A new activist project is seeking to connect several strands of the American left through a common defense framework. The NSPM-7 Defendants Union invites participants in Palestine solidarity campaigns, anti-ICE organizing, Tesla Takedown protests, opposition to data centers and land-defense movements to share legal strategies and turn criminal cases into opportunities for political organizing. Its stated ambition extends beyond helping individual defendants: it wants different movements to see themselves as participants in the same struggle.
The project takes its name from President Donald Trump’s September 25, 2025, national security memorandum, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The directive orders federal agencies to investigate political violence and the networks that organize or finance it. It also directs scrutiny of potential foreign-influence and money-laundering violations connected to domestic terrorism. The union presents that policy as an attack on the political left and proposes a coordinated response.
Different Causes, a Common Defense
The union’s website explicitly connects cases across movements. It argues that lessons from a Palestine-related prosecution could assist a future No Kings defendant, while defense strategies developed after Trump’s 2017 inauguration could help activists facing conspiracy charges today. Its organizers describe their own backgrounds in climate, abolitionist and socialist activism, including experience as defendants and supporting prisoners.
These movements have different immediate targets. Palestine solidarity campaigns focus on Israel and institutions associated with it. Anti-ICE organizing challenges immigration enforcement. Stop Cop City opposes Atlanta’s police and firefighter training center. Tesla Takedown targets Elon Musk’s company through protests, boycotts and divestment. Campaigns against data centers contest technology infrastructure. The union seeks to connect participants through their encounters with police, prosecutors and courts.
Its invitation also extends to people whose organizations were named in what the site calls the State Department’s “Cuba Report” and who expect they may be under surveillance. The invitation illustrates the project’s intended reach, but does not establish that those organizations participate.
That distinction matters throughout the article. The site does not publish a roster establishing that every movement or organization it mentions has formally joined. Its FAQ expressly says it has no official members. Instead, it organizes around a shared pledge and seeks to circulate resources across political campaigns.
Solidarity Without Denunciation
The project’s pledge contains a particularly consequential commitment: “I will not publicly denounce the tactical choices of anyone accused of actions I don’t personally agree with.”
The surrounding explanation treats disagreement over tactics as a potential source of division that benefits the government. Participants are also asked to refuse cooperation with investigators and prosecutors, publicize their cases, pursue collective defense and share information learned through discovery.
The non-denunciation provision does not specify an exception for violent acts. That does not establish that every participant endorses violence. It does raise a concrete question about the boundaries of the proposed framework: when tactics differ, how much public solidarity does the union expect?
The question is particularly relevant because the project prominently invokes the Prairieland defendants. The July 4, 2025, incident at the Texas immigration detention facility included a shooting that wounded a responding police officer. Benjamin Hanil Song was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 100 years in prison, according to the Justice Department’s June 23, 2026, announcement.
Defense attorneys disputed the prosecution’s broader characterization of the gathering as a planned terrorist attack. The union’s references to the case do not establish that Song personally participates in the project.
Turning Prosecutions Into Organizing
The union says its resources include media training, access to legal office hours through the People’s Law Collective, connections to journalists and instruction on building support committees. Its stated purpose is to make movements more resilient and circulate lessons from individual cases nationwide.
Its pledge goes further, encouraging defendants to use the attention surrounding their cases to promote their movement’s ideas. Under that approach, prosecution becomes both a legal problem and a platform for attracting political support.
The significance lies in the proposed exchange of knowledge and resources across campaigns with different goals. A defense strategy developed in an immigration-enforcement case could inform a campus activist’s response to prosecution. Publicity methods used by forest defenders could be adopted elsewhere. The project seeks to make those exchanges systematic.
Defendants retain the right to counsel and a fair trial. The public also has reason to examine a political framework that asks participants to withhold criticism of tactics they themselves oppose. How that principle operates in practice will help determine what this new organizing network becomes.