When President Donald Trump designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization last week, critics attacked the move, calling Antifa merely an idea.
Ideas don’t need lawyers, yet the Antifa-affiliated nonprofit National Lawyers Guild (NLG) exists in part to offer legal services to other Antifa organizations. NLG describes itself as anti-fascist, and it is directly connected to violent Antifa protest groups and individuals, because it shows up at their demonstrations, protests and riots, and advocates for those who get arrested.
NLG trains activists to be “legal observers” at riots. Once trained, these observers get a distinctive fluorescent green hat, a pad of paper, and attend events that align with NLG’s mission and leftist values, according to its website. They are not necessarily attorneys, but are there to watch law enforcement and connect arrested protesters with NLG. The hallmark of protests with Antifa anarchists is violence. NLG observers come prepared with helmets.
Among its goals, NLG aims to abolish prisons, police, and “all aspects of systems and institutions that support, condone, create, fill, or protect prisons, including jails, police lock ups, juvenile detention facilities, immigration detention centers, involuntary psychiatric treatment centers, and other institutional settings in which people are held against their will.”
That is why NLG “stands in support,” of the loosely organized Antifa group accused of attempted murder for the July 4, attack on the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Texas. Officials say the group ambushed the facility, shooting fireworks and bullets at the building.
“Making noise outside of jails is an extremely common form of protest,” NLG reasons in a statement that minimizes how the group terrorized workers at the facility. “One officer claimed to have sustained a minor injury to his neck by what the state claims was a gunshot. In response, the government has arrested 16 people, some through raids and traffic stops. Yet, through all of the federal government’s criminal complaints, only two people have been described as alleged shooters.” So yes, an officer was shot, but he was only shot a little bit, in NLG’s world.
The NLG is more than a group of lawyers. It is an activist group with a long list of goals, all designed to bring “basic change in the structure of our political and economic system.”
No one elected NLG into office, but the group’s website says it intends to change U.S. foreign policies it does not agree with. It supports agitators who advocate for NLG’s positions, such as its support for Palestine.
NLG is not opposed to violence. It supported the brutal, Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, with its torturous murder of 1,195 people, the taking of hostages, and the launching of war with Israel. NLG is a founding member of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, its international arm, which still has an NLG statement on its website, posted Oct. 8, 2023, the day after the attack.
“The NLG stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle against the settler colonial state of Israel,” the statement said. “The National Lawyers Guild urges public recognition of the right to resist unlawful occupation ‘by all available means, including armed struggle.’”
Finances
The National Lawyers Guild is a membership organization made up of staffed and unstaffed chapters, some of which have their own money, according to 990 tax exempt forms, which lists the parent group as having $1.4 million in net assets for 2023. But that is not the entire funding story. The nonprofit has numerous arms, including a funding foundation. The National Lawyers Guild Foundation had $4.6 million.
NLG also does business as the National Immigration Project, which had $2.9 million in net assets in 2023. NLG is closely tied to the International Association of Democratic Lawyers which was founded in Paris. Because it is not U.S. based, it does not provide financial data to the U.S. government. The groups are largely funded by well known philanthropists. National Immigration Project received $20,000 from the Tides Foundation in 2023. According to a report from Capital Research, National Lawyers Guild has received $25,000 from the Soros Family’s Open Society Foundation.
Disorganized Antifa
A piece at the Germen Antifa website Taz notes that Trump intended to declare Antifa a terrorist organization in 2017.
“Back then he had a Department of Justice that explained to him that ‘Antifa’ was not an organization, but an idea under which self-organized, loose groups come together — and that such a classification couldn’t simply be made by decree anyway,” the piece reads.
But this claim that Antifa is not real because it is too disorganized for the federal government to address is wearing thin. The groups work together but stay separate for their own protection. It is harder to untangle the Gordian Knot that is Antifa by design. Take out one group and there are others groups doing the same work. They have decentralized leadership, decentralized finances, and one united goal to kill capitalism and push socialism.
Taz names a handful of Antifa groups, including Antifascists 615, based in Nashville; Screwston Anti-Fascist Committee of Houston; Late Night Anti-Fascists; and Conejo Valley Antifascists in California. But there are many more operators managing their corner of the internet, ready to meet up with other groups, like Workers Over Billionaires; People’s Action; The Fascism Barometer; May Day Strong, and of course, the National Lawyers Guild.