Defense Motion to Quash Will Be Heard on Thursday, January 22 in Johnson County District Court
CLEBURNE, TX – A pretrial hearing will take place on January 22 for one of the defendants in the Prairieland case, which involves 19 people criminally charged in connection with a July 4, 2025 solidarity demonstration outside the Prairieland immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas. The 413th District Court of Johnson County will hear a motion to quash the state indictment against Dario Sanchez.
Sanchez, the sole defendant currently released on bond, is facing state charges of hindering the prosecution of terrorism and tampering with/fabricating physical evidence. Sanchez’s state trial is scheduled to begin on April 20. “From the beginning, the prosecution has failed to show how I committed an actual crime in a county I’d never been to,” said Prairieland defendant Dario Sanchez, whose motions will be heard Thursday. “At some point, the prosecution will be unable to escape its fundamental misuse of the law.”
What: Pretrial motions hearing for Prairieland defendant Dario Sanchez
When: Thursday, January 22, 2026 at 1:30pm
Where: 413th District Court of Johnson County, 204 S. Buffalo Ave, Cleburne, Texas
“The indictment fails to allege facts which constitute a criminal offense,” said defense lawyers for Sanchez, who is seeking to throw out the indictment. According to the defense, the indictment is “vague, indefinite, contradictory, and uncertain,” and “states conclusions, rather than facts.” The motion argues that Count One is “incomprehensible and fails to put Defendant on notice of the offense or offenses against which he must defend.”
The motion to quash goes on to underscore specific flaws in the State’s case. “Count two fails to charge tampering with physical evidence,” reads the motion. “The State alleges ‘digital evidence’ (Signal/Discord chat logs and group identifiers), but digital data has no material, corporeal existence and therefore cannot be ‘physical’ evidence.”
The defense was also prepared to make an argument tomorrow that the court should compel the state to comply with its discovery obligations. But, yesterday, more than four months after Sanchez was indicted, and after at least five discovery requests, the prosecution dumped nine terabytes of “evidence” on the defense. After a cursory review, it appears that most of the evidence handed over yesterday is about or from Sanchez’s codefendants and unrelated to his case. The refusal by the state to comply with evidence disclosures has hindered Sanchez’s ability to investigate and prepare his defense.
Remarkably, the charges against Sanchez are from him removing someone from private group text chats. “The accusation that someone tampered with evidence for removing someone from a group chat is absurd,” said Irina Popova, member of the DFW Support Committee. “The case against Dario shows how desperate the state is to criminalize these defendants.”
Sanchez’s State motions hearing comes as nine Prairieland defendants pleaded not guilty to federal charges at their arraignments in December. These defendants are demanding jury trials, which are scheduled to start on February 17.
The Prairieland cases, involving both state and federal charges, stem from a noise demonstration in solidarity with detainees at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4, 2025. Toward the end of the demonstration, an officer with the Alvarado Police Department allegedly became involved in an exchange of gunfire soon after arrival. The officer sustained minor injuries, and was released from the hospital shortly afterwards. Ten people were arrested at the scene or shortly after, and a manhunt ensued in the subsequent days for another defendant. Eight more defendants were arrested in the days and weeks following the protest.
Prejudicial and sweeping statements related to these cases have been made repeatedly by officials at the highest levels of government, polluting the perceptions of the public from which the jury will be drawn and undermining the defendants’ ability to get a fair trial. The Trump administration has publicly claimed that the Prairieland case is the first legal case against “Antifa,” widely considered to be an informal set of anti-authoritarian beliefs. Just days after Trump designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, the White House released National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) on September 25, 2025, which ordered all federal law enforcement agencies to prioritize combating Antifa as a domestic terrorism threat. FBI director Kash Patel has called the defendants “Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremists,” sharing Fox News coverage of the case on X.