President Donald Trump and senior law enforcement officials within his administration participated Wednesday in a “listening session” with self-described “independent journalists” who painted a picture of crime and anarchy in America’s cities driven by “antifa,” as the Trump administration ramps up a federal crackdown on urban crime.
“You look at Portland [Oregon] and you see fires all over the place, you see, fights, and, I mean just violence,” Trump reflected during the event. Those associated with antifa “have been very threatening to people, but we're going to be very threatening to them, far more threatening to them than they ever were with us, and that includes the people that fund them," Trump said.
Government officials participating in Wednesday’s event promised not just to target specific individuals committing crimes, but also the infrastructure alleged to be organizing and financing it.
“We're not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets. It's breaking down the organization, brick by brick, just like we did with cartels.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took things further, likening antifa to international terrorist groups the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.
“They are just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA [Tren de Aragua], as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them, they are just as dangerous,” Noem said. “They have an agenda to destroy us, just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years.”
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Some Jewish groups quickly decried the association.
"Secretary Noem’s comparison of ‘Antifa,’ whose threat the administration consistently exaggerates, to the very real terrorist group Hamas is not only absurd — it’s offensive,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Jewish group J-Street, told Scripps News in a statement. “Making such a statement nearly two years to the day after Hamas murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 demonstrates a disturbing lack of judgment and concern for those still being held.”
Wednesday's roundtable came just two weeks after the president signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorism organization” and an associated national security memorandum known as NSPM-7, directing the FBI to investigate “terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism,” including “common threads” the likes of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity.
Experts on extremism and domestic terrorism cautioned, however, that Trump lacked a legal basis to do so, and warned his directives were so wide-ranging that they could serve to chill constitutionally-protected speech.
“When you have a situation where the term ‘domestic terrorism’ is being used again for political framing, that should be a significant concern to everybody,” said Thomas Brzozowski, who until last month served for 10 years as counsel for domestic terrorism within the national security division of the Department of Justice.“It's now no longer tied to its actual statutory definition... and it's just being wielded arbitrarily and somewhat capriciously to target political opponents.”
According to Brzozowski, purely domestic organizations cannot be designated as terrorist entities under existing law. The two official lists of terrorist groups maintained by the U.S. government — Foreign Terrorist Organizations, as defined by section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, which draws on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — both require explicit ties to foreign nationals.
The antifa movement, conversely, is “decentralized, consisting of independent, radical, like-minded groups and individuals” according to a 2020 report by the Congressional Research Service. Designating antifa as a terrorist group “may infringe on First Amendment-protected free speech — belonging to an ideological group in and of itself is not a crime in the United States,” the report concluded.
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After Trump’s executive order was signed, numerous free speech groups across the political spectrum quickly condemned it.
“In America, we shouldn’t target people for their ideologies. We should target them for their actions, full stop,” wrote Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Liberties in Education.
“[T]his order signals a crackdown directed against speech by one side in the national discussion, Trump’s political adversaries,” echoed Walter Olson of the Cato institute.
Other legal experts noted that the new actions are likely to accomplish little in terms of prosecuting cases where real crimes were committed.
“The government doesn’t need NSPM-7 to investigate any of these groups if there’s reason to believe they’ve committed crimes that already exist,” wrote Georgetown University Law Center professor and national security law expert Stephen Vladeck. “The specter of labeling groups ‘domestic terrorist organizations’ is an exercise in legally empty but rhetorically dangerous symbolism—one that is trying to coerce more and more individuals and groups to ‘obey in advance,’ even though there are no new substantive rules that they need to actually obey.”
Indeed, it’s unclear what impact beyond messaging the new actions have had on Trump administration law enforcement operations to-date.
The Department of Homeland Security recently detailed how officials were “fighting back against antifa violence” in a press release pointing to a "non-exhaustive list of the arrests DHS has made to keep America safe from Antifa-aligned domestic extremism.” Most individuals included on that list were charged with making threats or committing violence against federal officials or buildings.
Yet several have refuted their alleged ties to antifa, among them Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), who was arrested and charged with “forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers” when trying to access and provide oversight of an immigration detention center.
McIver’s attorneys Monday described the DHS press release tying her to antifa as “false and prejudicial” in a letter to the judge overseeing the case.
Many local officials where antifa-organized protests are taking place, meanwhile, have pushed back on the Trump administration’s attempts to intervene – suggesting officials already in place are better equipped to handle things.
“The risks posted by nightly ICE-Facility protests have not merited anything more than standard, periodic monitoring like any other neighborhood in the City,” wrote Craig Dobson, Assistant Chief of Operations at the Portland Police Bureau, in testimony submitted as part of Oregon’s challenge to Trumps deployment of National Guard troops to Porland. “The notion that the ICE-Facility protests cannot be adequately managed by those local and federal resources already present... cannot be squared with the facts on the ground."
