Can Trump designate antifa as a ‘major terrorist organization?’ Here’s what we know

President Donald Trump’s announcement that he will designate antifa a “major terrorist organization” left some legal experts puzzled.

“I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” Trump wrote^[1] Sept. 17 on Truth Social. “I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Trump’s announcement came after conservative influencer Charlie Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination. Trump’s officials^[2] have said the killing was incited by extremists on the political left. Investigators said the suspect acted alone, and in releasing charges against Tyler Robinson, 22, prosecutors made no mention^[3] of antifa. 

This isn’t the first time Trump has said he wants to designate antifa as a terrorist organization. He said^[4] it in 2020, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Back then, politicians, pundits and social media posts blamed^[5] antifa, saying it had picked fights with police and looted businesses. But government intelligence reports, media reports and experts offered no evidence^[6] that antifa played any significant role in those events.

Short for “anti-fascist,” the antifa movement has an amorphous structure  and its domestic roots present legal obstacles for Trump’s plan to declare it a terrorist organization, experts said.

What is antifa?

Antifa is a broad, loosely affiliated coalition of left-wing activists.

Although it is widely considered a political movement, antifa is not an organization with an official membership, leader or base for operations, and it is often organized into autonomous local groups.

Its adherents typically rally against white supremacy and other causes, at times resorting to violence. The antifa movement goes back decades^[7], but regained attention^[8] during counterprotests against white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.

In his book “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,”^[9] historian Mark Bray traced^[10] the modern antifa movement to German and Italian leftist groups that fought proto-fascist gangs following World War I. 

Antifa activists often use^[11] social media and encrypted apps to target right-wing activists and communicate with one another. The oldest antifa cell is Rose City Antifa^[12] in Portland, Oregon, with similar organizations in several^[13] other^[14] cities^[15]. 

Antifa activists are “predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy,” Bray wrote in a 2017 Washington Post column^[16]. They often wear^[17] black clothing or bandanas over their faces to stay anonymous in crowds.

“Multiple independent reviews of incidents from the past decade — including analyses of FBI and Department of Homeland Security reporting, the Global Terrorism Database, and congressional testimony — show zero terrorist attacks attributed to Antifa,” said Gary LaFree, a University of Maryland professor emeritus of criminology and criminal justice and former director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

LaFree said in a Sept. 18 email to PolitiFact that attacks that meet the definition of terrorism are “overwhelmingly carried out by far-right extremists, jihadist-inspired actors, or — less frequently — other movements.”

Can the Trump administration designate antifa as a terrorist organization?

National security experts told PolitiFact^[18] back in 2020, there is no legal process for designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations. Experts now say that the 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, a senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told PolitiFact.

The State Department and Treasury Department make designations to the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list^[19], but there is no equivalent government list for domestic terrorist organizations.

When the government designates a person or group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, its members are inadmissible to the United States, and their assets and money in the U.S. are frozen so they don’t have access to it.

Michael German, a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told^[20] PolitiFact in 2020 that because antifa isn’t an organized group — it has no leaders, assets, or infrastructure — “banning material support to foreign anti-fascist groups would have little legitimate anti-terrorism effect here or abroad.”

“Domestic terrorism” is defined^[21] in federal law, but it is not considered a federal crime^[22]. In domestic terrorism investigations, prosecutors end up charging suspects with offenses such as hate crimes, murder or weapons violations. Thirty-two states and Washington D.C^[23]. have laws that criminalize acts of domestic terrorism.

So when Trump said he would designate antifa as a terrorist organization, it’s unclear who exactly his administration would be targeting or what kind of consequences that label would carry. We asked the White House how they plan to execute this designation, but we did not hear back.

Patel said an executive order designating antifa a “terrorist organization” and pursuing action against entities “funding antifa” could face court challenge.