The Trump administration is pursuing a multipronged strategy to quash those it perceives as its ideological opponents. Much of this plan is previewed in its 2025 executive order purporting to designate “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist group and subsequent National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). Those foundational strategic documents conjured up a violent, vast antifa/left-wing conspiracy intent on committing violence, listing as evidence disparate incidents across the country that included protected First Amendment activity.
Following these instructions, federal agencies, as I wrote in Part 1 of this series, are aggressively investigating and prosecuting people and groups associated with a broad range of disfavored ideologies supposedly tied to antifa. In parallel, the administration is attempting to cast antifa as an international terrorist threat. This piece — the second installment of this series — explains how advancing this false narrative could allow the federal government to use expansive authorities meant to combat foreign terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS against U.S. civil society, ratcheting up the cost of opposing the administration.
Inventing an International Terrorism Narrative
The Trump administration is making a concerted effort to create the international counterpart to the NSPM-7 narrative: that a coordinated network of left-wing groups is engaging in international terrorism. According to The New York Times, Sebastian Gorka, a senior White House counterterrorism official, leads the effort, pushing to designate left-wing groups abroad as terrorists, pressuring allied countries to investigate them, and searching for connections between them and Americans.
In March, a senior State Department counterterrorism official told her Western counterparts that they must recognize the actions of antifa and the far left “as political terrorism rather than mere protest or criminality.” In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened a meeting of high-level officials to build an international cooperation infrastructure to combat transnational “far-left political terrorism” modeled on responses to the September 11 attacks. Sixty-six countries participated. At the meeting, Rubio announced new visa restrictions barring entry to “Far-Left Terrorists” and “aligned groups,” building on earlier policies that screened people for “anti-American” views.
Also in July, the State Department published a 100-page report claiming that for nearly 70 years, Cuba has directed and coordinated U.S. left-wing groups. In its telling, the civil rights movement, opponents of the Vietnam War, 2020 racial justice protests, pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, and anti-ICE protests have all been driven by the communist Cuban government. The report casts established U.S. nonprofits, such as the National Lawyers Guild, and political organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, as nodes in a Cuban-directed network. It treats a series of loosely related movements separated by decades and generations as part of a single coordinated effort, apparently seeking to outdo even the manufactured left-wing threat underpinning NSPM-7.
The “antifa is an international terrorist threat” narrative, however thin, opens legal tracks that are staples of post-9/11 counterterrorism, marked by limited procedural protections and broad liability.
Foreign Terrorist Designations
The secretaries of state and of the treasury have broad discretion to designate persons and entities as foreign terrorists, although these authorities have long been criticized for their lack of procedural protections and minimal judicial review. Most familiar is the secretary of state’s authority to designate any entity as a foreign terrorist organization upon determining that it is a foreign organization that engages in, or has the capacity and intent to engage in, terrorism or material support of terrorism that threatens the security of Americans or U.S. national security. The designation lets the government impose penalties on the organization ranging from freezing funds held by U.S. banks to barring members from entering the country. Anyone who provides “material support” to a designated foreign terrorist organization is subject to prosecution and up to 20 years in prison.
The Supreme Court upheld this framework against a First Amendment challenge in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, finding that even training in peaceful conflict resolution could qualify as material support if provided in coordination with, or under the direction of, a designated foreign terrorist organization. Independent advocacy that merely aligns with the group’s goals remains protected speech.
The second route, which is less familiar but more widely used, is for the government to label entities and individuals as specially designated global terrorists under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as implemented by President George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13224. The secretaries of state and of the treasury have wide latitude to apply this designation to persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism, and to block their assets.
Today the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations stands at 100 entities, while the list of specially designated global terrorist entities numbers over 1,300. These designations — regardless of whether they are justified — have a domino effect, creating legal risks for anyone with even the most attenuated connections to designated entities.
At the heart of NSPM-7 is the administration’s goal of suppressing antifa and left-leaning groups that oppose its policies. Since antifa itself is a decentralized movement, not an organization, in November 2025, the administration designated four small European groups linked to that movement as specially designated global terrorists, designating them as foreign terrorist organizations a week later. The State Department has since offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the disruption of the four groups’ financing, in the same tier as its standing rewards for information about Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s networks.
In August, the administration raised the stakes substantially by extending specially designated global terrorist designation to an infrastructure provider: Autistici Inventati (A/I), an Italian nonprofit that offers free hosting, encrypted email, and mailing-list services. The government claims that A/I can be designated for supporting terrorism because its tools are “specifically designed to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks” and offered exclusively to “radical left-wing actors.” In support, the government claims that A/I manually vets potential users for ideological affinity and points to a handful of leftist American groups that A/I services. While these groups are not — and cannot be — designated as domestic terrorists (there is no such designation) or foreign terrorists (they are based in the United States), the government seems to be pulling them into the international terrorism framework through the digital infrastructure they use. Under existing rules, anyone who supports or is “associated with” specially designated global terrorists can be designated as one without any determination that they are supporting terrorism.
Some of the groups designated by the Trump administration do have a record of low-grade violence. But, as the administration’s own comments make plain, the point of these designations is mainly to target the Americans the administration hopes to reach through them.
Risks for U.S. Civil Society
This thicket of foreign terrorist designations creates potential liability for U.S. civil society, with severe, front-loaded consequences. An American who supports a designated foreign terrorist organization faces prosecution for material support — up to 20 years in prison or, in cases involving death, a life sentence — regardless of whether they intend to further terrorism. Since 9/11, this type of material support prosecution has almost exclusively been brought against Muslim Americans. These defendants are prosecuted as international terrorists even where their links to foreign terrorists are based on ideological affinity rather than operational ties.
These include cases where their actual criminal acts were minimal, such as translating and posting online content that was already public. If the same pattern holds for left-leaning designated entities, prosecutors may be able to obtain convictions based on a U.S. left-wing group’s ideological affinity with a designated foreign terrorist organization, no matter how small-bore their level of support. Such an outcome would be consistent with the recent Prairieland convictions for material support for terrorist acts, which targeted anti-ICE demonstrators based on conduct such as setting off fireworks and vandalism.
Civil society groups may also face liability for interactions with left-leaning groups that are specially designated global terrorists. For example, a U.S.-based group can face fines of up to $377,700 simply for receiving services from a designated entity like A/I, regardless of whether it knew that the group was designated. A “willful” violation (where the group knew that supporting a specially designated global terrorist was unlawful) can be criminally prosecuted and also carries a maximum 20-year sentence.
This administration has not yet directly labeled an American individual or organization as a specially designated global terrorist. But doing so would immediately freeze that person’s or entity’s assets, imposing an enormous practical handicap as well as the reputational damage of being sanctioned as a terrorist. Courts have required significant procedural protections for such dire consequences. But the two major cases litigated in this context — both involving post-9/11 terrorist designations of Muslim charities — took six and eight years to resolve, long after the damage was done.
The Trump administration may also target domestic groups with some connection to the Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Palestinian movements overseas, both of which it has designated in some fashion. For the last two decades, parts of the U.S. government have sought to tie Muslim civil society groups to the Brotherhood, and the current administration’s hostility to pro-Palestinian activists is hardly a secret. Even if a U.S.-based group’s ties to these designated entities are minimal, it could face investigations and prosecutions for supporting terrorism that would have enormous reputational, financial, and possibly criminal consequences.
Unlocking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Authorities
Casting the left as an international terrorist threat also gives the government access to intrusive foreign intelligence surveillance authorities that don’t require judicial review and warrants. Because surveillance purportedly targeting foreigners overseas inevitably sweeps up Americans’ communications, these expansive authorities have long been recognized as significant risks to domestic actors.
A designated foreign terrorist organization is the paradigmatic foreign intelligence target, and the administration can use its broad authorities under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Executive Order 12333 to collect these groups’ communications. This may be a limited pool for the small groups designated in 2025 but is likely far larger in the case of A/I, which the government claims hosts tens of thousands of accounts and mailing lists.
