Snitching, Rectification, and the Case of the Prairieland Anti-ICE Activists

The question of handling snitches has gained some controversy over the last month around the case of the Prairieland anti-ICE activists after a defendant who initially cooperated with the state and informed on other activists later claimed to stop snitching and was sentenced to decades in prison alongside them.

Background

The government sentenced 15 people to prison on domestic terrorism charges in connection with a noise demonstration that took place outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Prairieland, TX on July 4, 2025. Over half of the defendants were sentenced to 50 years or more. During the course of the demonstration, activists set off firework and one protester (who would also later be an informant) spray painted anti-ICE slogans. Another protester fired a gun in self-defense, grazing a police officer after the officer drew his gun on fleeing demonstrators.

The case was a test run of the Trump administration’s September 2025 “Antifa” executive order and the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), signed in the aftermath of the annihilation of Charlie Kirk and two months after the Prairieland anti-ICE protest. The executive actions broaden the use of domestic terrorism charges to include “politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.” In other words, low-level charges like trespassing can now have domestic terrorism charges tacked on to them if the ruling class identifies the behavior as threatening.

The orders are a development of the trend of heightening repression seen under the Biden administration, which expanded the use of hate crimes against pro-Palestine demonstrators. This trend of reactionization corresponds to the decomposition of bourgeois society—power and wealth are increasingly concentrated in fewer hands and militarization intensifies to repress the people as they rebel against their worsening conditions.

The Role of Snitches

The snitch named in court documents as Bradford Morris, who is going by the name Meagan Morris, was a critical element in the government capturing the activists and developing the narrative that they are involved in an “antifa” conspiracy.

Morris is one of several Prairieland defendants who cooperated with the state and informed on the other activists.

According to federal documents, Morris began providing information to the government immediately upon being captured on July 4. This information included how Morris became involved with the protest and the activists, making statements about the workings of the activists their plans for the protest, and providing information that would lead to the arrest of several of the Prairieland defendants, including Morris’s own partner.

While Morris now claims to stand with the other defendants, receiving a hefty sentence alongside them unlike the other informants, some organizations argue to continue support for Morris.

The Dallas/Fort Worth Support Committee, which has been raising awareness and organizing support for the defendants in the area, wrote about Morris on its website: “In early July, Meagan spoke with law enforcement, which caused serious harm to other defendants. With the help of competent legal counsel, she has made a commitment to affirming her constitutional rights going forward.”

In an analysis titled “Nothing for Snitches: For a Revolutionary Anti-Repression” published on the anarchist website Abolition Media, this and other claims in defense of Morris are refuted. The authors write, “Morris waived her Miranda rights and began snitching on her comrades within hours of her arrest,” leading to the arrest of four of the activists. “In a follow up interview Morris requested after her initial statement [to the state], she linked the gunshots fired on July 4, 2025 outside the Prairieland Detention Center to Song, claiming that the sound was consistent with a binary trigger he had on his rifle. She also suggested that the shooting was premeditated, and that Song had intended to use the demo as cover,” providing the narrative that would allow the state to “link a loose network of comrades, friends, partners, and unaffiliated individuals in a ‘coordinated ambush’ involving the shooting of a law enforcement officer”.

Fire Ant Movement, which describes itself as an “anti-repression collective”, published an article on the anarchist website CrimethInc defending Morris, writing, “We believe that Meagan Morris made an indefensible choice in giving hours of testimony to federal agents. By corroborating John Thomas’s testimony, she contributed to the arrests of Rebecca Morgan, Benjamin Song, and Autumn Hill. After that, she ceased all cooperation, refusing further interviews. She did not take a plea deal. She did not take the stand against her codefendants.”

While earlier stating that Morris’s decision was indefensible, the author then poses the question: “Morris has made the strongest course correction towards revolutionary solidarity that is possible in her position. Her refusal to cooperate further landed her a fifty-year sentence. If we believe that remorse, redemption, and renewal are possible, then Morris has committed herself to seeking them. If we do not, then we must ask ourselves what we can offer defendants who have erred but have yet to decide whether to continue to assist the state. If we cannot offer those who have begun to cooperate any incentive to stop doing so, that all but ensures that once someone starts cooperating, they will become a permanent addition to the state’s arsenal against us.”

It is necessary to take a hard stand against informants and all kinds of police work. Morris provided the state with all that it needed to make its case. The only way Morris could become a “permanent addition to the state’s arsenal” would be reintegration into mass movements and providing more chances to inform. Whether a permanent agent or not, Morris can be of no use to the state isolated from the people, and this is what must be imposed.

Those who have been recruited by the state to inform on their comrades have been compromised; they have become a resource that the state will continually use. Opening the door to redemption from snitching creates a severe strategic weakness. It lowers the cost of snitching and thereby encourages it, it makes it easier for state agents to move among the people, it propagates individualism and shows that an organization is too weak to enforce its own discipline, and it makes such an organization lose all trust and legitimacy.

Oppose Snitching in All Forms

Snitching supplies the enemy with information that can be used against the people. It can be done openly in the form of directly giving the enemy information, or indirectly by making the information public so that the enemy can access it. It is still snitching regardless of if the information is true or false, as long as it gives the enemy ammunition to use against the people.

Snitching has two aspects: 1. it discredits activists and particularly leaders to isolate them from the people, and 2. it creates a narrative to facilitate legal charges against them. The two go hand in hand, as the former makes it easier for the state to get away with the latter. Charges can be beaten through mass mobilization, and isolating the activist from the masses is the first step in locking up an activist on trumped-up charges.

Snitching can take a variety of forms. It can be like the Morris case, providing information directly to the state about other activists, information that is then used to build up a case against them and get them charged with lengthy sentences. It can also take the form of public call-outs, red baiting, and rumor campaigns, all of which aid the state in isolating and prosecuting activists.

Snitching should never be tolerated. At a time of heightened state repression, when the federal government is carrying out a campaign of investigating and prosecuting organizations and individuals who are opposing US imperialism even superficially, police work is all the more egregious.

Revolutionaries and progressives have a strategic duty to educate and guard against snitching in all its forms and take a hard stand against it.

When is Rectification Possible?

While snitching should never be tolerated, like anything, there are degrees to police work and corresponding degrees to rectification and the ability to carry this out.

The ability to rectify an error is a question of the relationship between the gravity of the error and the amount of power revolutionary forces have conquered. Minor offenses can be rectified through democratic methods such as criticism and education while more severe offenses require power to impose conditions for rectification.

Power is conquered bit by bit. It is a matter of being able to mobilize the masses to impose and enforce decisions through violence.

For severe crimes, rectification can only take place when the proletariat has state power. Then, the proletariat can determine if it is in its best interest to rectify or annihilate a counterrevolutionary.

In the aftermath of the defeated 1905 Russian revolution, Tsarist forces targeted the Bolsheviks and pro-Party Mensheviks while promoting the liquidationists and liquidationists-inside-out (trends in the working-class movement that aim to isolate revolutionary leadership from the working class). The notorious Tsarist agent Roman Malinovsky was for a time the highest-paid agent of the Tsarist secret police, leading many comrades to their imprisonment and death while serving on the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks and representing them in parliament. Following the conquest of state power by the proletariat, Malinovsky was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

In socialist China, there are several examples of high-profile reactionaries being reformed. Perhaps the most famous of all is the last emperor of China, Puyi, emperor of the Qing dynasty from 1908-1912 and later a puppet emperor collaborating with the fascist Japanese invaders during World War 2. After being captured in 1945 and imprisoned in the Soviet Union, Puyi was transferred to China where he underwent a nine-year rectification period in Chinese prison. Puyi and other prisoners would have regular discussions about their lives, engage in criticism and self-criticism, and attend lectures where they were confronted and educated by people affected by their crimes. Following his release in 1959, Puyi would go on to be a street sweeper and later a gardener, remaining a supporter of socialism and the Communist Party of China until he died in 1967.

Another case is that of Allyn and Adele Rickett, two Americans convicted of spying for US imperialism in China following World War 2. The couple spent four years in prison before being released following a similar rectification process. Upon their release, the Ricketts returned to the US and wrote a book on their experiences sympathetic to socialist China and how they have changed their worldview.

Without dictatorship, such reforming can’t take place.

Where the proletariat lacks state power, those who cannot be rectified are combated by mobilizing the masses against them. A Manual On Organization from the Communist Party USA in 1935 (prior to its liquidation and false reconstitution as a revisionist party) says that enemies of the people must be combated through “mass exposure, creating and organizing mass hatred against these rats.” The tactics used by the rats include, “Creating sentiment against the leadership of the Party”, “Systematic destructive criticism against the line of the Party”, and “The spreading of rumors about individual leaders of the Party, concerning their political integrity or personal life”.

The degree of rectification required depends on the severity of the case while taking into consideration the individual’s past history and present situation, the general context of the error, and the ability to rectify in service of the present task of the revolution.

In the conditions of the US today, the sole-hegemonic imperialist superpower, anti-people activity is common and widely encouraged by “common sense” decomposing bourgeois ideologies of extreme individualism and hedonism. Corresponding to this, revolutionary forces are relatively weak and dispersed in the current situation, and the ability to carry out rectification is limited.

Anti-people crimes such as police work must be assessed on a case-by-case basis within this context, understanding that minor offenses are widespread, and that 90% of the people are fundamentally good, as Chairman Mao teaches, while the ability to rectify more severe crimes cannot occur under current conditions.

For those who have carried out minor offenses of police work, who realize their error and can change their ways, renouncing police work and taking up their post as revolutionaries—a process that has already begun over the past few years in the US Maoist movement—serves the process of overcoming dispersal and weakening liquidationism, attacking it at its ideological root and forming revolutionaries through criticism, education, and class struggle.

Image: The Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, 2017. Credit: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.

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