Whether you remember his name or not, you've probably been reading about Judge Reed O'Connor and his judicial malevolence for years. O'Connor is making headlines again for being one of two judges to sentence 15 ICE protestors to a combined 547 years in prison. As the writer Lauren Fadiman pointed out in The Baffler, the media often uses "Prairieland ICE shooting" as a misleading shorthand for the protest. What actually happened is hard to capture in three words.
On the night of July 4, 2025, about a dozen people held a noise demonstration outside of the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. A few of them vandalized vehicles and guard structures, which cost the detention center around $2,200 to repair. Some set off fireworks in hopes of catching the attention of detainees, causing federal officers to call 911. Most of the protesters dispersed before the cops got there. But one of them, Benjamin "Champagne" Song, said that she saw Alvarado Police Lieutenant Thomas Gross pull out his gun and aim it at the back of an unarmed protester. Song fired her own gun in response, hitting Gross’s shoulder. The officer sustained minor injuries and was released from the hospital a few hours later. Song said she was trying to prevent another Renee Good or Alex Pretti from being "gunned down in the street." And maybe she did. No one died outside of Prairieland that night. Song and others were charged with attempted murder.
That happened before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Shortly after, Donald Trump designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and released a counter-terrorism strategy which tied Kirk's death to "extreme transgender ideologies" and identified "violent left-wing extremists" as one of the three major types of terror groups threatening the U.S. government. The Prairieland defendants—composed of trans people, tattoo artists, and zine-makers—served as the perfect embodiments of Trump's specter of domestic terror. Multiple defendants weren't even present at the protest, and much of the evidence presented at trial had nothing to do with the events of that night. Prosecutors weaponized the possession of stickers which said things like "ACAB," membership in the Socialist Rifle Association, the use of the encrypted messaging app Signal, and all-black clothing as evidence that the defendants were an "antifa terror cell."
Judge O'Connor ate up the bullshit and licked the plate clean, sentencing one defendant—who did not attend the protest—to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines. This vicious disregard for human life is only the latest in a storied career for O'Connor, who has achieved more than your average Federalist Society demon since his appointment to the federal bench in 2007 by George W. Bush. He's spent the last decade treating his judicial opinions like a white nationalist Make-A-Wish.
O'Connor's decisions are so extreme that they're frequently overturned by his overlords on the Fifth Circuit and at the Supreme Court, but not before causing immense suffering in the intervening years. After one of O'Connor's many attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board opened a piece critical of the decision with "No one opposes ObamaCare more than we do …" Even Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority and voted to save the law in the end. That might be the best summary of O'Connor that anyone can give: He is too extreme for Clarence Thomas.
O'Connor didn't even preside over the Prairieland trial; his colleague Mark Pittman did. But on June 17, less than a week before he helped tie a ribbon on Trump's first antifa indictment, a handful of defendants in the case were transferred to O'Connor's docket without explanation. O'Connor has referred to the protest at the center of the case as an "assault on democracy," and he said he chose to give the maximum possible sentences to the Prairieland defendants because "the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology."
It's not hard to believe that O'Connor forced his way into the sentencing for a taste of personal glory. His record is littered with shameless attempts to seize this kind of fascist splendor—some failures and others successes. The first time O'Connor made major national headlines was in 2015, when he ruled that it was unconstitutional for Congress to ban the interstate sale of handguns. Since "Congress regulates interstate commerce" is a collection of words that anyone with even the faintest memory of their eighth-grade history class can recite, the Fifth Circuit reversed the decision. Later that year, he made headlines again when he ruled that federally ensured family medical leave did not apply to married same-sex couples in Texas, since gay marriage was not legal in the state. This time it was the Supreme Court that dashed his designs, by default, when it decided Obergefell v. Hodges three months later.
It took O'Connor a year to avenge this humiliation, when he notched his first major national successes by undermining the dignity and agency of trans people. In 2016, he blocked the Obama administration from requiring public schools to let trans students use their preferred bathroom, and he blocked the portion of the ACA that prohibits insurers, doctors, and hospitals from discriminating against patients who are trans or have previously had abortions. (E.g., if you have a prostate, you are entitled to a prostate exam, no matter your gender.) Neither decision was reversed by a higher court. Judge O'Connor's machinations serve as an ongoing litmus test of national politics. How much fascism are we ready for? How low can he go? His early successes against trans people indicated what was to come, all the way up to Prairieland.
Anyone who wishes to test out their latest right-wing power grab knows to go to the Northern District of Texas, where O'Connor serves as a chief judge. State rules in Texas make it particularly easy to land your lawsuit in front of your preferred judge, and O'Connor has been a major destination for right-wing forum shoppers for years. In 2021, he ruled that Braidwood Management Inc. should be able to stop employees from entering a gay bar, engaging in "sexual practices associated with homosexuality," using Grindr, going on hormones and getting genital surgery (unless for purposes other than gender dysphoria, of course). The Fifth Circuit upheld the decision while reversing O'Connor's ruling that the case could become a class-action suit involving other businesses. Braidwood—whose owner likened gay and lesbian Americans to Nazis and compared LGBTQ people to "termites"—then tried to prevent employees from using the company's health insurance to obtain contraceptives and HIV-prevention drugs, and it knew to seek out Judge O'Connor. SCOTUS overturned his ruling eventually, but the occasional setback has not prevented him from getting bolder.
Last July, the Department of Justice subpoenaed more than 20 hospitals and clinics that provide healthcare to trans kids, demanding patient names, clinical histories, Social Security Numbers, addresses and more for anyone under the age of 18 who had been prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy in the last five years. Rhode Island Hospital told the DOJ that it could not comply with the request by the Aug. 7 deadline, so, at the end of April, the DOJ filed a petition to enforce the subpoena. Guess where? The DOJ claimed it subpoenaed Rhode Island Hospital in relation to an investigation in the Northern District of Texas, 1,800 miles away from where the patient records are actually located. The case landed in front of O'Connor, and he granted the petition.
After getting wind of this, Rhode Island's child welfare agency successfully filed a motion in federal district court in Rhode Island to quash the subpoena. A Trump appointee barred the DOJ from receiving the data from the hospital and excoriated the agency for its "subterfuge." In response, Judge O'Connor found a solution so laughably corrupt that it's still hard to believe it's real: He ordered Rhode Island Hospital to hand over the private medical records of trans children to him, personally, by the end of the following day. He promised not to share the details of the children's hormone therapy with the DOJ until all appeals in the case were exhausted, and to keep them as his own personal treasure for now.
Forum shopping doesn't exactly describe what is happening in the Northern District of Texas. It would be more accurate to say that Judge O'Connor, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the federal government are actively colluding with one another to bypass legislators and contort the political reality of the country into their desired shape. O'Connor does it over and over, somehow achieving levels of corruption notable even in 2026.
Another example: Since 2001, undocumented students in Texas received in-state tuition at public colleges if they lived in the state for three years and graduated from a Texas high school. But in June 2025, two days after the Texas legislature adjourned, former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Texas in federal court in Wichita Falls—where only Judge O'Connor presides. Instead of defending the state's law, which is his job, Paxton joined the side of the federal government. Judge O'Connor immediately ruled in their favor, permanently blocking undocumented students from in-state tuition. The whole thing happened in a matter of hours. Former Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli wasn't shy about the collusion, bragging that because they "were able to have that line of communication and talk in advance, a statute that's been a problem for the state for 24 years, we got rid of it in six hours." They pulled the same trick as recently as last month, when Texas sued the DOJ over a Biden-era immigration rule that allowed judges to indefinitely close deportation cases, something they routinely do. The DOJ sided with Texas, O'Connor signed off, and the whole thing was settled within hours. In plenty of ways, the feds have as much power as Reed O'Connor allows.
This is the reality: A judge who is actually part of an organized cell of extremist collaborators sentenced multiple people to languish in prison for the rest of their lives for taking part in a terror cell that doesn't exist. The sentencing is a major victory for the federal crackdown on protestors, which up until now has experienced little courtroom success. An April investigation by ProPublica and Frontline found that more than a third of approximately 300 anti-ICE protest cases have already fallen apart, with many still yet to be resolved. O'Connor couldn't help but insist on being part of a turning tide.
At least three of the nine people convicted and five of the 22 charged Prairieland defendants are trans. Autumn Hill, who has been held in a men's facility for the past year, received a 50-year sentence for conspiracy to riot and ambush a law enforcement officer. O'Connor didn't care that Hill wasn't present at the protest when the shot was fired. Trapping a trans woman in a male federal prison for being a member of a fake terror cell is perhaps the nadir of Judge O'Connor's illustrious career in anti-trans judicial activism. For now.
