'I Am Antifa': One Activist's Violent Death Became A Symbol For The Right And Left

News of an attack trickled out of Tacoma, Wash., just after dawn on a summer morning in July 2019. The details were fuzzy at first — one dead, a fire, the local ICE facility — but those who were close to Willem van Spronsen all said the same thing: They just knew.

Van Spronsen, 69, a Dutch-born immigrant, musician and father of two, was a lifelong activist and early member of the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, an armed antifascist group in the Seattle area. He stood up to far-right leaders at local rallies, and he was a fixture at demonstrations against U.S. immigration policies, especially family separation. "Kids in cages," he called it.

Van Spronsen's belief in militancy to fight injustice showed up in his song lyrics and street protests. Eventually, friends say, it shaped what they call his "final action," which began around 4 a.m. that July 13. Armed with a semiautomatic rifle, authorities say, van Spronsen crept onto the grounds of a sprawling immigration jail, set his car on fire, tossed Molotov cocktails and died in a hail of police bullets.

As word of a death at the detention center got out, calls flew among members of the John Brown Gun Club. "Was it Will?" they asked, hoping to be wrong about their suspicions. Confirmation came that afternoon with the arrival of a farewell letter that van Spronsen had mailed in advance to a club member.

He sent versions of it to other close friends and family members — "those burdened by the wreckage of my actions." He wrote that he was "a joyful revolutionary," motivated by love, by a desire to be "useful."

"Detention camps are an abomination," van Spronsen wrote. "I'm not standing by."

Whether that's a legitimate cause, van Spronsen's words suggest a premeditated attack in service of a political goal — to federal authorities, that makes him a domestic terrorist. And a particularly rare one. In his letter, van Spronsen wrote: "I am antifa," a reference to antifascist activists who fight the far right in a variety of extrajudicial ways — but seldom with fatal violence.

"What they're not doing is killing many people. In fact, killing almost no one," said Seth Jones, a terrorism analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Trump administration portrays antifa, militant, far-right extremists killed at least 38 people. The death toll attributed to antifa: one. The attacker himself, van Spronsen.