The FBI foiled a New Year's Eve terrorist plot, arresting four members of a radical anti-Israel extremist group accused of planning five coordinated bombings across Los Angeles, the Department of Justice announced Monday. The scheme involved painting Hamas triangles near their targets, and photos show "Free Palestine" stickers scattered across bomb-making stations, according to a criminal complaint.
The complaint indicates that Audrey Illeene Carroll, Zachary Aaron Page, Dante Gaffield, and Tina Lai—who were charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy and possession of unregistered destructive devices following their Friday arrest—hold significant ties to the anti-Israel movement. They belong to the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF), "an anti-capitalist, anti-government movement" centered around militant, anti-Israel rhetoric and open endorsement of violence.Their alleged plot included spray painting upside-down triangles—a symbol Hamas uses to denote Israeli targets—near the buildings they planned to bomb. A search of Carroll's residence also uncovered posters with Hamas triangles seenon TILF's Instagram page, which have also appeared at the group's protests, and a photograph of the group's bomb-making stations included "Free Palestine" stickers.
The TILF members allegedly planned to target two companies in their attack. While the complaint did not name the companies, the group protested against Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense company, outside its Los Angeles office earlier this month. "These genocidal war criminals have no place in our city, and no place in Palestine. Never let them live in peace," the group wrote on Instagram.
TILF, which is named after an indigenous term for North America, has also expressed support for "Arab resistance" and has appeared at protests displaying signs reading "Israel has the right to go to hell." Other slogans promoted by the group include "Free Palestine or scorch the earth." The group has also called for "Death to ICE," and "Death to America."
The day after the arrests, the TILF group was scheduled to participate in a Palestine-focused market event in Los Angeles sponsored by left-wing activist group Code Pink, which has worked on behalf of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine members.
TILF's plot is just the latest to be foiled by federal authorities. In late October, the FBI announced the arrest of multiple suspects in Dearborn, Mich., in connection with a jihadist-inspired ISIS-linked terror plot timed for the Halloween weekend.
Federal investigators began uncovering the scheme after a confidential informant embedded in the group reported that Carroll, who runs TILF's Instagram account, had distributed copies of an eight-page handwritten attack plan, dubbed "Operation Midnight Sun," during in-person meetings with other TILF members. According to the complaint, the informant provided the FBI with a physical copy of the document and later recorded additional meetings in which the plot was discussed in detail.
The attack plan laid out instructions for constructing complex pipe bombs, conducting surveillance, evading law enforcement, and destroying evidence after the attack. It called for coordinated teams to plant backpacks with explosive devices at five separate locations and detonate them simultaneously at midnight on Dec. 31, 2025. The plot explicitly cited New Year's Eve fireworks as a way to mask the sound of explosions and delay detection by authorities.
At one meeting, Page asked those present whether "they would be interested in receiving firearms training." Carroll added that she had a contact "who could obtain unregistered ARs" and claimed another TILF member with prior military experience could help source parts, according to the complaint.
Investigators also obtained access to encrypted communications used by the group. According to Signal messages reviewed by the FBI, the conspirators used a group chat titled "Order of the Black Lotus"—described by Carroll as their space "for everything radical"—to coordinate logistics, assign roles, share bomb-making instructions, and plan a Mojave Desert trip to test the explosive devices. FBI agents intervened as the suspects began assembling explosive components at their desert site, arresting all four before a functional device could be constructed.
"After an intense investigation, the Department of Justice, working with our @FBI, prevented what would have been a massive and horrific terror plot in the Central District of California (Orange County and Los Angeles)," Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X.
Agents recovered potassium nitrate, sulfur, charcoal powder, PVC pipes of various diameters, gasoline, primers, and fuse materials—components that FBI bomb technicians determined could be readily assembled into improvised explosive devices or Molotov cocktails.
The complaint further alleges that Carroll and Page discussed plans for follow-up attacks after New Year's Eve, including potential pipe bomb attacks targeting ICE officers and vehicles "beginning in January or February 2026," with Carroll noting "that would take some of them out and scare the rest of them."
According to FBI director Kash Patel, a fifth individual believed to be linked to the same TIFF subgroup was arrested in New Orleans in connection with a separate, alleged attack.
Gaffield, meanwhile, served as president of the Associated Students of Cerritos College, the student government at Cerritos College in Norwalk, California, a role in which he acted as an elected student body leader before his term ended earlier this year. He also served on the District Committee on Safety.
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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