia Koza Hill was born under a different name far from Texas. Her “family of origin,” as she calls them, were fundamentalist Christians who homeschooled her through high school, as she went through puberty and became increasingly aware that her identity did not fit into the narrow definitions of gender and sexuality that she was taught. Online, though, her world opened up. She made friends easily in digital fandoms for the webcomic Homestuck and message boards for video games, discovering a world of romance and companionship and sexuality that she could not express in her room at home.
“A big part of the process of my political and spiritual development led me from community to community,” Hill says. “I have been extremely blessed to find people who are attracted and moved to my way of loving.”
By 2023, some of those ties had grown so strong that Hill left home, moving to Plano, Texas, with an online friend she calls “Boots.” There, for the first time, she came out publicly as a trans woman. “It was an accident of faith that I ended up in Texas,” Hill says. “It was the first place that I felt like I could escape to.”
In Texas, Hill’s life flourished. She dated Boots and several other friends romantically, becoming close to others platonically, creating a polyamorous, diverse community both online and off. She went to her first protest, an LGBTQ Pride celebration outside of city hall in Dallas. Eventually, she moved into the Big Gay House with Koza and several other romantic partners and platonic friends, a community that she refers to as her “found family,” or sometimes “house kindred.” She got a job as a package handler for UPS. She and Koza were married in the fall of 2024.
The left-wing and anti-fascist activism space in the DFW area is, as in many cities, comprised of constantly shifting, heavily overlapping groups catering to various interests and flavors of activism, from poetry reading to the Socialist Rifle Association. In 2023, DFW was also a major flashpoint in the conversation around armed protest on both the left and the right. I traveled there to meet members of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an armed anti-fascist group that had gained some notoriety for opposing armed right-wing protesters with similar open-carry demonstrations at public events, the two sides sometimes staring at one another across city streets, rifles and long guns at the ready. Though the Elm Fork JBGC had disbanded by the time Hill moved to the area, its sentiment and some of its former members, including Song, were still well known among the city’s activist scene.
THE RESIDENTS OF the Big Gay House knew Song, or “Champagne,” was particularly militant about armed protest and direct action. He’d been affiliated with both the Elm Fork JBGC and the Socialist Rifle Association, and had participated in armed protests before. According to a Texas Monthly investigation, Song, a former Marine reservist, was enthusiastic about sharing his training with others, often going over security plans, communications, and basic firearms instruction with friends and fellow activists. On July 3, Song led a “gear check” at the Big Gay House, meeting with Hill and several others to talk over ideas for the protest and plan some of the logistics involved. Hill, according to testimony at trial from another defendant, asked Song if the plan was to bring firearms. Song said yes. “I’m not getting arrested,” he declared — a statement that played over and over again during the trial. Depending on which side you were on, it read as either a promise to remain peaceful, or an implicit threat. The following day, Hill, Song, and several others piled into a van driven by another member of the Big Gay House, and set out for Prairieland.
What happened outside of the Prairieland facility was chaotic, disorganized, and murky. As night fell, some protesters began lobbing fireworks over the facility’s fence. Hill had carpooled to the protest with Song and several others in a van driven by another member of the Big Gay House. But they weren’t the only attendees. Word of the protest had been broadcast widely on DFW-area activism group chats and message boards, and there were several attendees no one had met before. After the fireworks, Hill left the protest with a small group that did not include Song.
Song and several others stayed behind. Inside the Prairieland facility, a security guard had called 911, confused about the fireworks and yelling outside. Alvarado Police Lieutenant Thomas Gross responded to the call, driving up to the facility and into the middle of a chaotic scene — black clad figures, graffiti on cars, he later testified. As one protester ran in front of his vehicle, he stopped and got out, drawing his weapon. Gross’ body camera footage shows him pursuing the protester, before another figure, masked and carrying a rifle, appears. This, prosecutors say, was Song. “Get to the rifles!” someone yelled. Gross yelled at Song, telling him to get on the ground. Instead, Song opened fire, striking Gross once. Gross returned fire, one of his bullets striking Song’s AR-15. Song dropped it and fled, disappearing into the night.
Gross was treated at a nearby hospital. Song’s bullet entered near the side of his neck and exited out of his back. Several protesters were arrested on the scene, including the driver of the van, in which there was a handgun and two other AR-15s. Hill and several others were arrested at the Big Gay House on July 5. Song evaded capture for 11 days, before being arrested on July 15.
When the squad cars drove her away on July 5, 2025, Hill’s life behind bars began. The first week, she says, was torture. She and many of the other defendants were immediately placed in solitary confinement, and for days, she had no idea who had been arrested and what her future looked like. She was terrified for Koza, who hadn’t participated in the protest and had medical needs that would make incarceration almost unlivable. After nearly a week, Koza was able to visit. She had not been arrested or detained. Hill broke down in relief.
“I just knew — Lydia’s going to be ok, I can do this,” Hill says. “I can take whatever they give me.”
IT’S TEMPTING TO SEE the charges against Hill and her co-defendants as an isolated case: a protest gone seriously wrong, its participants convicted and sentenced harshly in a conservative state. There was real violence involved, that much is clear, and Texas is not known for its mercy. But during the time the Prairieland defendants sat in Johnson County, waiting for federal charges to be filed, the country changed underneath them.
On September 10, 2025, a lone gunman shot conservative activist Charlie Kirk in the neck. The alleged killer, Tyler James Robinson, had no ties to political activism or organizing. But the person Robinson loved, according to prosecutors, was trans — the kind of American that Kirk relentlessly persecuted. In a text message, prosecutors allege, Robinson told his partner that he had “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.”
Kirk’s killing upended the country’s political discourse almost immediately. Robinson was no clear-cut, black-clad antifa supersoldier, but the right immediately branded him as such, and the Trump administration capitalized on the shocking nature of the assassination to push a set of new directives that could fundamentally change the nature of political speech and protest in this country. Trump’s chief adviser, Stephen Miller, started making connections between Kirk’s killing and wider patterns of anti-fascist and left-wing organizing almost immediately, appearing alongside Vice President JD Vance on Kirk’s podcast and declaring that Kirk’s killing was the product of an “organized campaign.”
“It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller declared. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks.”
“It will happen and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” he said.
Shortly after, Miller’s pronouncement became policy. In an executive order on September 22, Trump declared “Antifa” a domestic terror organization, codifying a narrative that the right had been pushing for years: that “antifa,” short for “anti-fascism,” was a contiguous group that individuals could be members of or affiliated with, rather than a loose description of a political philosophy shared by groups across the political spectrum. The concept of “anti-fascism” is widespread across liberal and general left-wing organizing. You’ll see it on websites, social media pages, cardboard signs, posters, and zines produced by everyone from community gardening clubs and mundane nonprofits to more militant groups like the Socialist Rifle Association. What that meant, in practice, was that the government could brand almost any political act it didn’t like as domestic terrorism.
The Trump administration took this further three days later, releasing National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, now colloquially known as “NSPM-7,” which expanded in far more detail the resources and logistics with which the government would prosecute alleged domestic terrorists. As it happened, they already had several in custody, awaiting sentencing in Johnson County.
Emboldened by a newly militant president, the government’s narrative in the Prairieland case changed. Autumn Hill’s lawyer, Cody Cofer, told me that the initial narrative around the case focused on Song’s shooting of a police officer. “It was more about a police officer being shot — that was very much the headline,” Cofer says.
But by the time the case went to trial, it became clear that the prosecution had something different in mind. “The die had been cast. It was very much the narrative of antifa.”
The government’s case created a web of connections through chats on encrypted messaging platforms, attempting to establish that the events of July 4, 2025, including the shooting, were the product of a concerted, organized effort by a “cell” of antifa terrorists. This assertion was at the core of the government’s case for charging Hill and others with the most serious crime on their docket, providing material support for terrorists. The judge, Mark T. Pittman, a federal justice for the Northern District of Texas, was a Trump appointee, and allowed prosecutors a wide berth to make their case — a circumstance that Cofer says is typical with federal prosecutions. “It’s pretty easy for them in most cases to obtain a conviction. The law just doesn’t require the government to prove any of the window dressing about antifa.”
Still, Cofer hoped that he would be able to prove Hill was innocent of the charges against her. The evidence, he thought, was in his favor. There was no evidence Hill had ever held a gun, no evidence she had trained with Song in firearms, no weapons found in her part of the Big Gay House, no testimony, even, that she held a firework or a can of spray paint.
“Even if you look at this sort of hodgepodge of political ideas to create some patchwork of a scary anti-government rhetoric, there’s not evidence that Ms. Hill was engaged in that sort of militant activism, that sort of militant ideology,” Cofer said at Hill’s sentencing hearing. “There’s just no evidence of it. There’s no evidence at trial. There’s no evidence in the discovery. The evidence is that, after the corrections officers walked out and confronted the group, that group left and Ms. Hill paused to try to get the group to pick up the trash from the fireworks.”
The Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on March 16, 2026. AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez,File During the trial, Hill says her spirits were high. At lunch with her co-defendants, they joked about how stupid the government’s narrative was: antifa was an ideology, not a group, and there was no such thing as a “cell.”
But the weight of government prosecution was working on the jury. Several defendants took plea deals, testifying widely under harsh cross examination. When the trial ended, the jury deliberated for only two days, then came back. Hill was acquitted of attempted murder and the firearms charges, but found guilty of riot, the explosives charges, and the government’s real prize: providing material support to terrorists.
“We really sank into a black despair,” Hill says. “There was very little to hold on to.”
Cofer was similarly stunned. For weeks, after the trial, he was plagued by nightmares.
“Some of it is just that we care deeply for Autumn,” he says. “Some of it is, the government disappointed us. I felt sort of betrayed. I had more faith in the system than maybe I should have.”
During her incarceration, Hill has bounced around detention centers in the DFW area. First, she was in Johnson County, a small jail about 13 miles west of Prairieland. She spent most of her days there in AdSeg, confined to a tiny cell with no contact with her fellow inmates or co-defendants. Then, she was transferred to the only federal facility she’s been at thus far, the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, where she was housed in general population with several of her co-defendants. Hill, a trans woman, is housed with men, correlating to her gender at birth. In June, nearly a year after the protest, Hill was sentenced. She and six of the other “AMAB” — assigned male at birth –— defendants were reunited briefly at FMC Fort Worth and driven to court in a blacked-out SUV that Hill called the “party bus.” Up front, the guards played butt-rock anthems and pop country. As they approached the courthouse, the guards cranked the music up, aiming to drown out the sounds of the loud protests outside the courtroom in support of the defendants.
In another twist, Hill and several other defendants were not sentenced by Pittman, the judge who tried their case. Instead, they were brought before the U.S. Magistrate Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee who has been so sympathetic to the Trump administration’s agenda that he was chosen by government prosecutors to intercede in a federal case about trans health care all the way in Rhode Island.
Hill was first on the docket. O’Connor began sentencing by quickly overruling the defense’s outstanding objections. Behind his desk, Cofer began to suspect that the judge had already made up his mind.
“It was a gut punch,” Cofer says. “I realized this is a train on tracks and there’s nothing I can do.”
Frank Gatto, the U.S. Attorney leading the prosecution, laid out the government’s case plainly from the start.
“It’s easy to look at this case and say, well, they just brought fireworks, but that’s not the case,” Gatto said. “This antifa stuff has been going on for a number of years.” Gatto called the protesters “extremely motivated by this extremism,” and said there was “no question” that their acts were terrorism, something he said deserved the maximum sentences possible. “We can try deterrence and send that message. But with these kinds of beliefs, that’s even hard to do.”
Cofer made his final pitch, arguing Hill should be tried as an individual, and sentenced on the basis of her actions and her actions alone on the night of July 4.
After he spoke, Hill took the stand herself.
“When I went to protest on the night of July 4, it seemed more like a party to me than anything else,” Hill said. “My friends had prepared fireworks to shoot. The atmosphere was festive. And it was my belief that we would go home at the end of the night to continue eating and drinking and be merry. We truly didn’t think that anything was going to go wrong. And we didn’t expect or want any violence to occur.”
O’Connor was unswayed. He sentenced her to 50 years, 28 years more than the longest sentence delivered to a rioter on January 6 (Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and subsequently pardoned by Trump).
“Engaging in terrorism and violence to do so is an assault on democracy,” the judge said, overruling an objection from Cofer.
AUTUMN HILL IS one of the first long-term political prisoners incarcerated by the Trump regime. But the conservative movement’s plans to criminalize dissent have been building for years, in both state and federal cases. In Atlanta, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and Attorney General’s office had for years been arresting, charging, and trying protesters in the city’s “Stop Cop City” movement under a statewide domestic terrorism statute. While many of the cases were unsuccessful, prosecutors forced dozens of activists behind bars in squalid conditions during lengthy pre-trial detentions, and slapped others with harsh bail conditions that prohibited contact with other activists, effectively dismantling some of the loosely organized protest networks in the city. It also tested out more structural cases, filing RICO charges against a nonprofit group that provided jail support for incarcerated activists.
NSPM-7 built in some of these tactics, noting that the government would prosecute not just individuals accused of committing crimes against the state but “institutional and individual funders” of those crimes, specifically mentioning that it would seek to use RICO charges to break up these networks. The Trump administration’s toolkit against domestic dissent has been informed by years of domestic unrest, including the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests. The more serious terrorism charges have their roots in post-9/11 policy, Tomaszewski says, pointing to a number of cases in which nonprofit groups were charged with providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations while trying to distribute aid in the Middle East.
The difference, though, is that unlike specifically designated “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” or FTOs, there is no legal distinction for “domestic” terrorist groups. Trump’s executive order has no legal basis or framework. It is not law or precedent. And yet, it plays in courtrooms.
“The narrative is really important here,” Tomaszewski says. “In Prairieland, [the prosecution is] referring back to the executive order by President Trump. All of it is concerning but looking at the broader effects — it’s chilling protest activity. You’ve effectively stifled civic space.”
And in the streets, activists say, things have changed. “It’s completely changed [since NSPM-7],” an activist named Prim told me last October, in the midst of chaotic protests against immigration enforcement in Portland, Oregon. “We now have an open target on us.”
A sign outside of the Eldon B. Mahon U.S. Courthouse in Fort Worth, Texas, on July 1, 2026. Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News/Getty Images In January, these national tensions exploded across the frozen streets of Minneapolis, as Trump set thousands of federal agents loose in the city during an immigration crackdown dubbed “Operation Metro Surge.” By the end of the winter, ICE agents had shot two civilians dead in the street and brutalized hundreds of protesters. As the dust settled, charges started to come down. In June, a few days before Hill’s sentencing, the federal government indicted 15 alleged members of a group called “Direct Action Minnesota.” In the indictment, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that members of “antifa groups” had engaged in “an unrelenting campaign of harassment and violence targeting federal and local law enforcement,” which included conspiracy to impede federal officers, interstate stalking, threats, and multiple counts of assault on a federal officer. The protesters involved were not individuals responsible for various actions that may or may not have been protected First Amendment activity, the government argued, they were a dangerous cell fomenting a conspiracy against the government.
“There is an element of trying to send a message of fear and repression to people,” Bruce Nestor, an attorney who represents several of the Minneapolis defendants, told me. “The question is how serious are they really about it.”
Nestor says that the immigration has given the government an easy expansion of both their policing and prosecutorial power. Outside of D.C., he said, it’s uncommon for everyday civilians to encounter federal law enforcement — meaning that actions at protests are rarely liable for federal charges.
“All they really have is a bunch of community members planning a street blockade,” Nestor told me. But during immigration protests, Trump’s mass deployments “gives them the excuse to put federal agents on the street and then provoke interactions with them.”
It’s clear that expanding these efforts is still a key priority for the administration. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Miller held an international conference in D.C. on the “resurgence of political terrorism.” In his opening remarks, Rubio made an explicit link between the type of terrorism America experienced on 9/11 and what he called a current trend of “extremist violence from the political left.” Rubio claimed that left-wing violence was a “blind spot” that was under-covered and under-policed, effectively asking for international help in the administration’s war on antifa.
Tendrils of this policy have now crept into almost every level of the federal government. At the end of July, a bulletin within the Federal Emergency Management Agency instructed officials to prioritize grant funding to efforts that would combat domestic terrorism. Other documents uncovered by Reason show that the FBI is seeking to create an AI tool to identify potential political extremists before they have committed any crimes. The Trump administration now lies in wait for the next person to challenge it, armed with enough precedent and legal red tape to turn activists into political prisoners before they even have a chance to resist.
THE REC YARD at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth is mostly dirt and concrete — some cracked basketball courts, a sand volleyball pit, a lane for horseshoes. But underneath the spotlight on the eastern edge of the yard, a few feet from the fences lined with razor wire, there is a spot where the grass thrives and dandelions grow. A few days after the sentencing, Hill sat down there, digging her fingers into the turf, listening to the birds and bugs singing in the trees. The sun was on her face. There was a breeze, even in the late June heat.
“I remember thinking to myself, I’m going to survive this,” Hill says. “I can watch the earth change from in here. It was a profound reaffirmation in my membership in this divine dance.”
Hill is under no illusions about the rest of her life. Her sentence is 50 years. She is 30 years old now, meaning the next time she knows freedom could be at the age of 80. State charges that have yet to be resolved could make it even longer. There are avenues of relief — the slim chance of appeals, the even slimmer chance of a pardon or commutation by a Democratic president — but none of them are likely, and none of them would be swift. She will spend the next chapter of her life behind bars.
As I wound down reporting, my conversations with Hill got more philosophical, more personal. We talked for hours on the nature of acceptance, and community, and the existence of hell — a concept Hill says she first explored through her drag persona, “Lady Hell,” a matronly goddess who embraces the fact that queer people are often told they will receive damnation. We swapped book recommendations (the lesbian necromancer series is, in fact, extremely good). Once, after not hearing from her for three days, she called me to apologize, saying she had been deeply embedded in several books on grief and love, including the work of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who wrote about a great, interconnected spirituality that transcended religious distinctions — being part of a larger world, no matter where and who you were. In our first conversation, Hill told me how she grew up reading stories of the early Christian martyrs. It was one of the only times she used the word, but it’s clear that she’s still seeking for a way to give the next 50 years of her life meaning.
What keeps her going, she says, is the hope that Americans are more motivated by the clear injustice of her sentence than if she had been found not guilty and allowed to go home. To the right wing, she is a terrorist: regardless of her personal actions, she went to a protest in a van carrying several assault rifles. That branding will keep her in small rooms with hard walls for most of the rest of her life. But in some ways, I think, she has grasped onto the disproportionate severity of her sentence as an indication that her suffering can be in service to others, can be somehow connected to both the wider world and the wider struggle for a better future.
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Any purpose she has found in her incarceration, of course, will exact a price.
“I do get hungry,” Hill tells me. “Not like a physical stomach hunger, but like a heart hunger. I’ve lived a very lonely life. I have a very hungry heart.”
