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Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA)
Contact: [email protected] | Sufia Khalid [email protected]
Website: mlfa.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RICHARDSON, TX, June 23, 2026
MLFA National Security Criminal Defense Center on the Unprecedented Abuse of Terrorism Laws and A Draconian 70-Year Sentence Against Maricela Rueda
Maricela Rueda attended a noise demonstration on July 4th outside the Prairieland Detention Center to show solidarity with immigration detainees. She fled when officers began dispersing protesters. After she left, another protester fired at the ground to interrupt an officer he saw take aim at a fleeing protester. The officer was grazed by a bullet and released from the hospital within hours. Maricela had nothing to do with that shot. She had no weapons, no criminal record, and spent her life as a doula, artist, poet, and beloved mother to her 12-year-old daughter. The government made the unprecedented move of charging her with material support of terrorism and attempted murder. The jury acquitted her of every violence-related count.
Muslim Legal Fund of America’s National Security Criminal Defense Center took this case on after its trial, for sentencing and appeal, because we saw a dangerous expansion of terrorism laws being applied not to those who plot mass violence, but to a woman who attended a protest. We know the dangers these expansions pose and what it means for our constitutional rights when cases are pushed into “national security” territory. Today, that fear was borne out in the starkest terms possible.
A federal court sentenced Maricela Rueda to 70 years in prison for attending that demonstration (her co-defendants received between 50-100 years). To achieve this extraordinarily excessive sentence, the government and the Court used the terrorism enhancement — the most extreme federal sentencing tool in existence.
The January 6th prosecutions make the disparity undeniable. In over 1,500 federal cases arising from a coordinated attack on the Capitol that injured 140 officers, the government sought the terrorism label against only a handful of senior organizers — and even then, judges repeatedly refused to apply it. A man who marched to the Capitol with a loaded pistol and stated his goal was to physically remove members of Congress received 60 months — no terrorism enhancement. Another arrived with an arsenal a federal judge described as napalm-like, a target list that included a federal judge, and still received less than four years. When judges were asked to apply the terrorism label to defendants who had assaulted officers, broken bones, and ended careers, they refused — with one calling it “overkill,” another noting “no other judge had applied it,” and a third declining specifically to avoid “unwarranted sentencing disparity.” The government recognized that even mass political violence directed at Congress did not automatically make someone a terrorist. Today it took the opposite position against a woman who brought a megaphone to a noise demonstration.
People who traveled to Syria to train with and fight for ISIS received three to twelve years. Maricela Rueda received seventy.
That is not justice. It is the unequal application of the law — reserving the harshest punishments in the federal system for a nonviolent protester while treating far more dangerous conduct with far more leniency, based on political beliefs. When that becomes acceptable, the First Amendment’s right to dissent becomes conditional. Governments that punish nonviolent protestors more severely than they punish violence are not democracies in any meaningful sense. We should not be comfortable with the direction this unprecedented case points.
MLFA’s National Security Criminal Defense Center (NSCDC) is appealing this case. The legal grounds are substantial, the moral imperative is clear, and we will not stop until Maricela Rueda is home and the Constitution means what it says for everyone.
MFLA’s National Security Criminal Defense Center (NSCDC) is the product of MLFA’s 25 years of experience providing expert pro bono legal representation in select federal criminal terrorism-related cases. The NSCDC is an expansion that allows MLFA to:
- Expand its ability to offer expert assistance and representation in critical national security cases to ensure quality representation,
- contribute important policy comments and proposals on federal criminal national security issues,
- and provide thought leadership on our areas of expertise to reform federal national security over-criminalization.
Learn More: MLFA.ORG/NSCDC
