Antifa, which stands for anti-fascism, traces its roots to 1930s Germany. Photo / Getty Images
United States President Donald Trump today signed an executive order designating “antifa”, a decentralised, leftist ideology adhered to by various individuals and groups, as a “domestic terrorist organisation”, days after raising the prospect in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s fatal shooting.
While the order defines antifa as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the US Government” and its rule of law, it does not explain what people or groups will be targeted.
The US has no legal mechanism for labelling domestic organisations as terrorist groups.
Experts also said it remains unclear how such a designation would work for a broad movement rather than a distinct group and expressed concern that it could be used to justify a crackdown on the political left more generally.
Trump’s executive action also does not specify the financial or legal consequences that will stem from the designation, saying only that “all relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilise all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle all illegal operations … conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.”
Trump, in a Truth Social post shared last week, described the far-left movement as “SICK” and “DANGEROUS”.
Trump added a warning: “I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices”.
Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is a global, decentralised ideology, and its proponents oppose fascism through various methods.
“It’s essentially a kind of coalition politics of all kinds of radicals, from different kinds of socialists to communists, anarchists and more independent radicals,” said Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
“Sometimes I compare it to feminism. There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group,” he said.
Antifa adherents engage in a wide variety of activities, Bray said, primarily monitoring far-right groups and counterprotesting them.
What has received the most coverage, he added, are occasional physical confrontations with those groups.
“Insofar as terrorism is setting off explosives and killing people, that’s not what these groups ever do,” Bray said.
In early 2017, the University of California at Berkeley cancelled a talk by right-wing figure Milo Yiannopoulos after violence by masked agitators, some of whom appeared to be affiliated with antifa.
That August, a planned demonstration turned violent when left-wing counter-protesters clashed with right-wing groups at Berkeley.
Antifa’s public profile gained further prominence when Trump attempted to pin the blame on the movement for violence during demonstrations over police killings of black people in 2020.
There is no legal mechanism in the US for labelling purely domestic organisations as terrorist groups.
For the executive order to have legal impact, the Trump Administration would need to create such a mechanism.
The Administration has shown a willingness to push legal boundaries in ways that many experts hadn’t expected, and such an effort would surely draw challenges, given the Constitution’s broad First Amendment protections for free association and speech.
“The president does not have legal authority to designate a domestic group as terrorists for good reason, as any such designation will raise significant First Amendment, due process and equal protection concerns,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.
Trump appears to be employing a term that many people associate with left-wing violence to try to promote a repressive agenda, Bray said, adding that such a move could provide an umbrella for clamping down on any political opposition.
Under US law, the Government can designate hostile groups as “foreign terrorist organisations”, a label that carries key financial and legal consequences.
It can do so because individuals and groups that are entirely foreign aren’t protected by the First Amendment.
Typically, the formal declaration is made by the secretary of state, often under direction from the president, and the label allows the Treasury Department to impose financial sanctions and the Justice Department to prosecute people for providing “material support or resources” to the organisation.
Unlike the antifa movement, however, most groups that have been designated foreign terrorist organisations have some sort of leadership and membership structure, said Bernard Keenan, a law lecturer who studies terrorism and national security at University College London, in Britain.
“I’m not really aware of any comparable attempt to designate what is more like an ethos or ideology,” Keenan said.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, his Administration has designated 14 organisations as foreign terrorist groups, including Latin American gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the Sinaloa cartel, which often operate with partners inside the US.
Trump tweeted that the US would be applying a domestic terrorist designation to antifa during the protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Then-FBI director Christopher Wray described antifa as “a movement or an ideology”, not an organisation with a clearly defined hierarchy that would facilitate a terror designation by the Government.
While Trump did not succeed in getting the designation in 2020, his attorney-general then, William Barr, said “the violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly”.
The Patriot Act, signed into law in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, granted law enforcement greater ability to target suspected members and supporters of domestic terrorism for investigation and prosecution.
Shamsi called the act’s definition of domestic terrorism “vague and overbroad”, saying it has “enabled administrations of both parties to conduct abusive investigations on people and groups based on beliefs, speech and association”. She said the ACLU has repeatedly challenged the federal Government on the matter in court.
Shamsi said Trump’s targeting of antifa “demonstrates, yet again, that terrorism is an inherently political label that is easily misused and abused”. In seeking a domestic terrorist designation for a group within the US, Trump “would be jeopardising everyone’s First Amendment rights”, Shamsi said last week.
Recent research on political violence in the United States does not indicate a surge of left-wing violence.
This week, two sociology professors at the University of Dayton wrote in an article that their research and a review of related work showed that “most domestic terrorists in the US are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism”.
According to data from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, left-wing perpetrators who fall under the umbrella of antifa made up a small percentage of overall attacks and casualties in the 893 terrorist incidents recorded in the US between January 1994 and May 2020.
The majority of the incidents, or 57%, were perpetrated by those on the right, including white supremacists, anti-government extremists and incels, men who blame women for their inability to find a sexual partner and advocate violence.
Trump has a long track record of not denouncing right-wing political violence when asked about it. During a 2020 presidential debate, he declined to condemn the Proud Boys, a right-wing group with a history of violence whose members have often clashed with antifa supporters at protests, saying instead that they should “stand back and stand by”.
Shortly after reclaiming the presidency this year, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of almost all of the people, including Proud Boys members, involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.
And during an interview last week on Fox and Friends, the President appeared to justify some violence on the right: “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime.
“They don’t want to see crime. Worried about the border. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in.’”
“The radicals on the left are the problem,and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”