A pair of activists subpoenaed by Trump’s Justice Department have announced their refusal to cooperate with investigators on an apparent legal fishing expedition into pro-Palestine donor Fergie Chambers. They call potential imprisonment “a cheap price to pay for the defense of our movement.”
Read The Grayzone’s first exclusive report on the subpoenas here.
Two pro-Palestine activists who were issued subpoenas by the Federal Bureau of Investigation have publicly pledged not to cooperate with prosecutors seeking to force them to testify against fellow activists. In a statement provided to The Grayzone, Bridget Shergalis and Sophie Ross wrote that they “have decided to publicize our refusal to testify in this federal grand jury,” declaring flatly that “neither of us will ever testify, inform on, or expose another person to the state” who was accused of involvement in resistance to Israeli genocide.
The two activists, were previously sentenced to 60 days for defacing and briefly blocking access to an Israeli weapons manufacturing facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire, plan to comply with their legal obligation to appear in court on November 4th. But they insist they will only “give our names to the court, and respond to any additional questions by invoking our rights to remain silent.”
It’s still uncertain exactly who federal prosecutors are targeting with the grand jury proceedings, but it appears investigators are focusing on Fergie Chambers, a philanthropist and anti-imperialist activist who’s donated to a variety of charities in Gaza. Chambers has been detained in Spain for over three months under a highly questionable US extradition order accusing him of money laundering in support of Hamas.
Though the activists run the risk of being found in contempt of court, they wrote that they “consider the possibility of imprisonment to be a very cheap price to pay for the defense of our movement,” which they described as “one small part of the global struggle against US imperialism.” 
Shergalis and Ross urged others who’ve been ordered to testify in grand jury to follow in their footsteps, and join them in signing the NSPM-7 Defendants Union Pledge, a declaration of non-compliance and solidarity released in response to the Trump administration’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. That policy, issued by Trump acolyte Stephen Miller in late 2025, directed all federal law enforcement and security state agencies to surveil, investigate, and prosecute any and all “networks, entities, and organizations” allegedly connected to “left wing political extremism.”
That ideological strategy was on full display in August 2026, when the Trump administration formally designated a group of activists which claimed responsibility for vandalizing the Elbit weapons factory in New Hampshire —Palestine Action US — as a “terrorist organization.”
Firmly rejecting that label, Shergalis and Ross wrote that the federal government uses terror designations as a veneer to “isolate political actors from international support networks, and to delegitimize the tactics they use.”
“When the United States has done nothing but bring down slaughter and mass destruction on Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and the rest of the Third World,” they stated, “this is the ultimate hypocrisy.”
“We stand by our past tactics, and in unconditional solidarity with whoever is being targeted by this grand jury, as well as with every other person currently undergoing similar investigations by the United States.”
The activists concluded, “Those of us on the outside of the prison have a permanent duty to defend them.”