By design, antifa is a decentralized, far-left movement of loosely knit “resistance” networks operating primarily in Democratic strongholds. But in recent years, antifa’s forces have become highly organized and increasingly sophisticated, with organized crime cells cropping up across the country. Part 3 of this Washington Examiner series, Antifa, Inc., will explore what it would take to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and assess the implications of that designation.
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have long entertained the idea of designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.
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However, applying the term “terrorists” to describe, identify, and sanction domestic groups remains a controversial topic and is considered politically charged by observers on both sides of the aisle.
As the federal statute stands, labeling antifa as a domestic terrorist threat would be largely symbolic, though some proponents support sending a public message as antifa’s forces continue to terrorize communities.
Threat assessment
Through an intimidation tactic, known as “doxing,” antifa militants often publicize sensitive information such as home addresses, personal phone numbers, and private photographs of their intended targets. At times, antifa’s followers have appeared outside a victim’s house, answering “doxes” they see as calls to take “direct action.”
“Sometimes you have to use direct action to stop [‘fascists’] because protesting, signs, yelling is not going to do anything,” an antifa activist told VICE at the apex of the anti-Trump riots on UCLA Berkeley’s campus. “You have to make them afraid.”
Rose City Antifa, the oldest-known antifa chapter in America and regarded as the most influential, has publicly posted about fighting “fascists” with militant violence: “We are unapologetic about the reality that fighting fascism at points requires physical militancy.”
LEFT-WING TERRORISM IS BACK IN BUSINESS
Now, some antifa cohorts are employing guerrilla-like tactics on par with paramilitary warfare.
In a well-coordinated July 4 “ambush,” heavily armed members of a suspected Texas antifa cell allegedly descended on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, opening fire on law enforcement officers they lured outside and shooting a local officer in the neck.
According to the charging documents, multiple gunmen fired from various vantage points, including at least one shooter positioned in the nearby woods. Alleged ringleader Benjamin Song, an ex-U.S. Marine reservist, reportedly provided weapons training to antifa militants in the Dallas-Fort Worth region.
MEET THE ANTIFA CELL CHARGED WITH TERRORISM AND ATTEMPTED MURDER OVER ‘AMBUSH’ AT TEXAS ICE FACILITY
Antifa attacks on ICE property and personnel, with the apparent intent to kill, are not new escalations of antifascist violence.
In 2019, self-identified “comrade” Willem van Spronsen firebombed an ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington, allegedly trying to ignite a 500-gallon propane tank attached to the facility. “I am antifa,” van Spronson’s manifesto read in part. After he died in a police shootout, Seattle Antifascist Action hailed him as “another martyr in the struggle against fascism.” His death turned into a dog whistle for “direct action.”
A transgender-antifa (dubbed “Trantifa”) cult called the Zizians has also emerged this year, whose kill count is allegedly up to six fatalities, including the January shooting death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont.
Designation debate
The two Trump administrations have supported identifying antifa as a domestic terrorism threat. However, these attempts to do so, in effect, only amounted to proclamations or investigative pivots, with no actual effect on the legal landscape.
In early 2016, before President Donald Trump’s first term, the Department of Homeland Security internally classified antifa activities as “domestic terrorist violence.” This description, used among officials to assess the movement’s threat to national security, was not an official designation.
DHS CHARACTERIZES ANTIFA AS “DOMESTIC TERRORIST” GROUP
At the outset of the George Floyd riots in 2020, Trump tweeted, “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”
On the same day as his declaration, Trump’s then-U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr announced that federal authorities were treating riot-related antifa violence as domestic terrorism. “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,” per the Justice Department announcement.
In accordance with this, law enforcement officials were deploying the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to identify organizers and instigators, Barr said.
For federal investigative purposes, the FBI, whose stated No. 1 priority is protecting the U.S. against terrorist attacks, defines domestic terrorism as violent acts carried out to further ideological goals “stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”
Antifa suspects can be sub-categorized as an anarchist extremist under the classification of “Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremism,” one of the FBI’s five “threat categories.”
While antifa extremists may be the subjects of domestic terrorism investigations, the federal government does not have the prosecutorial power to charge them as domestic terrorists explicitly.
FBI INVESTIGATING PEOPLE ANIMATED BY ‘ANTIFA IDEOLOGY’
This legislative session, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, has introduced H.Res.26, which would congressionally designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and deem certain conduct of antifa activists, “or any unlawful conduct performed at an Antifa-affiliated demonstration,” as domestic terrorism.
Greene’s resolution was referred to the House Judiciary Committee in January and has not seen any congressional action since.
Several similar Republican-drafted resolutions targeting antifa were proposed in the past, including Greene’s 2023 version. None of them advanced past committee referrals. Regardless, these resolutions are non-binding in nature, meaning they’re simply declarative and would not result in punitive ramifications for antifa followers.
What federal authorities are saying today
“The FBI’s role in and dedication to investigating terrorism, both domestically and internationally, has not changed,” the agency’s public affairs office previously said in response to a Washington Examiner inquiry asking if investigators are cracking down on antifa militancy.
The bureau deferred to the U.S. secretary of state regarding terrorist designations, although the State Department deals strictly with foreign matters and accordingly only designates foreign actors as terrorism threats.
No legal framework exists for designating a domestic group, antifa or otherwise, as a terrorist entity. Anti-terrorism legislation setting the criteria for State Department designations narrowly defines a terrorist organization as one operating primarily outside the U.S.
Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which authorizes the U.S. State Department to make these determinations, relies on definitions of terroristic activity and terrorism as delineated, respectively, by the Foreign Relations Authorization Act and the INA’s guidelines concerning the inadmissibility of foreign nationals on terrorism-related grounds.
A spokesperson for the State Department confirmed that the agency, pursuant to statutory powers, does not designate organizations based mainly in the U.S.
The department does not discuss deliberations or potential considerations related to designations, the spokesperson said, when the Washington Examiner asked whether the American offshoot of antifa, which originated in Europe, would fall within the purview.
Investigative journalist Andy Ngo, author of Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, said he does not envision American antifa ever officially being deemed a domestic terrorist threat.
HOW THE ANTIFA MOVEMENT HAS METASTASIZED
Ngo, citing First Amendment protections, said the U.S. government cannot outright ban domestic extremist groups, even when certain cohorts incite terrorism and political violence.
“Any ‘labeling’ of antifa as a terrorism group or network would be primarily political rhetoric, in my opinion,” Ngo told the Washington Examiner.
As specified in the FBI’s interagency standards for investigating domestic terrorism, “mere advocacy of ideological positions and/or use of strong rhetoric” does not necessarily constitute violent extremism, without direct threats, nor does “generalized philosophic embrace of violent tactics.” All are constitutionally protected speech.
Criminal caveat
Ngo noted that the U.S. attorney’s office in North Texas has not charged the alleged members of the Dallas-area antifa cell with any terrorism-linked crimes, though the state of Texas did file state-level terrorism charges against them.
Domestic terrorism is defined in the U.S. criminal code as ideologically driven acts “dangerous to human life” and committed on American soil that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence policy via intimidation or coercion, or affect government conduct through mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.
As part of Greene’s resolution, if passed, Congress would call on the DOJ to prosecute antifa-affiliated “crimes of domestic terrorism.”
However, domestic terrorism is not a stand-alone crime chargeable under federal law.
“I don’t think it ever will be,” Cully Stimson, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s National Security Law Program, told the Washington Examiner.
The issue has been debated on Capitol Hill for decades, but no federal authority has ever formally attached criminal penalties to domestic terrorism. Until an act of Congress codifies the crime of domestic terrorism, it is technically not criminalized.
Therefore, designating antifa as a domestic terrorist group is “performative,” Stimson said, and bears no legal consequence.
“What you’re doing is you’re raising alarm bells that this organization is up to no good. They can be prosecuted for underlying crimes that they commit, and that may be the whole point,” Stimson, a former federal prosecutor, explained. “But the so-called crime of domestic terrorism does not exist.”
Indeed, the FBI’s policy on opening investigations into domestic terrorism underscores that the federal statute is “definitional,” not “charging” in nature. “[I]deology itself and the advocacy of such beliefs is not prohibited by U.S. law,” the FBI emphasizes.
Regardless of a formal designation from the DOJ, prosecutors focus on underlying criminal conduct rather than labels such as domestic terrorism, Stimson said.
COULD ANTIFA CO-CONSPIRATORS EVER FACE FEDERAL RICO CHARGES?
Stimson said he doesn’t foresee lawmakers amending or adding penal code provisions with regard to domestic terrorism, given the expansive range of criminal offenses and legal procedures laid out under Title 18.
“They’re not going to do it,” Stimson said. “And by the way, they don’t need to do it. It’s unnecessary…There’s more than sufficient amount of law on the books to go after criminal conduct.”
According to Stimson, domestic terrorism lacks criminal punishment due to these practical and political reasons.
“One person’s domestic terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter,” Stimson said.
The American Civil Liberties Union says terrorism is “an inherently political label, easily abused and misused.” Designating political opponents as domestic terrorists would raise due process and First Amendment concerns, the ACLU warns.
Dr. Eric Patterson, president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said groups seeking revolutionary violence are a cause for concern, and any criminal actions perpetrated in furtherance of a violent agenda are worth public condemnation.
“Americans should rightfully be worried about groups that glorify the symbols of communist oppression, such as communist flags that symbolize the murder of 100 million men and women during the 20th century by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, and other communists,” Patterson told the Washington Examiner.
WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER USE THE TERM ‘ANTI-FASCIST’
“Every such movement began with misinformation campaigns and illicit violence against fellow citizens and government institutions,” Patterson added. “As a society, we must be vigilant in calling out all forms of such intimidation and violence.”