Administration seeks to label Antifa as terrorists

Trump officials are trying to treat Antifa and other far-left networks less like loose protest movements and more like terrorism targets, according to a New York Times report published on April 9, 2026. The push is aimed at getting allies across government to use counterterrorism powers that were built for groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. (nytimes.com) That matters because the United States does not have a formal list of designated domestic terrorist organizations the way it has a Foreign Terrorist Organization list for overseas groups. The State Department’s designation system under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act applies to foreign organizations, not homegrown political movements. (state.gov) Federal law does define domestic terrorism, but the definition works more like a category for investigations than a standalone charge. A Congressional Research Service report says there is still no federal criminal statute that simply makes “domestic terrorism” itself a separate offense. (congress.gov) The legal definition is narrower than the politics around it. Federal law says domestic terrorism involves dangerous criminal acts meant to intimidate civilians or influence government policy inside the United States. (justice.gov) The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security also draw a line between violent acts and protected speech. Their joint guidance says advocacy, ideology, and even harsh rhetoric do not by themselves amount to violent extremism. (fbi.gov) That is one reason “Antifa” is hard to fit into a terrorism framework. Antifa is not a single national organization with a membership roll or command structure; it is usually used as a label for decentralized anti-fascist activists and local crews, which makes any blanket designation legally and practically messy. (nytimes.com) The administration is not starting from zero. In September 2025, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” and civil-liberties groups say it opened the door to using national-security tools on nonprofits and activists. (aclu.org) Those tools can include intelligence sharing, terrorism task forces, financial scrutiny, and broader watch-list style coordination even when prosecutors do not have a new terrorism charge to file. The ACLU has separately sought records on how fusion centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces are used to monitor protesters and communities of color. (aclu.org) The argument from critics is not that political violence on the left never exists. It is that the administration is trying to stretch a system designed around organized violent threats into a tool for policing a wider set of domestic political enemies without showing public evidence on the scale usually associated with terrorism designations. (nytimes.com) Congress’s own research has warned for years that how the government defines domestic terrorism shapes who gets investigated, surveilled, and prioritized. Once a movement is pulled into that category, the practical effect is less about a new label on paper and more about which agencies start treating it as a national-security target. (congress.gov)