On November 20, 2025, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Texas returned an indictment against two young men from the Dallas suburbs that read less like a criminal complaint than a summary of someone’s darkest fantasies rendered operational. Gavin Rivers Weisenburg, twenty-one, of Allen, and Tanner Christopher Thomas, twenty, of Argyle, were charged with conspiracy to murder, maim, or kidnap persons in a foreign country — the foreign country being Haiti, the plan being to sail there by boat, raise a mercenary army recruited from Washington, D.C.’s homeless population, invade Gonave Island, kill every man on it, and enslave the women and children as sexual property.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in federal prison.¹
The Plan, As Prosecutors Describe It
According to the indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Weisenburg and Thomas began plotting in August 2024 and spent the following year turning their scheme from fantasy into operational logistics with a methodical commitment that, under any other circumstances, might have been admirable.
They began learning Haitian Creole. They researched firearms, ammunition, and military-style rifles. They investigated sailboat purchases and the logistics of transporting weapons and explosives by sea. Weisenburg enrolled in the North Texas Fire Academy in Rockwall, Texas, in August 2024 — prosecutors allege he did so specifically to acquire skills useful for the coup — but failed out of the program nearly six months later. He later traveled to Thailand to attend sailing school in preparation for the voyage.²
Thomas took a more direct route to military training: he enlisted in the United States Air Force in January 2025. According to the indictment, he did so expressly to acquire combat skills he could bring to bear on Gonave Island. He then successfully transferred his initial station assignment away from Ramstein Air Base in Germany — placing himself instead at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, conveniently close to Washington, D.C., where the homeless recruitment operation was to be centered.³
The men communicated about the plan on social media. They are also charged with one count each of producing child pornography, stemming from an alleged incident in August 2024 in which they coerced a minor into sending a sexually explicit video.
Both men have entered not-guilty pleas. Weisenburg’s attorney, David Finn, told NPR in a statement that “something can be somewhat accurate yet wildly misleading at the same time.” Thomas’s attorney, John Helms, said his team would be “defending him vigorously against these charges.”⁴
The Island They Chose
Gonave Island sits in the Gulf of Gonave, roughly fifty miles west-northwest of Port-au-Prince, and is home to approximately 87,000 people. It is the largest of Haiti’s satellite islands, running about thirty-seven miles long and fifteen miles wide, composed largely of limestone and fringed by coral reefs.⁵ Its residents survive primarily through fishing, subsistence farming, and small-scale livestock raising. There are no major paved roads across most of the island; people travel by motorcycle, by donkey, or on foot. Access to clean water has been a chronic crisis for decades. It has been described, repeatedly and without apparent exaggeration, as one of the most underserved places in Haiti — which is itself one of the most underserved countries in the Western Hemisphere.⁶
The island also carries a history that makes the indictment’s language land with particular weight. During the colonial period, Gonave served as a refuge for Taíno people fleeing Spanish conquest, and later for enslaved Africans hiding from their captors on the mainland. It was, for centuries, a place people fled to in search of freedom from exactly the kind of violence now described in a federal indictment. That two men from North Texas planned, in 2024, to sail there and impose a new regime of slavery is a historical irony sufficiently grim as to resist further editorializing.
The Context They Were Exploiting
The plan, however deranged in its execution, was not conceived in a vacuum. Haiti in 2024 and 2025 was in a state of collapse that made governance of any kind — including on remote islands — functionally absent in many areas. Armed gangs, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, killed at least 5,601 people in 2024 alone, an increase of more than a thousand over the previous year.⁷ By late 2025, gangs controlled an estimated ninety percent of Port-au-Prince, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, and had displaced more than 1.4 million people nationwide.⁸ The Haitian National Police lacked the capacity to respond effectively. The international community’s 2024 stabilization effort — a Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission — had achieved little before it was superseded by a new UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force in September 2025.
Gonave Island, separated from the mainland by open water and largely absent from the attention of either the Haitian government or international relief organizations, was in this environment effectively ungoverned. The men appear to have identified this as an opportunity. Federal prosecutors characterized the scheme as designed to “carry out their rape fantasies” — a phrase that appears directly in the DOJ press release — under cover of a power vacuum that nobody would move quickly to fill.⁹
Whether the plot was, as the defense suggests, something less than what the indictment describes, will be determined in court. What is not in dispute is that two young men from the affluent suburbs of Dallas spent more than a year learning a new language, enlisting in the military, enrolling in firefighting school, flying to Thailand for sailing lessons, and researching the acquisition of weapons and explosives — all, prosecutors allege, in service of a plan to conquer and enslave a Caribbean island. The FBI, the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and the Celina Police Department are all listed as investigators on the case.¹⁰
The indictment, it bears repeating, is not evidence of guilt. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The evidence that two men from Allen and Argyle, Texas, spent a year trying to become pirates — that part, at least, appears not to be in serious dispute.
Endnotes
¹ U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of Texas, “North Texas Men Indicted in the Eastern District of Texas for an International Murder/Kidnapping Scheme,” press release, November 20, 2025, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edtx/pr/north-texas-men-indicted-eastern-district-texas-international-murderkidnapping-scheme. The charges — conspiracy to murder, maim, or kidnap in a foreign country under 18 U.S.C. § 956, and production of child pornography — are enumerated therein.
² U.S. Department of Justice press release, November 20, 2025. Details of Weisenburg’s fire academy enrollment (August 2024), failure, and Thailand sailing school trip are confirmed in the indictment as described in the DOJ release and reported in Kristin Wright, “Texas Men Indicted in Plot to Take Over Haitian Island and Enslave Women and Children,” NPR, November 23, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/11/23/nx-s1-5618242/texas-haiti-gonave-island-plot.
³ U.S. Department of Justice press release, November 20, 2025. Thomas’s enlistment date (January 2025) and station transfer from Ramstein to Joint Base Andrews (March 14, 2025) are described in the indictment, as reported in Courthouse News Service, “Two Texas Men Indicted in Plot to Kill Men, Enslave Women and Children on Haitian Island,” November 21, 2025, https://www.courthousenews.com/two-texas-men-indicted-in-plot-to-kill-men-enslave-women-and-children-on-haitian-island/.
⁴ Defense attorney statements quoted in Wright, NPR, November 23, 2025. The not-guilty pleas are confirmed in both the NPR report and Courthouse News Service.
⁵ Island dimensions and population from “North Texas Men Indicted,” DOJ press release, November 20, 2025 (87,000 population), confirmed in Courthouse News Service, November 21, 2025. Geography from La Gonave Haiti Partners, “La Gonave,” https://lagonavepartners.org/la-gonave/: the island is “37 miles long and 15 miles wide,” “made mostly of limestone,” and “reef-fringed.” La Gonave Haiti Partners is a registered nonprofit that has operated on the island since 2005, working on water access and community development.
⁶ La Gonave Haiti Partners, “La Gonave”: “The island is an arrondissement of the Ouest Department, which also includes Port au Prince on the mainland. This unfortunate annexation results in the island being severely under-resourced in relief and development initiatives, as global and government entities rarely prioritize emergency resources to the Ouest Department.” For broader context on transportation and economic conditions, see ibid.
⁷ UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Haiti: Over 5,600 Killed in Gang Violence in 2024, UN Figures Show,” press release, January 2025, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/01/haiti-over-5600-killed-gang-violence-2024-un-figures-show.
⁸ Council on Foreign Relations, “Can the New Gang Suppression Force Bring Relief to Haiti?” December 2025, https://www.cfr.org/article/can-new-gang-suppression-force-bring-relief-haiti: “gangs have gained more ground in Haiti — now controlling up to 90 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince — and have displaced more than 1.4 million people, creating a severe humanitarian crisis.”
⁹ U.S. Department of Justice press release, November 20, 2025: “information presented in court indicates that…Weisenburg and Thomas are alleged to have conspired to recruit and lead an unlawful expeditionary force to the Island of Gonave…for the purpose of carrying out their rape fantasies.”
¹⁰ Investigating agencies from DOJ press release, November 20, 2025. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Locker of the Eastern District of Texas.
