Trump Antifa Order Seen as a Weapon to Attack Left-Wing Speech, Protests

The executive order issued by US President Donald Trump Monday evening claimed a legal authority that the president doesn't have to designate the "antifa" movement as a "domestic terrorist organization," despite the fact that no central group exists to assign the designation to—but rights advocates said Trump's claims about antifa weren't the point of the order.

"This isn’t an attack on antifa," said Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Healthcare. "It’s an attack on our rights."

The executive order states that antifa, a portmanteau of the term "anti-fascist," will be designated a "domestic terrorist organization." The movement is comprised of autonomous individuals and loosely affiliated groups who oppose fascism, but has no central organizational structure or leaders. People associated with the movement mobilized in 2017 to oppose the white nationalist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a nonviolent anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist who rammed a car into a group of demonstrators.

In the order, the president pinned blame for a "pattern of political violence" on anti-fascist protesters and organizers and pledged that the executive branch will "utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations—especially those involving terrorist actions—conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa."

The order was written so broadly, said journalist Prem Thakker of Zeteo, that it suggests "someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they're doing, can be deemed a 'terrorist.'"

The president has ordered US citizens, he added, "to be anti-antifa."

With no central organization to assign the "domestic terrorist organization" to, said rights advocates, the executive order will likely be used to crack down on a wide range of left-wing protest activity and speech.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was among those who noted that no US law or statute gives the president the authority "to designate anything as a 'domestic terrorist organization.'"

All 219 groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, are foreign entities, and the designation makes it possible for people who provide material support to those groups to be prosecuted by the federal government.

"This would appear to have no direct legal effect beyond acting as a statement of policy for the executive branch," said Reichlin-Melnick.

Chip Gibbons, policy director at the First Amendment advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, said that while the order "is without statutory basis, a close read of the language mirrors existing FBI powers, such as 'terrorist enterprise investigations' into 'anarchist extremists.'"

"The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech," said Gibbons. "Given the FBI’s current guidelines, which encourage preventative intelligence in the name of counterterrorism, the FBI will have no problem continuing its sordid history of preemptively investigating political speech under the pretext of thwarting terrorism.”

At The Conversation, Dafydd Townley, a University of Portsmouth teaching fellow, wrote that the classification of antifa "as a terrorist organization could have profound effects on the First Amendment rights of large numbers of law-abiding US citizens."

"It would be a serious danger to American democracy if US citizens were unable to voice their protest and exercise their right to free speech because of this classification," Townley wrote.

The designation was announced amid widespread public opposition to many of Trump's policies, including the deployment of federal troops to US cities to crack down on unhoused populations, immigrant communities, and what the president has claimed is a wave of violent crime—despite statistics showing crime is on the decline in all the cities he's targeted.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have already responded violently to people protesting raids and arrests of immigrant neighbors, including last week when an ICE agent was filmed throwing US congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh to the ground at a protest in the Chicago suburbs.

"This isn’t about 'antifa'—whatever that is," said journalist Erin Overbey on Tuesday. "Trump’s new executive order is written so that anyone protesting against the US government, ICE, or even top politicians can potentially be deemed a terrorist."

"It’s federal weaponization against free speech and the right to protest itself. Full stop," she said. "And it’s un-American as hell."