Three more suspected members of a Texas antifa cell were indicted on state terrorism charges in connection with a July 2025 attack on federal officers outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, Texas.
Overnight on July 4, 2025, more than a dozen heavily armed antifa militants belonging to a Dallas-area antifa chapter ambushed Homeland Security personnel guarding the ICE holding site near Fort Worth. The coordinated attack left one local police officer, who was responding to a disturbance call at the detention center, shot in the neck.
Now months after the nonfatal shooting, Melania Lynn Estes, Andrew Tyler Smith, and Steven Thomas Reyna became the latest alleged associates of the antifa cell to be charged, each facing one count of hindering the prosecution of terrorism and one count of engaging in organized criminal activity: smuggling of persons.
Estes, Smith, and Reyna are accused of helping Benjamin Hanil Song, the cell’s convicted ringleader, evade law enforcement after he shot Lt. Thomas Gross of the Alvarado Police Department on the night of the attack. Song, then a fugitive from justice, was the subject of a weeklong FBI manhunt and made the Texas Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.
According to charging documents obtained through a Washington Examiner records request, the three allegedly collaborated with two other accomplices, Lynette Read Sharp and Susan Elaine Kent, to “harbor or conceal” Song.
Sharp and Kent both previously pleaded guilty to federal charges of providing material support to terrorists. Sharp, the first coconspirator to take a plea deal, admitted to aiding and abetting Song’s escape by supplying him with a disguise, while Kent told investigators that she coordinated lodging and transportation arrangements to move the antifa cell’s at-large leader between safe houses.
State prosecutors allege that Estes, Smith, and Reyna worked alongside Sharp and Kent as part of a support network that activated in the aftermath of the attack to hide Song and provide him with “the means of avoiding arrest.”
A grand jury indicted the trio in March, but the indictment against Estes, Smith, and Reyna was just recently unsealed, bringing the total number of individuals suspected of involvement in the terrorism plot to 22 alleged antifa operatives across state and federal proceedings.
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Sixteen of the defendants have already been federally convicted, including nine found guilty earlier this year in the first-ever federal antifa terrorism trial in U.S. history. Jurors returned convictions in March related to terrorism, rioting, carrying an explosive, and unlawful use of a firearm. Song was the only one convicted of the most serious charge of attempted murder.
Seven others pleaded out ahead of trial, confessing in sworn statements that the anti-ICE attack was launched “in line with [an] Antifa ideology,” and five of them flipped to testify at trial against their comrades in exchange for reduced sentences.
An antifa collective called the DFW Support Committee, which established a legal defense fund for the nearly two dozen suspects, issued a statement declaring that the three newly indicted defendants “do not intend to cooperate with the prosecution.”
To date, the committee has raised almost $125,000 from mostly anonymous contributors on behalf of the 22 criminally charged cell affiliates. Antifa International’s funding arm, the International Antifascist Defense Fund, sent the largest donation, signing “With love and solidarity from your friends.”
Estes, Smith, and Reyna were booked into Johnson County Jail, with bail set at a combined $1.25 million. All three have since been bonded out of state custody, court records show.
The federal investigation came after President Donald Trump designated the anti-fascist organization as a domestic terrorist organization, directing all appropriate agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” criminal enterprises organizing under the banner of antifa, including targeting antifa’s financial backers.
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Those convicted so far are scheduled for sentencing this Thursday in the federal terrorism case. They still have state charges pending in Texas for offenses ranging from organized crime to obstruction of justice.
Dario Emmanuel Sanchez, another state defendant, is slated to stand trial on June 22 for allegedly tampering with evidence. Authorities say that Sanchez, a former teacher in the Dallas Independent School District, deleted texts from Signal and Discord showing the antifa cell’s attack plans.