The suspects were arrested while testing explosives in the Mojave Desert.
Four members of a left-wing, pro-Palestinian extremist group were arrested over the weekend for allegedly planning to bomb several sites throughout Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.
The individuals, members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF), were targeting “property and facilities operated by two separate companies that are used or engaged in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce,” according to an FBI affidavit. Suspects were arrested in Lucerne Valley this weekend while testing explosives in the Mojave Desert.
“The Turtle Island Liberation Front — a far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist group — was preparing to conduct a series of bombings against multiple targets in California beginning on New Year’s Eve. The group also planned to target ICE agents and vehicles,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
Audrey Illeene Carroll, 30, Zachary Aaron Page, 32, Dante Gaffield, 24, and Tina Lai, 41, have been charged with conspiracy and possession of an unregistered destructive device.
Carroll outlined the operation in an eight-page document, which he provided to a confidential source in late November. The document detailed a plan to plant backpacks with explosives, “to be simultaneously detonated at five locations targeting two U.S. companies at midnight on New Year’s Eve 2025,” according to the affidavit.
When the group went to construct and detonate test explosive devices on Friday in the Mojave Desert, the FBI intervened to arrest the four co-conspirators, “before they completed assembling a functional explosive device.”
The group also planned to target ICE in January or February 2026. Authorities recovered bomb-making materials and signs that read, “Death to ICE,” and, “Death to America, long live Turtle Island & Palestine.”
TILF believes in “full decolonization and land back for all occupied and oppressed peoples in the world,” according to the organization’s website. According to law enforcement, Carroll operates the organization’s Los Angeles chapter’s Instagram account, on which the group frequently posts radical pro-Palestinian messaging advocating for revolt against capitalism and describing Israeli technology companies as “bloody war criminals.”
Although authorities did not name the two organizations that were targeted in Operation Midnight Sun, TILF’s L.A. chapter has on social media called out Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense firm. TILF LA encouraged members to protest the “genocidal monsters” earlier this month at a demonstration against “the bloody war criminals . . . planning to install their AI into the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles.”
“We cannot allow this,” the group wrote in a post. “These genocidal war criminals have no place in our city, and no place in Palestine. Never let them live in peace.”
One of the signs recovered by the FBI also appears to have been featured in a November protest, during which TILF was protesting ICE.
A recent post from TILF LA also professes that “peaceful protest will never be enough,” and that because “we are up against fascist colonizers there are no morals for us to appeal to, no sense of justice or what’s right.”
“The only way out is through resistance,” the post continues. “Stop marching in parades, fight back.”