Thirty-plus years in courtrooms as a designated expert witness and a lifetime coaching young men on rugby and football fields teaches you something about lines. Draw one and enforce it consistently, and character develops. Blur it because it's politically inconvenient, and chaos follows. The Justice Department's prosecution of anti-ICE protesters on federal conspiracy charges isn't authoritarian overreach. It's a correction that is long overdue, applied to years of letting "mostly peaceful" demonstrations morph into coordinated efforts to nullify federal law.
The Spokane case goes to trial this week, May 18, 2026, and what happens in that courtroom matters well beyond eastern Washington. Nine defendants, the so-called Spokane 9, were originally charged with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers after the June 11, 2025 protest outside ICE's Spokane facility, where a crowd blocked transport vehicles carrying two legal asylum seekers to a Tacoma detention center. Six of the nine have since pleaded guilty. Three — Bajun Mavalwalla II, Justice Forral, and Jac Archer — chose trial. Prosecutors point to coordination, real-time communication, and actions that went beyond chanting slogans: blocking driveways, surrounding transport vans, and throwing police-deployed smoke canisters back at officers.
Critics immediately reached for the First Amendment. They should reread Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) first. The Supreme Court drew an explicit line: speech is protected unless it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. Handing out signs is protected speech. Coordinating to physically block federal officers executing lawful immigration procedures crosses that line. Courts have upheld conspiracy charges for decades when prosecutors demonstrate agreement plus an overt act, from the Smith Act cases like Dennis v. United States (1951) to modern organized disruption prosecutions. This isn't novel law. Its existing law being applied without a political thumb on the scale.
The DOJ's posture makes the backdrop more pointed. The morning after the Spokane protest, the Justice Department distributed a memo to all 93 U.S. attorneys directing them to prioritize prosecutions of ICE protesters. By January 2026, DOJ official Aakash Singh convened a conference call and delivered the department's message to federal prosecutors: go after the protesters with everything you have, "go big and go loud," as Singh put it. The directive rested on National Security Presidential Memo 7, a Trump administration order that expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include not only assault but interference with immigration enforcement. The acting U.S. attorney in Eastern Washington, Richard Barker, launched the investigation, then resigned rather than sign the indictment, saying he couldn't bring felony charges that would compromise his integrity. Whatever one thinks of Barker's conscience, the question he couldn't answer still stands: when does organized physical obstruction of federal operations become criminal conspiracy?
I've watched California answer that question with steadily rising tolerance for disorder over thirty-five years. I arrived in 1990 when the state still rewarded work and aspiration. I drove in the Presidential motorcades following the 1992 LA Riots, close enough to see how fast selective non-enforcement accelerates lawlessness. What begins as a calculated disruption of one transport van in Spokane becomes a template tested in city after city. The St. Paul conspiracy case — involving 39 defendants, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, charged in connection with a demonstration at a local church — shows the model is now national in scope. Sanctuary policies, activist judges, and performative disruption created predictable cascades of disorder in California. The same calculation is playing out on the federal stage.
The left's counterargument is predictable: federal conspiracy charges chill legitimate protest. Worth taking note. Vigorous dissent is core to the republic, I believe that. But the First Amendment has never been a get-out-of-jail-free card for coordinated physical obstruction of law enforcement. Brandenburg protects heated rhetoric. It doesn't protect an organized effort to prevent officers from doing their jobs. Blocking a van, throwing incendiary devices at officers, and surrounding federal transport vehicles aren't abstract expression. They're violent, overt acts. Whether they satisfy the legal threshold for conspiracy is exactly what Spokane's jury will decide, which is how the system is supposed to work.
Solving this requires no new law, just applying existing law without fear or favor. Prosecutors should anchor charges with concrete evidence of unlawful agreement, not ideological opposition to the cause being protested. Congress should tighten penalties for organized interference with federal operations in ways that survive First Amendment scrutiny. And voters in sanctuary jurisdictions need to understand that openly nullifying federal authority doesn't insulate communities from federal response, it invites it. California has run that experiment for three decades. The results aren't encouraging.
My oldest son graduated from West Point. My youngest brother is a retired Green Beret. Service carries obligation. Part of that obligation is enforcing lawful orders and accepting consequences when you choose to obstruct them, regardless of how righteous the cause feels from the inside. The republic doesn't run on good intentions. In The Untouchables, Eliot Ness's breakthrough came when he finally decided the rules of engagement had changed and meant it. The DOJ's current posture is a version of that same decision. Protest loudly. Organize deliberately to physically nullify federal enforcement, and you've made a choice the law recognizes. The DOJ is finally prepared to treat it like one.
The Spokane Three go to trial Monday. Whatever that jury decides, the principle at stake isn't going away. The question isn't whether Americans have the right to protest. They do, and no serious person disagrees. The question is whether the state retains the will to draw the line between protest and conspiracy, and the honesty to enforce it regardless of who's doing the obstructing.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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