Cal Robinet woke on the morning of June 16 to federal agents smashing the window in the door of his St. Paul home. They burst in outfitted with bullet-resistant vests and masks, guns trained, and ordered him to put up his hands.

Bringing up the rear: a film crew.

Robinet and a dozen of his friends were simultaneously arrested across the Twin Cities and charged with conspiracy to impede or injure immigration enforcement officers during Operation Metro Surge.

Minnesota’s U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, called the defendants members of antifa, which President Donald Trump designated a domestic terrorist group after the killing of Charlie Kirk.

“We have a group of people who quite deliberately got together, planned violence, used violence,” Rosen said in a news conference accompanying the unsealing of a 94-page indictment.

The Justice Department has brought several waves of charges against Minnesotans for their actions during Operation Metro Surge, the nation’s largest-ever immigration enforcement blitz. But the antifa conspiracy case against the “Minnesota 15,” as they’ve come to be known in activist circles, is part of a larger strategy to crack down on leftist organizations holding what Trump calls “anti-American” beliefs about immigration, race and gender.

Nationwide, legal observers have questioned whether these cases stand on crimes having been committed, rather than ideologies being put on trial.

Four days after his arrest, Robinet showed a Minnesota Star Tribune reporter his boarded-up door and garage, which federal agents had breached by carving a giant A-shaped hole. He pulled up the Department of Homeland Security’s latest Instagram story — a high-production video montage of the arrests featuring him, his roommate and co-defendant Isaac Sant and others.

Robinet, a 37-year-old union electrician, said he felt confident about beating the charges. Energized even.

“The Department of Homeland Security kicked a hornets nest with this one, and I’m looking forward to having my day,” he said.

This summer’s antifa indictments describe how activists, blending “anarchist and communist views,” planned and carried out direct actions, including throwing ice blocks at agents and tailing them across the state, using vehicles and homemade shields to block roads around the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building.

The claims have generated both skepticism from legal observers and support for the 15 defendants. A fundraiser generated more than $350,000 in two weeks, and a line of people attempting to observe their mass arraignment earlier this month stretched out the doors of the federal courthouse.

Defense attorneys have criticized the indictment as being high on rhetoric but low on substance. The most serious charge involved a minor vehicle collision, which was also the subject of state misdemeanor charges that have already been dismissed.

At the same time, long passages describe protesters speaking at a conference, raising money for mutual aid and organizing a general strike, in which tens of thousands of Minnesotans took part. The indictment also highlights some defendants’ chat histories in which they expressed frustration over mainstream protests for not being confrontational enough.

At the June news conference, a reporter asked Rosen whether any federal agents were hurt as a result of the actions of the indicted.

“Causing bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” he told said. “And I would dare say, we just cannot have in this country people getting together, engaging in all of these violent acts, and then simply saying, ‘Well, you know, nobody got hurt. So how bad could it have been?’ ”

The 15 defendants are teachers, trade workers, artists and activists for transgender rights, with politics their common element. Several are professed anarchists and proud antifascists. Many swim in the same social circles and support the same causes.

On the day they were charged, Twin Cities activists swarmed the St. Paul federal courthouse, where law enforcement deployed chemical irritants and flash-bangs as protesters fought to keep courthouse doors open. At their July 1 arraignments, hundreds of supporters rallied between City Hall and the federal court in downtown Minneapolis. There were fiery speeches from representatives of a half dozen labor unions, and afterward, an attempt to squeeze as many bodies into the courtroom as would fit.

Defendant Treasure Thoreson, a special education teacher at Hmong International Academy, recalled to the crowd outside how teachers patrolled schools and delivered groceries to immigrant families in hiding during Metro Surge. “This case we’re here for today is all about intimidation and repression,” she said. “The federal government is terrified of our ability to organize.”

Fourteen defendants pleaded not guilty before being released back to their homes. But one was conspicuously absent.

Kyle Wagner is the outlier of the group, a self-described satanist with a distinctive shaved head and face tattoos who has been in federal custody for months.

After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in early January, Wagner took to social media, urging people to arm themselves and confront agents. “Rise up now in every corner of this country and fight ICE,” he said in one of his videos. “This is kill or be killed.”

Good’s death also sent a signal flare to right-wing activists, including Michigan Islamophobic provocateur Jayden Scott. In an interview with the Star Tribune, Scott said he saw an opportunity for provocateurs to “cause chaos in our country, to lead us closer to a civil war” in the city where George Floyd’s murder by a police officer triggered civil unrest.

The following day, Scott appeared in Minneapolis, where he was filmed taunting protesters: “We executed one of you.”

Scott and Wagner, diametrically opposed in their politics, clashed online. At one point, Scott filmed himself lurking inside an independent journalist’s apartment building, and Wagner allegedly struck back by blasting an old address linked to Scott’s parents over Instagram.

Shortly after, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan charged Wagner with cyberstalking. When federal agents raided his south Minneapolis apartment in February, he was wearing a sweatshirt with “I’m Antifa!” splashed across the chest.

Scott took credit for funneling evidence against protesters to the government.

“When my team got into their Telegram groups, when we broke into their vibe-coded websites and got their emails, we sent it to Homeland Security Investigations to go ahead and get these people arrested,” he told the Star Tribune.

At Wagner’s detention hearing in February at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis, public defender Lisa Lopez called out irregularities in the charging documents. Usually a witness to a crime would be called to testify under oath, but in Wagner’s case an out-of-state government lawyer used secondhand information provided by a federal agent.

“That was presumably because nobody in this district might want to sign that,” Lopez said. She criticized the complaint for cherry-picking the most inflammatory rhetoric from Wagner’s videos while ignoring his more temperate statements: “Do not attack them,” and “We do not shoot first.”

Wagner’s mother, Beth Plamondon, told the Star Tribune her son was “loud on the internet” and “staunchly antifascist,” but that the charges were ridiculous.

“They basically want to paint him as the national leader of antifa, which just makes me laugh,” she said. “There’s no such thing.”

Wagner is being held in the Livingston County Jail in Michigan, with his moods vacillating between defiance and despair, Plamondon said. He worries if anyone in Minnesota will show up to support him when it’s his time to appear in court.

For four months, Wagner’s case lingered alone in the Eastern District of Michigan. Then in June, the Justice Department joined him with the 14 other Minnesotans on the antifa indictments.

Not all of the defendants spoke with the Star Tribune about their connections to each other, but those who did said Wagner wasn’t well known in their circles.

The other defendants repudiated the notion of antifa being anything more than a right-wing boogeyman. Still, many are union organizers and some are self-described anarchists, which they define as a political philosophy opposed to hierarchy and control.

Defendant Emmett Doyle is an anarchist folk singer whose repertoire includes German-language ballads sung by antifascist prisoners of Nazi labor camps in the 1930s. On the day of the raids, he passed the time in a holding facility of the federal building in downtown St. Paul by singing, which was how his friends in the other cells discovered he was there. They started shouting, “Play ‘Dick Blizzard!’ ” — the number that made Doyle famous during the chapter of Metro Surge when protesters pelted ICE vehicles with dildos.

Defendant Erik Davis, a Macalester College religious studies professor accused of facilitating meetings where protest plans were formed, also identifies as an anarchist. It couples with his academic focus on Cambodia, where for three years in the 1970s an authoritarian socialist government slaughtered 1.7 million people.

“I’ve always been an anarchist, but that’s because I don’t like violence, and I don’t like authority,” Davis said. “I don’t like it when somebody says, ‘Because I said so.’ ”

Peter Rachleff, a retired Macalester professor of labor history, sees parallels between the Antifa indictment and past decades’ prosecution of Twin Cities labor activists.

One local group identified in the charging documents, the Ray Rainbolt Memorial Shooting Club, is an LGBT gun club named after an American Indian organizer of the Teamsters union federally charged with conspiracy to subvert the government in 1941.

Rachleff credits Minnesota’s strong labor traditions for forming the backbone of the anti-ICE movement. But he argues the pervasive mobilization of regular people ultimately turned the tide of public opinion against Metro Surge.

“The actions were remarkably nonviolent, but it’s not the threat of violence that frightens the authorities,” Rachleff said. “It’s the scope of the movement.”

Robinet and Thoreson call themselves anarchists. So does Sant, the lead defendant on the indictment.

Sant, a nursing assistant, said the nature of the charges are reminiscent of those he faced nearly 10 years ago. At the onset of Trump’s first term, he was among 200-plus protesters from around the country accused of conspiring with antifa, charges largely based on the demonstrators wearing all-black attire. The cases eventually collapsed after prosecutors were found to have hidden exculpatory evidence and the extent to which they were being fed by Project Veritas, an alt-right organization known for making secret recordings of leftist groups and editing them in deceptive ways.

John Marti, a former acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, warned that prudent federal prosecutors must handle politically motivated information — like what Scott claims to have provided — very carefully.

“When prosecutors ignore that risk, cases go bad,” Marti said. “What is surprising to me is that this Department of Justice is more open to pursuing individuals who they perceive as their political opponents when the evidence, when the facts of the law, don’t warrant it.”

At the defendants’ arraignment, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sommer Lindsay Honeycutt asked U.S. District Judge David Schultz for a three-month extension to meet their deadline to turn over evidence to the defense, saying the government’s voluminous data included more than 20 terabytes of written reports and photographs, surveillance videos and messages exchanged over Signal.

The defendants were ordered to have no contact with each other, but some are now petitioning the judge to allow them to plan a joint defense against the charges.

Hanging over them is the recent sentencing of eight members of an accused antifa cell to a combined 450 years in prison for an attack on the Prairieland ICE detention center in Texas. While one man received a life sentence for shooting and wounding a police officer, another got 30 years on a conviction of conspiring to conceal documents.

Some defendants are counting on Minnesota jurors to distinguish themselves from the Texas panel. But with the potential federal jury pool drawing from people across the purple state of Minnesota, where opinions on immigration enforcement, police and civil liberties vary, no outcome is certain.

On Thursday, the Trump administration announced that it had convened officials from multiple governments to launch a global offensive against radical left terrorism, which “will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

“This feels like déjà vu,” Sant said. “Conspiracy charges are a very convenient way for the government to criminalize otherwise lawful First Amendment conduct. It’s not the first time they’ve tried it. It’s not going to be the last.”

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