President Donald Trump officially designated “Antifa” as a domestic terror organization in a new White House Executive Order signed Monday evening.
The order represents the Trump Administration’s most comprehensive definition yet of a movement it has long sought to target, and offers some insight into how it will seek to prosecute people associated with the group.
“Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” the order reads.“It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.”
Trump’s Executive Order says that Antifa actions include “armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists.”
Read more: What It Means for Trump to Label Antifa a ‘Major Terrorist Organization’
The order directs government agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations” performed by “Antifa.”
But the U.S. has no domestic terror law on the books, and the order appears sufficiently broad that it could be used to target a wide range of protest movements. It is unclear how the order will be used in practice due to Antifa’s indistinct definition and lack of structure.
Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is a largely decentralized movement that lacks a defined leadership. It often contains those who lean to the political far-left. Unlike far-right white supremacist domestic groups with neo-Nazi influences, Antifa does not organize as a cohesive group and does not have a designated structure. Generally, Antifa describes those in opposition to fascism and far-right neo-Nazi ideologies, who find their roots in the 20th-century resistance movement to fascism in Europe.
It comes as Trump has ordered a crackdown on left-wing groups in response to the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, despite the motives of the suspect in his murder, Tyler Robinson, not yet being clear.
Trump introduced the idea of labeling “Antifa” as a terrorist organization in his first term and reintroduced the idea on Wednesday when he said on Truth Social that he would be “designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” and that organizations funding Antifa should be investigated legally.
Antifa movements rose to prominence in 2017 after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which led to violent clashes between white nationalists and counter-protesters.
“I think especially in light of the advent of Antifa, if you look at what’s going on there, you know, you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also,” Trump said in the aftermath of the rally during his first term in office, speaking about the anti-fascists that pushed back against neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville.
Trump continued attacking Antifa in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests that swept the nation. In the aftermath of these protests, Trump floated the idea of “designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”
Back in 2020, experts on national law said that while there was a legal process for designating foreign terrorist groups, there was not the same option for domestic terrorist groups, and that this law has not changed.
“The Secretary of State has authority to designate foreign terrorist groups, but there is no parallel authority to designate (a) domestic terrorist group,” Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center for Justice tells Politifact.
Critics say Trump’s executive order lacks a basis in law and could infringe on citizens’ First Amendment rights to protest and dissent.
Patrick G. Eddington, senior fellow at libertarian think tank Cato Institute, writes that Trump’s executive order is “idiotic on multiple levels.”
“The notion that an idea can be designated an organization is one,” he says. “The fact that there’s no constitutional provision or statute granting any president the power to designate a domestic civil society organization a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ is another.”
Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson, a Minnesota representative serving as the ranking member on the Homeland Security committee, wrote that Trump’s order serves to allow “for the Trump administration to stifle dissent, investigate anyone – or any group – they don’t like, punish their enemies, and potentially label any American they want as a terrorist.”
Still, Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt noted that one of the multiple messages engraved in Robinson’s bullets used in the Kirk assassination had an anti-fascist message on it— “Hey fascist! CATCH!”
“This is something the president campaigned on because we have seen a rise in violence perpetrated by Antifa radical people across this country who subscribed to this group. And unfortunately, it’s gone widely uncovered by many in the legacy media,” Leavitt said in a Monday press meeting.
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