Updated September 19, 2025 at 3:46 PM EDT
In the wake of the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, top Republicans are calling for increased scrutiny of "antifa." President Trump on Wednesday night, while on a state visit to England, posted on social media that he would be designating antifa "as a major terrorist organization." He and other Republican leaders are urging federal agencies to investigate purported funders of antifa.
So far, the man accused of assassinating Kirk has no publicly known link to antifa, a diffuse, politically left movement that is shorthand for "antifascist." Nonetheless, the tenuous connection that some are trying to draw between it and Kirk's killing recalls a previous period of Trump's presidency.
In May of 2020, during Trump's first term in office, he called for antifa to be designated a terrorist organization. At the time, the political spark behind this effort was protests across the nation against police brutality and the killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis. In some places those protests turned into riots.
Back then, efforts to formally classify antifa as a terrorist group failed. Experts on the intersection of civil liberties and counterterrorism, and former government officials, say it is unclear how, this time around, the administration's efforts would fare any differently. In particular, they note two obstacles to any such designation.
"I think it's pretty well-known that antifa is sort of a loosely organized movement rather than a particular organization," said Faiza Patel, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Additionally, Patel said the U.S. government currently has no legal authority to do what Trump seeks.
"There is no framework to designate an organization as a domestic terrorist organization," she said.
Nonetheless, Patel and others say the energy behind pursuing this designation could have real-world consequences. They caution that it could lead to broad First Amendment violations by the government and have significant ripple effects throughout civil society.
No legal way to designate a "domestic terrorist organization"
Current law does provide for the designation of some groups as "foreign terrorist organizations," a process that lies with the State Department. It is through this mechanism that al-Qaida and ISIS, for example, have landed on the public list that the department regularly updates. To qualify for this designation, an organization must be based overseas; it must be a cohesive entity engaged in terrorist activity; and it must be a threat to U.S. national security interests.
No similar list or process exists for domestic groups.
"It would really require a separate executive order by the president of the United States to designate antifa as a terrorist group," said Jason Blazakis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and former director of the State Department's Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office. "But I think that could result in a legal challenge because there historically haven't been any inherently domestic groups sanctioned."
Blazakis said if the administration were somehow eyeing the current FTO designation process for antifa, he believes that effort would fail.
"The group doesn't meet the first prong of the legal criteria, in that it is not a foreign based organization," Blazakis said. "Nor is it an organization that is cohesive. It's made up of individuals, individual organizations, most of which are primarily based in the U.S."
The existence of a designation process for foreign groups, and not domestic groups, can sometimes lead to a surprising difference in how U.S. law treats similar conduct.
"If, for example, I sent a $20 gift card to an organization on that list on the State Department's website, knowing that that organization was a foreign terrorist organization, I could be looking at 20 years in jail," said Tom Brzozowski, former Counsel for Domestic Terrorism in the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. "However, if I sent the same $20 gift card to the local chapter of the KKK, for example, that would be subject to no criminal sanction whatsoever."
Brzozowski notes that Congress could choose to pass legislation to allow the State and Treasury departments to make designations for purely domestic-based organizations. But such a move, many say, would likely run into constitutional legal challenges.
"It may result in infringement on things like freedom to assemble, freedom of speech —even the Second Amendment could come into play, freedom to bear arms," said Blazakis. "All these factor into why there's been some deep concern by government practitioners to label groups to be domestic terrorist groups."
Even if a designation fails, the effort could have broad effects
In one respect, the current round of attention that Republican leaders are giving to antifa differs from the calls in 2020 to label the group terrorist.
"The last attempt was really focused on protests," Patel said. "Right now it seems the attempt is going to be primarily focused on financing."
Trump's social media post this week said he would be urging an investigation of "those funding antifa." Similarly, Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, encouraged FBI director Kash Patel to pursue such a line of inquiry during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing earlier this week.
"Follow the money. The violence we are seeing is not purely organic," Cruz said. "I would encourage the administration to designate antifa as a terrorist organization, to go systematically after antifa. They've committed acts of violence all over the country…. I believe there is considerable money funding it."
Cruz did not provide any evidence to support this claim. But this call to investigate organizations that support left-wing causes is raising serious concern.
"What that means is that there's potentially a broad array of civil society organizations that can be caught up in this as being potentially linked to anti-fascism in some way or the other," said Patel. "And that would include both groups that are organizing protests, for example … but then also potentially donors and funders who are providing financing for various groups."
Patel said this could fundamentally handicap on-the-ground organizations that rely on those funders to do community, racial and social justice work. Beyond this, Patel said the rhetorical conflation of antifa and terrorism is troubling.
"I think it's instructive to go back and see what happened in 2020 when the first Trump administration said that they were going to designate antifa as a terrorist organization," she said.
Patel said the president and the U.S. Attorney General's characterizations of antifa as terrorists led law enforcement agencies at every level to focus attention and resources toward identifying antifa activists at protests, and trying to establish a hierarchical structure within the movement. Those efforts were ultimately fruitless.
"So if you take that lesson and you apply [them] to today… you can imagine that they will be throwing investigative resources at this and that they will be targeting very broadly anybody who might potentially be considered to be anti-fascist," she said.
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