Two Americans Dead in a Philippine Jungle: The Disputed Killing of Filipino-American Activists in a Dying Insurgency

On April 19, 2026, a unit of the Philippine Army's 79th Infantry Battalion moved into the rural barangay of Salamanca in Toboso, Negros Occidental — a sugarcane-growing province in the central Visayas. By the end of the day, 19 people were dead. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) said they were all members of the New People's Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Among them, the military said, were two American citizens [1][2].

The deaths of Lyle Prijoles, 40, and Kai Dana-Rene Sorem, 26, both Filipino Americans, immediately drew international attention. The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) confirmed their U.S. citizenship, calling them foreign combatants who had joined a designated terrorist organization [2]. But the CPP, allied activist groups, and Philippine human rights organizations contested that account, identifying Prijoles and Sorem — along with at least seven others — as unarmed civilian organizers and advocates, not armed guerrillas [3][4].

The incident, now commonly referred to as the "Toboso 19," has become a flashpoint in the long-running debate over the Philippine military's counterinsurgency tactics, the practice of "red-tagging" civilians as insurgents, and the legal and moral questions that arise when American citizens die abroad while allegedly participating in a foreign armed movement.

Who Were Lyle Prijoles and Kai Dana-Rene Sorem?

Lyle Prijoles was born and raised in San Diego, California, to a Filipino immigrant family. He studied Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, where, according to his wife, "his passion for the community grew." Around 2004, he became chair of SFSU's chapter of the League of Filipino Students, a left-wing student organization with roots in the anti-Marcos movement. He went on to become the founding "solidarity officer" of Anakbayan-USA at its 2012 congress and later served as a country council member of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP). After 2006, Prijoles made multiple trips to the Philippines, with his organizational work there intensifying in the years before his death [5][6].

Kai Dana-Rene Sorem was a 26-year-old Filipino American from Seattle who identified as a trans woman. Her early political involvement included serving as a legislative page for the Washington State Democratic Party. While studying at Central Washington University in 2020, the killing of George Floyd and the broader social upheaval of that year sharpened her political trajectory. She co-founded the Anakbayan chapter of South Seattle, became active in GABRIELA USA (a women's rights organization within the Filipino diaspora), and attended international leftist summits. In 2025, Sorem traveled to the Philippines on what was described as a U.S.-based "exposure trip." By 2026, she had relocated to the country full-time to work as an organizer [5][6].

Both were embedded in overlapping activist networks — Anakbayan, Bayan-USA, GABRIELA, and the International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS), the latter founded in 2001 by Jose Maria Sison, the CPP's founder, who died in exile in the Netherlands in 2022 [5]. The Philippine government characterizes these organizations as front groups for the CPP-NPA [7]. The organizations themselves reject this designation, describing their work as legal advocacy for Filipino diaspora rights, land reform, and human rights [8].

The Toboso Encounter: Competing Narratives

The AFP stated that the April 19 operation targeted the Northern Negros Front of the NPA. According to the military, troops encountered armed resistance and 19 fighters were killed in a series of clashes throughout the day [1][9].

The CPP released its own list of the dead, identifying 10 as NPA members and nine as civilians. Among those it called civilians were two University of the Philippines students (Alyssa Alano and Maureen Keil Santuyo), a community journalist (RJ Nichole Ledesma), a community researcher (Errol Wendel Chen), and Prijoles and Sorem. Two unnamed minors were also among the dead [3][4].

The Commission on Human Rights (CHR), the Philippines' constitutionally mandated independent human rights body, launched an investigation. It flagged "inconsistencies in the identities of those dead" and invoked the principle of international humanitarian law that "in case of doubt, persons shall be presumed civilians." The CHR also documented the displacement of at least 167 families — 653 people — from the area following the operation [10]. An independent fact-finding mission conducted in May 2026 concluded that at least six of the 19 killed were civilians, including "peasant advocates and organizers" [11].

ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) condemned the killings, calling for an independent investigation [12]. The Philippine Army denied any civilian casualties [9].

The Legal Exposure: 18 U.S.C. § 2339B

Both the CPP and the NPA are designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) by the U.S. State Department [13]. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, the federal Material Support statute, it is a crime for any person subject to U.S. jurisdiction to knowingly provide "material support or resources" to a designated FTO. The definition of material support is broad — it includes "personnel," meaning that joining an FTO, or providing oneself to work under its direction, can constitute a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. If death results from the violation, the penalty rises to life imprisonment [14][15].

The statute does not require proof that the support was connected to a specific planned attack. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law, ruling that even providing "training" or "expert advice" to an FTO could be criminalized, regardless of the provider's intent [14].

No public record exists of an American citizen being prosecuted specifically for joining the NPA. However, the statute has been used extensively against Americans who joined or supported other FTOs, including ISIS and al-Shabaab. Between 2014 and 2019, the Department of Justice brought more than 200 material-support prosecutions related to the Islamic State alone [15].

The question of prosecution is now moot for Prijoles and Sorem. But the legal framework means that any surviving American who traveled to the Philippines to work with or for the NPA could face federal charges upon return to the United States — even if their activities were characterized as humanitarian or political rather than military.

Red-Tagging: A Pattern of Posthumous Labeling

The Philippine government's claim that all 19 dead were NPA combatants must be evaluated against a documented history of "red-tagging" — the practice of labeling individuals, including civilians, activists, journalists, and lawyers, as communists or terrorists, often with lethal consequences.

Human Rights Watch reported in 2022 that red-tagging "targets people who often end up being harassed or even killed" [16]. Karapatan, a leading Philippine human rights organization, documented at least 427 activists who were red-tagged before being killed between 2016 and 2021 [16][17]. The United Nations, Amnesty International, and multiple international human rights bodies have criticized the practice as a mechanism for suppressing dissent [16].

In the Toboso case, the presence of two university students, a community journalist, and a community researcher among the dead — people whose work was publicly documented and primarily non-military in nature — lends weight to concerns that the military's classification of all 19 as NPA combatants may not be accurate. The CHR's investigation and the independent fact-finding mission both raised serious doubts about the military's account [10][11].

That said, the CPP itself acknowledged that 10 of the 19 were NPA members [3]. The dispute centers on the remaining nine — and on whether the military operation distinguished between armed fighters and unarmed civilians present in the area.

A Dying Insurgency: NPA Strength in Decline

The NPA was founded in 1969 by Jose Maria Sison as the armed wing of the CPP, modeled on Maoist principles of protracted people's war. From roughly 60 armed members at its founding, the movement grew rapidly during the Marcos dictatorship, reaching an estimated peak of more than 25,000 fighters in the late 1980s [18][19].

Source: Philippine Armed Forces / IISS Military Balance

Data as of Aug 1, 2025CSV

Since that peak, the NPA has been in steep and largely continuous decline. By 2010, estimates placed NPA strength at around 4,100 fighters. By 2024, that number had fallen to approximately 1,500. In August 2025, the AFP and NTF-ELCAC declared that no active guerrilla fronts remained in the country, citing a reduction in NPA strength to fewer than 785 combatants [18][19].

The decline reflects decades of counterinsurgency operations, internal splits within the CPP, the loss of foreign patrons (China ceased support in the 1970s, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991), and the failure of peace negotiations that repeatedly broke down under successive administrations [18].

Against this backdrop, the presence of two American citizens among the dead in Negros Occidental is a striking anomaly. Foreign fighters in the NPA have been rare throughout the insurgency's history. Unlike the YPG in Syria, which attracted an estimated 100 to 400 Western volunteers during the fight against ISIS [20], or FARC in Colombia, where a 2016 study identified 85 foreign fighters among its ranks [21], the NPA has never been a significant draw for international recruits.

Why Negros? Why Now?

Negros Occidental is not a random site for NPA activity. The province is the Philippines' largest sugarcane-producing region and the site of the country's most acute agrarian conflicts. As of 2018, an estimated 125,000 hectares of land in Negros Occidental had yet to be distributed under the government's agrarian reform program — the largest such backlog in the country [22].

The violence is not abstract. In October 2018, gunmen killed nine sugarcane farmers, including women and children, during the Sagay massacre — an attack linked to land disputes between plantation owners and farmworkers [23]. Farmworker organizations like the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) have long operated under threat of violence from both private security forces and the military [22][23].

This context matters because it illuminates the conditions that sustain NPA recruitment even as the organization's military capacity collapses. The CPP's core platform — land redistribution, opposition to landlordism, and armed resistance to state violence — retains resonance in places where the promise of democratic land reform has gone unfulfilled for decades [22].

For Prijoles and Sorem, both of Filipino descent, the pull appears to have been a combination of diaspora identity, ideological commitment shaped through activist networks in the United States, and direct exposure to conditions on the ground in the Philippines [5][6]. Whether they crossed the line from advocacy into armed participation — or whether that line was drawn posthumously by the military — remains the central unresolved question.

Foreign Leftists and Armed Movements: A Broader Pattern

The phenomenon of Western citizens joining foreign armed movements is not unique to the Philippines. The most prominent recent parallel is the YPG (People's Protection Units) in Syria, where left-wing volunteers from the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe traveled to fight alongside Kurdish forces — drawn by a combination of anti-ISIS sentiment and the Rojava experiment in democratic confederalism. France 24 reported that foreign volunteers in the YPG increasingly consisted of "far-left revolutionaries" attracted to the movement's anti-capitalist and feminist ideology [20].

The legal treatment of these individuals varies sharply. The YPG is not designated as an FTO by the United States — a critical distinction. Americans who fought with the YPG generally did not face prosecution upon returning home, though some encountered scrutiny from the FBI [20]. By contrast, the NPA's FTO designation means any American who materially supported the organization — including by joining its ranks — committed a federal crime under U.S. law [14][15].

The comparison to FARC is also instructive. Colombia's Marxist-Leninist guerrillas attracted few Western volunteers despite decades of conflict, and the 85 foreign fighters identified in its ranks were predominantly from neighboring Latin American countries [21]. The NPA's recruitment of Americans appears to be even rarer — a function of the insurgency's geographic remoteness, its declining military viability, and the narrowness of the diaspora networks through which potential recruits might be reached.

The U.S. Government Response

The U.S. Embassy in Manila issued a security alert on May 1, 2026 — nearly two weeks after the killings. The alert warned American citizens in the Philippines that "anyone in proximity of NPA elements is at grave risk of arrest, injury, or death" and stated that "foreign terrorist organizations actively recruit Americans to participate directly in terrorist activities and/or provide financial support" [24].

Under U.S. consular law, the embassy has an obligation to issue a Consular Report of Death Abroad, notify next of kin, and carry out instructions regarding the disposition of remains — regardless of the circumstances of death [25]. The State Department has not publicly stated whether it will conduct an independent investigation into the deaths, nor whether it had any prior knowledge of Prijoles' or Sorem's presence in the Philippines.

Anakbayan-USA called for justice and denied that the two were combatants, describing them as community advocates [8]. The Daily Wire and City Journal published investigations alleging that Anakbayan and Bayan-USA function as recruitment pipelines for the CPP-NPA [7][5].

The Steelman Case: Political Combatants or Terrorists?

The strongest case against labeling Prijoles and Sorem as "terrorists" rests on several pillars.

First, the NPA's FTO designation is a U.S. policy decision, not a universal legal standard. The insurgency predates the FTO designation system by decades, and the CPP-NPA describes itself as waging a national liberation struggle against a state that has, by multiple documented accounts, engaged in systematic extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and the dispossession of rural communities [16][17][22].

Second, the conditions driving NPA recruitment are real and documented. In Negros Occidental, sugarcane workers earn poverty-level wages, land reform remains stalled, and activists who advocate peacefully for agrarian rights have themselves been targets of violence — red-tagged, arrested, or killed [22][23]. The CPP's analysis — that democratic channels have failed the rural poor and that armed struggle is a legitimate response — is shared, in varying degrees, by a range of Philippine civil society organizations, church leaders, and legal observers. San Carlos Bishop Gerardo Alminaza issued a pastoral letter following the Toboso killings, and the University of the Philippines student government condemned the operation as part of a pattern of militarization on Negros Island [4].

Third, the classification of the dead matters. If Prijoles and Sorem were engaged in community organizing and human rights documentation — as their allies claim and as their pre-death organizational roles suggest — then their killing by military forces raises questions under international humanitarian law that are distinct from the killing of armed combatants.

The counterargument is straightforward: the NPA is a designated terrorist organization that has engaged in assassinations, extortion, and bombings over more than five decades. Regardless of the social conditions that fuel recruitment, voluntarily embedding with an armed group engaged in active hostilities against a sovereign government's military is a choice that carries legal and mortal consequences. The AFP maintains that all 19 individuals died in armed combat [9].

What Remains Unknown

Several critical questions remain unanswered. The CHR investigation is ongoing and has not yet issued final findings [10]. No independent forensic evidence has been made public regarding whether Prijoles and Sorem were armed at the time of their deaths. The U.S. government has not disclosed whether it had prior intelligence about American citizens embedded with NPA units, nor whether the FBI had open investigations related to material support for the CPP-NPA within Anakbayan-USA or affiliated organizations.

The Toboso 19 will likely become another contested data point in the long history of the Philippine counterinsurgency — a history in which the line between combatant and civilian, between legitimate political action and terrorism, has been drawn and redrawn by governments, guerrillas, and the communities caught between them for more than half a century.