Mistral AI on Tuesday released OCR 4, a document intelligence model that moves beyond raw text extraction to return structured representations of entire documents — complete with bounding boxes, block-type classification, and per-word confidence scores. The release marks Mistral’s fourth generation of optical character recognition technology in roughly 15 months and lands at a moment when the company’s pitch for European AI sovereignty has never been more commercially relevant.

The model supports 170 languages across 10 language groups, accepts PDF, DOC, PPT, and OpenDocument formats, and can be deployed as a single container on an organization’s own infrastructure — a capability Mistral is positioning directly at enterprises in regulated industries that cannot route sensitive documents through U.S.-jurisdiction cloud APIs.

“Mistral OCR 4 extracts and structures content from a wide range of documents,” the company said in its announcement. “Where previous generations focused on converting a page into clean text and tables, OCR 4 returns a structured representation of the document.”

The model is available immediately through the Mistral API, Document AI in Mistral Studio, Amazon SageMaker, and Microsoft Foundry, with Snowflake Parse Document support coming soon. Pricing starts at $4 per 1,000 pages, dropping to $2 per 1,000 pages through a batch API discount.

OCR 4 treats every document as a semantic map, not a wall of text

The central engineering shift in OCR 4 is structural. Rather than outputting a flat stream of extracted text — the paradigm that has defined OCR for decades — the model returns a layered representation in which every block is localized with a bounding box, classified by type (title, table, equation, signature, and others), and scored for confidence at both the page and word level.

Mistral says bounding boxes were its most-requested capability. The reason is straightforward: without location data, downstream systems cannot trace an extracted fact back to its source on a specific page. That traceability gap has been a persistent friction point for enterprises building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, compliance workflows, or any application where “where did this number come from?” is a question that needs an auditable answer.

Block classification addresses a related problem. A paragraph tagged as a “title” can segment a document into hierarchical chunks for semantic search. A block tagged as a “table” can be routed to a structured-data pipeline rather than a text summarizer. A block tagged as a “signature” can trigger a redaction workflow in a compliance system.

These are not novel ideas in isolation, but packaging them as first-class outputs of the OCR model itself — rather than requiring a separate layout-analysis stage — removes an integration layer that enterprise teams have historically had to build and maintain themselves.

The confidence scores serve a dual purpose. At scale, they allow organizations to programmatically route low-confidence regions to human reviewers and auto-approve high-confidence extractions, building what the industry calls human-in-the-loop verification without requiring a person to review every page of every document. In production systems, OCR is rarely the end goal — it is the first step in a larger pipeline.

Developers building RAG systems, agent workflows, or document automation often spend more time reconstructing layout and structure than on the downstream AI logic itself. OCR 4 aims to eliminate that reconstruction step, and if it delivers on that promise, the value accrues not just in OCR cost savings but in reduced engineering hours across the entire document pipeline.

Independent reviewers preferred Mistral’s output 72 percent of the time, but benchmarks tell a complicated story

Mistral reports that OCR 4 achieved a 72% average win rate in a head-to-head human evaluation against leading competitors, conducted by independent annotators across more than 600 real-world documents in over 12 languages. The model also achieved the top overall score on OlmOCRBench at 85.20 and scored 93.07 on OmniDocBench.

But the company itself urges caution in interpreting those numbers. In its release, Mistral took the unusual step of auditing and publicly disclosing the specific types of scoring artifacts it encountered, including ground-truth errors in the reference annotations, equivalent LaTeX notation scored as mismatches, column-reading-order assumptions, and header/footer attribution issues. “We therefore treat the aggregate score as directional rather than definitive,” the company said — a notably transparent stance from a vendor announcing a product.

That transparency is well-timed. On the public OlmOCRBench leaderboard, some researchers have noted that OCR 4 currently ranks third, behind open models like Chandra OCR 2. And some open-weight models self-report higher OmniDocBench composite scores — PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 claims 96.33 — though those results have not been independently reproduced on the public leaderboard.

Early enterprise feedback has been favorable nonetheless. Aidan Donohue, an AI engineer at financial AI firm Rogo, said the company benchmarked OCR 4 against leading agentic document parsers on a chart-dense financial QA dataset and “reached equivalent accuracy at roughly 8x lower cost and 17x lower latency.” Ivan Mihailov, an AI engineer at intellectual property management firm Anaqua, said OCR 4 is “roughly 4x faster per page than our incumbent provider.” 

Enterprise buyers, however, should run their own evaluations rather than relying on any vendor’s benchmark numbers. The practical question is not which model scores highest on a leaderboard, but which model produces the fewest errors on your specific documents, in your specific languages, at a price and latency that fit your workflow.

The Anthropic export ban gave Mistral’s sovereignty pitch the proof point it needed

Mistral’s release lands in a geopolitical context that could hardly be more favorable for its strategic positioning.

On June 12, Anthropic was forced to disable all access to its newest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the U.S. Commerce Department used national security export controls to bar the company from distributing the models to any foreign national. Enterprise clients in finance, healthcare, SaaS, and critical infrastructure found their core intelligence services abruptly disabled, without prior warning or effective recourse. As of June 24, both models remain offline, with prediction markets giving only 57% odds of restoration before July 1.

That episode validated a warning Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch has been sounding for over a year. As Business Insider reported, Mensch warned at London Tech Week in June 2025 about American AI companies “having the keys” for their models, calling it a scenario where European companies are “giving leverage to their providers.” He added: “At some point, you need to be able to turn it off or turn it on, and you don’t want to leave it to another country.”

The argument gained further urgency as Mensch’s broader sovereignty pitch escalated in recent months. As reported by CNBC in late May, Mensch told the outlet: “Europe is lagging behind when it comes to [the] buildout of infrastructure, and so we are investing to close that gap.” 

At the same time, Mensch pushed back against Pope Leo XIV’s call for AI to be “disarmed,” arguing that Europe cannot afford to fall behind U.S. tech giants. “We’re all for ​peace, but if you look at our rivals and adversaries in the world, they’re using artificial ​intelligence … we do need to have our own capabilities,” Mensch told reporters.

OCR 4’s single-container, self-hosted deployment model is the product-level expression of that argument. A U.S.-headquartered provider offering EU data residency means documents are stored in Frankfurt but governed by U.S. law. Mistral, incorporated in France and operating under EU jurisdiction, offering on-premise containerized deployment, means documents never leave the customer’s infrastructure at all. The EU AI Act’s fine enforcement provisions take effect August 2, adding regulatory pressure to the compliance calculus for European enterprises evaluating document AI vendors.

Baidu’s free, open-weight OCR model arrived one day earlier — and the contrast is revealing

Mistral’s release did not arrive in isolation. Just one day before OCR 4 launched, Baidu shipped Unlimited-OCR on June 22 — a 3-billion-parameter MIT-licensed model that tackles one of the most persistent pain points in document AI: parsing entire PDFs and multi-page scans in a single forward pass, without chunking the input or stitching the output back together afterward.

Baidu’s model uses a technique called Reference Sliding Window Attention (R-SWA) that, as a top Hacker News commenter explained, splits the AI’s focus into two paths: maintaining full attention on the original document image while restricting memory of generated text to a tight, moving window. The result is constant KV cache size and the ability to transcribe 40-plus pages in a single forward pass. The model gathered 1,800 GitHub stars in its first 24 hours and racked up more than 479 upvotes on Hacker News, where the discussion thread ran to 109 comments.

The two releases frame what some analysts are calling the June 2026 document-AI split: self-hosted long-horizon parsing with open weights versus structured managed extraction with enterprise features.

Baidu’s model is free under an MIT license, runs on standard GPU hardware, and has no managed API or enterprise SLA. Mistral’s model is a commercial product with per-page pricing, bounding boxes, confidence scores, block classification, multi-platform distribution, and self-hosted deployment options for enterprise customers. 

Unlimited-OCR may be the better tool for a research team digitizing scanned dissertations on a single GPU. OCR 4 is built for the IT procurement process — the world of SLAs, data processing agreements, and compliance audits.

Beyond Baidu, the broader OCR competitive field includes Google Document AI, Amazon Textract, Azure Document Intelligence, ABBYY Vantage, and a growing number of open-weight models. 

On the Hacker News thread for Unlimited-OCR, practitioners offered a candid assessment of the state of the art. Joss82, who has worked on document parsing for 10 years, wrote bluntly: “OCR still sucks in 2026.” Meanwhile, one user named SyneRyder reported success with Claude for OCR of hundreds of pages of handwritten documents, noting the model delivered results with “no corrections required” and even pointed out a continuity error in the source text. These practitioner reports underscore a key tension in the market: performance varies wildly depending on the specific document type, language, and quality of the source material.

The real play is not OCR — it is an enterprise AI stack with document intelligence as the on-ramp

Step back far enough, and Mistral’s OCR 4 release is not really an OCR story. It is an enterprise go-to-market story built on top of a $4.4 billion global intelligent document processing market that is forecast to grow at a 33.1% compound annual growth rate through 2030, according to Grand View Research.

For Mistral, OCR is a wedge into enterprise AI budgets. The model feeds directly into Mistral’s Search Toolkit, the company’s open-source composable search framework announced at the AI Now Summit. In that architecture, OCR 4 serves as the ingestion layer for retrieval-augmented generation and enterprise search pipelines, converting raw documents into citation-ready, structurally classified input. The logic is clear: once an enterprise adopts OCR 4 for document extraction, Mistral’s broader model suite — including Medium 3.5 for reasoning and the Vibe agentic platform for task execution — becomes the natural next step in the stack. 

That pipeline ambition is critical context for understanding Mistral’s current fundraising trajectory. Bloomberg recently reported that the company is in early discussions to raise about €3 billion ($3.5 billion) at a valuation of roughly €20 billion — nearly double the €11.7 billion valuation from its September Series C round. To date, Mistral has raised only about $4 billion, a fraction of what its largest U.S. rivals have taken in. OCR 4 and its associated enterprise revenue pipeline are part of how the company plans to justify that higher valuation, with Mistral targeting €1 billion in revenue for 2026, up from €200 million in 2025, according to Le Monde.

Mistral is a company with roughly 1,000 employees and ambitions to compete with labs that have raised 40 times as much capital. It cannot win a general-purpose model arms race against OpenAI and Anthropic. What it can do is build a differentiated enterprise stack around sovereignty, structured document intelligence, and agentic workflows — and use that stack to capture European enterprise budgets that are increasingly wary of U.S. provider dependency. 

The pricing structure reinforces that strategy: at $2 per 1,000 pages in batch mode, the cost of processing a 100,000-page corporate archive falls to $200, making large-scale digitization projects economically viable in ways they may not have been with token-based vision-language model pricing.

Whether Mistral can execute that vision at scale — against Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and a surging open-source ecosystem — remains an open question. But the Anthropic export control crisis is still unresolved, European data sovereignty regulations are tightening, and a potential €20 billion funding round is on the horizon. The company is holding an OCR 4 production webinar on July 7 at 6:00 PM CET.

Two weeks ago, the argument for building AI infrastructure outside the reach of U.S. export controls was theoretical. Then the U.S. government flipped a switch, and Anthropic’s most advanced models went dark for every non-American on the planet. Mistral did not cause that crisis — but it spent the last year building the product that makes it matter.

If you spend $80 of your hard-earned income on a physical edition of Grand Theft Auto VI, you’ll receive a box with a code inside. The box is your standard rectangular, disc-holding shape, but the game itself doesn’t come on a disc — or two — at all. Perhaps the physical part is the warm feeling you get when you manually type the code into your PS5 or Xbox Series X? It surely can’t just be referencing the box, right?

Anyway, at least the physical edition doesn’t cost any more than the digital version, which is already raising eyebrows at $80. This isn’t an unheard-of price point in today’s market, but it is a shock to players who are still getting used to the $70 standard for AAA games. Nintendo has been at the forefront of the more-than-$70 movement, pricing Mario Kart World at $80 in 2025 and following that up with Elden Ring heading to Switch 2 this August. Xbox also teased an increase to $80 for its first-party games in 2025, but it backtracked just a few months later. (Classic Xbox).

The writing has been on the wall for a while now, but Rockstar pricing the standard edition of GTA VI at $80 feels like a turning point. The doors were cracked, but now they’re wide open, and the wave of $80 AAA games can start flooding in. 

This matters because it affects players’ budgets at a time when the cost of living is rising at a torturous rate — but don’t worry, if you look at it from a holistic perspective, it gets worse. On a grand scale, the $80 price point matters because we’re simply spending more to own nothing. The GTA VI physical edition is the clearest, most tangible example of this trend.

I’ve said it before, but about 10 years ago, it feels like we all kind of forgot that DRM sucked. Digital rights management drew heavy consumer ire in the 2000s, as publishers started adding always-on authentication requirements to major new releases like BioShock, Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed 2 in the name of fighting piracy. Some publishers even developed their own stores to ensure every copy of Half-Life 2 was activated and official. Many titles had to regularly connect with the publisher’s servers while in use, a feature that generated major glitches and sometimes rendered games unplayable. Players felt like they didn’t actually own their purchased games, and there was broad pushback against DRM with awareness campaigns, petitions and lawsuits.

But then broadband and wireless infrastructure expanded, downloads became more common than discs, and the number of games coming out each week skyrocketed, particularly on Steam. Players needed places to purchase and store their growing backlogs, download speeds increased, and the market leaned into convenience. And here we are today: Valve owns your entire Steam library and is simply letting you access it, and the same goes for most game downloads on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo platforms. Online games can be shaken up or taken down by their rights holders at any moment, and even AAA single-player narrative experiences come with day-one patches and critical post-launch updates. In a digital-first world, DRM reigns supreme.

So when Rockstar prices GTA VI at $80 and calls a game box with a code inside a “physical edition,” it feels like, yeah, the joke’s on us. Not only does the physical edition not include any discs, but it’s also spiking prices on a whole line of products — AAA games — that players can’t own and don’t control.

The GTA VI physical edition is what it looks like when game ownership disappears. It isn’t a new trend, but combined with the upgraded price point, the code-in-a-box brings this phenomenon into supreme clarity. Purchasing any ultra-hyped AAA game feels like a gamble (or, maybe a loot box).

This hasn’t been happening in a vacuum, of course. Consumer protections are on the rise in the video game space, alongside efforts to preserve the industry’s history. The grassroots Stop Killing Games movement has been loudly advocating against publishers that remove titles from players’ libraries and haphazardly shut down their services. Stop Killing Games recently failed to convince the European Commission to require publishers to maintain support for games that they’ve stopped selling, but the group is generating conversation and change on a large scale.

Meanwhile, the GOG storefront remains completely free of DRM, and in 2024 GOG launched its Preservation Program aimed at adapting historic games for modern hardware. The program has spit-shined and preserved 300 classic games so far, including Metro 2033, The Witcher and its sequel, Devil May Cry: HD Collection, Resident Evil 1–3, six Tomb Raider installments, Diablo and Crysis. All of the preservation work is handled by GOG, with no upkeep required from the original game makers. And of course, itch.io is another storefront that doesn’t have built-in DRM like Steam.

The $80 GTA VI physical edition — without any physical media — is exactly what we should expect from the existing AAA machine. It’s a matter of Rockstar playing its part in the video game ecosystem: perpetuating crunch-layoff cycles, raising the baseline price of all AAA games, and further solidifying strict DRM control structures that benefit publishers over players. Rock on, I guess.

If you’ve just upgraded to a new iPhone and are looking for the best accessories to buy during the ongoing Prime Day 2026 sale, you’ve landed in the right place. I’ve gone through dozens of iPhone accessory deals, but these are the ones I’d actually use myself, buy with my own money, or recommend to friends and family.

Lisen Cell Phone Stand

Anyone who works at a desk in an office knows how easy it is for a phone to get buried under printouts, documents, and the steady stream of items that get handed over to you throughout the day. Even beyond that, I prefer to position my screens closer to eye level. The Lisen Cell Phone Stand makes all of that easier.

Down from its $17.99 listing price, the stand is currently available on Amazon for just $9.45. For the price, you get a weighted metal base for added stability, an anti-slip design, adjustable height ranging from 7.1 to 8.5 inches, and the ability to tilt your iPhone to a comfortable viewing angle (5° to 85°) and to use it hands-free.

Anker MagGo 3-in1 iPhone Charging Station

If you own an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, instead of leaving them scattered across your desk or nightstand and carrying separate charging adapters and cables, you can place each device in its designated spot on the Anker MagGo 3-in-1 Charging Station. The charger can power all three devices simultaneously, reducing both clutter and cable management headaches.

This one offers 15W wireless charging for compatible iPhones (iPhone 12 or later), carries Qi2 certification, has a compact, foldable design that’s easy to toss into a backpack, and comes with a 40W power adapter included in the box. For $59, the charging station replaces all your charging adapters and cables for a single, travel-friendly accessory, and that’s the kind of convenience I’d choose any day.

Pitaka Military Grade Protective Case

The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max look gorgeous without a case, but the repair bill for a broken back glass panel or cracked screen is far more painful. This is why I always recommend that my friends and family members use a protective case on their iPhone, not the rugged ones, but good ones. 

What I’ve got for you is the $29.99 Pitaka protective case (previously $59.99), made from woven aramid fiber for the back panel and flexible TPU on the sides. Without adding much bulk, the case provides drop protection from heights of up to 2.44 meters, raised screen and camera lips to help prevent scratches, and a plush leather interior.

Lisen MagSafe Car Mount

The infotainment system in your car is great, but there are times when you may want to check a new route without interrupting the one already active, or quickly check a message or app that looks better on your iPhone.

For a more distraction-free driving experience, I recommend the Lisen MagSafe Car Mount, which keeps secondary navigation, calls, and messaging within easy sightline without taking your attention off the road. Currently priced at $16.08 (down from $29.99), the car mount attaches securely to your car’s dashboard, and its built-in magnets snap your iPhone (iPhone 12 or later) into place without using any clamps or locks.

Baseus Picogo Power Bank

I’m always using my iPhone, which is why it rarely makes it through a full day on a single charge. Naturally, I have to carry a power bank at all times. Having used bulky models with 10,000mAh and 20,000mAh battery capacities, I was on the lookout for something sleeker, more elegant, and lightweight when I found the Baseus Picogo Powerbank.

Measuring around 0.3 inches thick, the compact power bank weighs around 108 grams and can easily slide into my jeans pocket. Yes, it only has a 5,000mAh battery, and the max wireless output is 7.5W. However, that’s enough to take your iPhone (iPhone 12 or later) from nearly dead to 70% to 80%, depending on which model you have.

I’m willing to trade off charging speed for the convenience of the form factor. For $24.99, the Baseus wireless power bank is among the best iPhone accessory Prime Day deals you can invest in.

Whether you’re looking for a protective case for your iPhone 17 Pro or a 3-in-1 charging station for your Apple devices, there’s something for everyone on this list.

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author.

For the past few years, my commentary on regional ecommerce has revolved around the competition between Shopee and Lazada. The ambitious upstart from Singapore ended up pushing out the former market leader, even though it received backing from Chinese Alibaba.

And just when it seemed that the war was settled, that Shopee would reign over Southeast Asia with its rivals scrambling for the breadcrumbs it left behind, TikTok—of all the brands—has decided to enter the fray as well.

But what does a social media company know about running an online store? How can it be a match for industry veterans?

Well, one thing it does know is that those veterans have to pay for access to eyeballs that it owns. And if that’s the case, then why not sell to them directly?

Location, location, location

Nobody can sell anything if people don’t know about it. You have to make yourself known or, better still, place your business where the people already are. That is the source of the famous rule of real estate—location trumps everything else.

But it works in the digital world as well. It doesn’t matter how attractive your offer is, or how robust or cheap your product selection is, if nobody is aware of your existence.

And so, major ecommerce companies have had to first spend billions of dollars to position themselves in front of potential consumers—and now continue spending more to keep them coming back.

What’s more, size and brand awareness is no guarantee of enduring success, as the case of Lazada proves.

However, even its successful challenger, Shopee, still operated within the same rules. But what if the next competitor injects himself before customers can ever see you?

That’s what TikTok is trying to do. It is like a landlord who used to rent space for other companies, only to now reserve half of it for himself and compete with them instead.

This is a catch-22 situation for the incumbents. On one hand, they are effectively paying a direct competitor for access to the same audience that TikTok can reach freely through its own platform. On the other, they cannot simply walk away, because TikTok remains a gateway to millions of potential customers.

Meanwhile, TikTok benefits from both sides of the equation. It earns revenue from advertising while also generating income from direct sales to consumers.

Given its rapid growth, the strategy appears to be paying off. Including Tokopedia, which TikTok took control of in 2024, the company now commands close to 30% of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market. Shopee still leads with a 52% share, but the question is whether it can maintain that dominance.

Monetising boredom

In the consumerist world we’re living in, many purchases are made on impulse. You see something cool, fun, stylish, and you want it.

Over the past few years, short, catchy, viral videos have become one of the most powerful tools for creating demand. Traditionally, however, acting on that impulse required an extra step: clicking a link or searching for the product on a marketplace such as Shopee.

In fact, most traditional e-commerce platforms are built around intent. Consumers typically visit them with a specific goal in mind, whether it is searching for a product, comparing prices, or making a purchase they have already decided on.

TikTok Shop works differently. It creates the desire before the search happens.

A creator tests a product. A livestream host demonstrates it. A short video shows a before-and-after result. A discount appears while the viewer is still watching. The purchase button is not placed after a search query, but inside a moment of attention.

That is a problem for Shopee and Lazada because search-based marketplaces tend to reward scale, logistics and price. TikTok rewards attention, storytelling and impulse.

A seller does not necessarily need the best product listing. He needs a video that converts—and it converts within TikTok Shop, just moments after buyer interest has been piqued.

Millions of people swiping through short clips are regularly exposed to new products, which they can now buy right then and there. The whole ecommerce experience of going to a third-party app or website and completing your checkout there has just been truncated into a few taps in the midst of your social scrolling session.

In other words, TikTok’s approach to ecommerce is not only fulfilling the demand but creating it too, and monetising it before competition ever has a chance.

This is where it gets really dangerous for existing ecommerce platforms.

While there are certain necessary goods that we are buying on a regular basis, which people may habitually visit Shopee, Amazon or Lazada for, consumer demand needs to be regularly refreshed with something new.

And all of those new products are introduced through various forms of content. These days, it’s mostly video—the medium that TikTok dominates over, especially in Southeast Asia.

So, not only does it own the main communications channel, but it gets to create new trends before competitors are even aware of them.

Can it replace big online marketplaces entirely? Most likely not. But it can monopolise access to the latest, most attractive products or even create many of them itself, a little bit like Shein does through its tight integration with Chinese manufacturers.

If it continues its successful run, it could redefine ecommerce forever and encourage other social media giants to follow suit.

• Read other articles we’ve written on tech giants here.

Featured Image Credit: airdone/ depositphotos

Sort out your summer viewing with this deal from Paramount Plus, netting you two months at just $0.99 per month. But only if you’re quick.

The summer is upon us, and while we should all be going outside and enjoying the sunshine, it’s also a great opportunity to catch up on TV. Thanks to one deal from Paramount Plus, you can do that without spending much money at all.

New and eligible former subscribers can sign up for Paramount Plus for $0.99 per month for their first two months of service. That means being able to watch everything on the service from sports to original dramas.

Get Paramount+ for $0.99 for 2 months

You can also choose the plan you want, except for live TV and trailers.

Once the two-month promo period is up, it will auto-renew at the normal rate for your chosen plan. If you go for the cheapest option, that would be $8.99 per month.

The offer is open until June 25, 2026, meaning you have only a small window to grab it. It’s available to people aged 18 or over, and other terms and conditions also apply.

Get 50% off Apple TV too

While the Paramount Plus deal is great, you can also get another Apple-related deal. Select Amazon accounts are able to sign up for Apple TV streaming with Amazon Prime at half the usual price for two months.

This is an account-specific offer, so not everyone will gain access to it. Your mileage may vary, but it’s worth a try.

from the an-actual-political-prisoner dept

In Trump’s America, the First Amendment is a dead letter. If you’re seen as anti-Trump, you apparently no longer have any rights at all. We’ll get to the man who moved a box of zines and got thirty years — he wasn’t even at the protest, but the judge claimed he was aiding a “terrorist on the run” (he was not). To understand how that’s even possible, though, you first have to look at how some people who actually tried to overturn democracy were treated. Because they walked.

Just look at the treatment of the January 6th insurrectionists, who literally sought to hang the Vice President, invaded the Capitol, blocked the certification of the free and fair 2020 presidential election, and generally tried to take down the federal government. While some were convicted of their crimes and given jail sentences commensurate with their actual crimes, Donald Trump then pardoned them all and is now trying to pay them millions of dollars, claiming that it was so unfair that the government was “weaponized” against them.

Now, compare them to the Prairieland protestors, who went to the Prairieland ICE detention center in Texas last year on July 4th. It was like plenty of the angry protest gatherings we’ve seen lately: a bit rowdy, with a few individuals going too far. Some set off fireworks. Some engaged in vandalism. One person fired a gun which appears to have hit a local police officer (who was released from the hospital soon after with no lasting damage).

It seems totally reasonable for prosecutors to prosecute the actual crimes that happened: mainly the person who fired a weapon at someone, and perhaps some of the vandalism. But, instead, the federal government tried to turn this into “an antifa terror cell” engaging in “domestic terrorism.” While a small number of those arrested knew each other and had planned to show up and be disruptive, many others didn’t know those who were engaged in the planning or the vandalism. They were just there.

some of the defendants – like Batten, Elizabeth Soto and her husband, Ines Soto, were not involved in the planning, arrived separately at the protest, and left when guards at the facility asked them to do so.

The whole case was always nonsense:

“This indictment stretches far beyond a specific, violent criminal action that might have taken place,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It characterizes these people who put together a protest as being in an antifa cell and tars all of them with this label of domestic terrorists.”

Levinson-Waldman said the overreach threatens the civil liberties of all Americans. 

“This is not just about antifa,” she said. “Anything that somehow feels at odds with this administration’s policies could be considered domestic terrorism and will be pursued with the full force of the federal government.”

But the cases were filed in North Texas before two of the most Trumpy judges around: Mark Pittman and Reed O’Connor. As we discussed back in March, the DOJ was able to get convictions against the protestors, including the one who wasn’t even there (hold that thought… it’s coming further down). A big part of the evidence was the weapons that some of the protestors brought to the protest. But, this is Texas. You’d think that in “we love the Second Amendment, Texas” that this wouldn’t be seen as a crime, but we’re dealing with a clearly ideologically driven prosecution.

This week, some of those convicted had sentences handed down, and they are so extreme and so long that they literally seem unbelievable.

Eight activists found guilty of terrorism-related charges in connection with an attack on an immigration detention facility in Texas in which a police officer was shot were sentenced to decades in prison Tuesday. One person in the group was sentenced to 100 years in prison, federal court records show.

Benjamin Song, who shot an Alvarado Police Department officer in the neck during the July 4 incident at Prairieland Detention Center outside the Dallas-Fort Worth area, was sentenced ​to a century behind bars, according to court documents reviewed by USA Today.

Maricela Rueda, another defendant, was sentenced to 70 years in prison, records show.

Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto, Autumn Hill and Meagan Morris were each sentenced to 50 years in prison….

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Again, Batten and Soto had no connection to those who planned the event or who showed up with weapons or engaged in violence. And they left when guards asked them to leave. And now they’ve been sentenced to 50 years in prison. For what?

Even if we compared these sentences to the absolute longest sentence for January 6th insurrectionists, they are nowhere near as long as this. From The Guardian’s coverage of the sentencing:

The punishment for the protesters exceeds the lengthiest prison sentences given out for the attack on the Capitol on January 6. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Tarrio and Rhodes were found guilty of detailed planning to overturn a presidential election. All anyone involved in the Prairieland case did was… get mad about ICE kidnapping and kicking their neighbors out of the country, and maybe a bit of vandalism.

Song, who was sentenced to 100 years did fire his weapon and hit a law enforcement agent, meaning he was always going to face some more serious sentence, but he claims he did so because he thought the officer was going to shoot protestors. From The Guardian again:

In a statement, Song said he had fired at the police officer, Lt Thomas Gross, because Gross had his weapon drawn and Song believed he was about to shoot a protester.

“I never want to see good people, standing for what they believe in, gunned down in the street,” he said. “Now 21 people have been arrested, have been persecuted, have been punished. For knowing me or being my friend? This is wrong. This is mass punishment. Collective punishment. This is guilt by association. This is injustice.”

Even worse, Judge O’Connor (who has been one of MAGA’s favorite judges, and who has no problem making it clear that he rules on purely ideological grounds) allegedly told some of the defendants that the long sentences were necessary to make sure that leftist ideology was seen to be punished:

If you can’t see that, it’s a post from a group that is supporting the defendants (and hasn’t yet been confirmed by other reporting) saying that O’Connor said, from the bench: “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”

If accurate, that would be incredibly damning. Judges aren’t supposed to increase sentences to stamp out ideology. That’s about as blatant a clear First Amendment violation you could imagine.

The Intercept has some other quotes from the courtroom, and while they don’t have the same ideology quote from O’Connor, the quotes they do have from him are pretty bad on their own:

O’Connor, the judge, said several times that the defendants had committed an “assault on democracy.”

“What happened here was not by any stretch of the imagination a protest,” he said during the sentencing of one defendant.

I mean… come on. January 6th was an “assault on democracy.” It was quite literally an attempt to overturn a democratic election. What happened in Texas was quite clearly a protest where a few protestors went too far. It happens at plenty of protests. It’s not an “assault on democracy” unless you’re a partisan activist. Given that we’re talking about Reed O’Connor, the claims of being a partisan activist have stuck on him for years.

Again, it’s clear that some of the defendants did break some laws, though most seemed to be minor property damage. There is zero indication of anything even remotely looking like a “terrorist” plot.

But the worst, most ridiculous case is that of Daniel “Des” Sanchez-Estrada. He wasn’t even at the protest. He was arrested for… moving some left wing zines after his wife — Maricela Rueda, one of the people just sentenced to 70 years — was arrested. Prosecutors claimed that moving a box with zines in it amounted to “corruptly concealing a document.” It sounds unbelievable, but you can read the criminal complaint against him, which really is just about him taking a box of leftist zines from his and his wife’s house (after she called him from jail) to another apartment.

He was just sentenced to 30 years in prison.

I need to repeat that. He moved a box of zines. He wasn’t at the protest.

He’s now been sentenced to THIRTY YEARS in prison.

For scale, this is in Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton (currently running for the US Senate) let a repeat child sex abuser plead down to one day in jail. One day for a child abuser. Thirty years for moving a box of pamphlets.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation has rightly called out how utterly unconstitutional this is:

Texas artist Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison today for transporting a box of zines, or political pamphlets. The prosecution claimed Sanchez moved the zines so they wouldn’t incriminate his wife, who attended a protest outside the Prairieland immigration detention center near Dallas, where a police officer was wounded by gunfire.

The zines at issue may have discussed controversial political views, but they said nothing about the shooting or the Prairieland protest, and prosecutors did not allege that Sanchez’s wife, Maricela Rueda (who was sentenced to 70 years today), fired any shots or had anything to do with the shooting.

According to The Intercept, O’Connor insisted that moving the box of zines was helping a “known terrorist.”

Sanchez Estrada said he still could not understand why he was convicted.

“I am a father, I am a husband, I am a teacher, a poet — I am many things, Your Honor, but I am not a terrorist,” he told the court.

O’Connor said he disagreed with the idea that moving the box of the zines was harmless. At the time of Sanchez Estrada’s actions, Song was still on the run from police.

“What was at stake at that time was a known terrorist was on the run for shooting a police officer during a terrorist attack,” he said.

Even if Song was a “known terrorist” (he’s not), that still…. means nothing. Sanchez moved a box of zines. What the fuck does that have to do with Song being on the run? The answer is absolutely nothing.

Yes, the Trump administration has been desperately trying to drum up some sort of violent organized opposition because they need that to justify the suppression of everyone’s rights as part of their continued authoritarian project. That the Trump Justice Department and a couple of famously partisan judges played along with this travesty of a prosecution, doesn’t make it legitimate by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s just another sign that in Trump’s America those who violate the law in support of Trump get told they can do whatever crimes they want, and Trump might even get them paid, but protesting the ongoing fascism, may get you sent to prison for decades. It’s so extreme that it’s almost difficult to believe it has happened in the United States. This case will go down in history among the most ridiculous, partisan, bullshit attacks on free speech, and Judges Pittman and O’Connor will both be remembered for being the judges responsible for this travesty.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, autumn hill, benjamin song, daniel sanchez estrada, elizabeth soto, excessive punishment, free speech, ice, ice protests, ken paxton, mark pittman, meagan morris, prairieland, reed o’connor, savanna batten, terrorism, texas, todd blanche, zachary evetts