Staff Reports
Federal law enforcement deserves credit and our gratitude after authorities stopped what could have been a mass-casualty terror attack planned for New Year’s Eve in Southern California. Four suspects — identified in court filings as Audrey Illeene Carroll, Zachary Aaron Page, Dante Gaffield, and Tina Lai — were arrested after allegedly plotting coordinated bombings aimed at multiple commercial facilities and federal personnel. The arrests came after agents caught the group testing explosive devices in a remote desert location, preventing what could have been a horrific holiday massacre.
According to prosecutors the plot, labeled in filings as “Operation Midnight Sun,” targeted five or more logistics-type facilities across Los Angeles and Orange counties with the intent to detonate devices simultaneously at midnight to mask blasts as fireworks. Officials also say the conspirators planned follow-on attacks against ICE agents and vehicles — a chilling escalation from protest to premeditated terror. The suspects were allegedly recorded rehearsing bomb construction in the Mojave Desert on December 12 before the FBI moved in to arrest them.
Evidence described in the criminal complaint paints a disturbingly detailed picture: step-by-step bomb instructions, an eight-page manifesto, encrypted chats, and piles of bomb-making components including PVC pipe, suspected oxidizers, charcoal and fusing materials. Prosecutors also recovered communications tied to an offshoot calling itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front, a pro-Palestinian, anti-capitalist fringe that reportedly urged violent action. This was not idle rhetoric — this was hands-on preparation for terror, and the danger was real.
Make no mistake, Americans should salute the swift work of the FBI and Justice Department here — this was a textbook example of interagency vigilance stopping violence before it landed on innocent workers and families. Attorney General Pam Bondi and federal prosecutors detailed the case publicly, and officials credited coordinated investigative work that cut the plot off before New Year’s Eve could become a night of bloodshed. If we want safety, we must continue to give law enforcement the tools and support to hunt domestic terror cells of every stripe.
For too long the left’s violent fringes have been treated as political theater or moral outrage instead of the domestic terror threat they are — today’s arrests prove radical ideology can and does cross the line into homicidal planning. Whether cloaked in anti-capitalist jargon or tied to foreign causes, these extremists sought to undermine American life and livelihoods; the fact that their targets included logistics hubs and ICE agents shows the practical cruelty behind their rhetoric. Conservatives have warned for years that we face a two-sided domestic-terror problem, and this case should end any naïveté about the danger on the radical left.
This should be a wake-up call to policymakers: prosecute the perpetrators, cut off the networks that radicalize them, and fund the agencies that stopped this attack. Protecting workers at factories, warehouses and critical infrastructure is not partisan — it is patriotic duty. Americans who go to work to build and ship our goods deserve a government that treats threats to their safety with the seriousness they demand, and we must guard our communities from any ideology that answers political grievance with violence.
