Federal agents loom over a crowd of protesters at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building on September 28, 2025 in Portland, Oregon after President Donald Trump said the facilities were “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” Photo by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images.
Five days after the murder of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, Vice President JD Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House. The Trump administration has never been particularly friendly to dissent, but since the killing of Kirk it has increasingly sought to lay blame for his death on their political opponents.
While broadcasting from the White House, the vice president used the opportunity to rail against the left, promising to “dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.” Vance was joined by Stephen Miller who serves as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff as well as Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor. Miller pledged, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people.” Later, Miller obliquely referenced the First Amendment on X, saying “The path forward is…to take all necessary and rational steps to save civilization” not to “mimic the ACLU of the mid 90s.“
It was in this atmosphere that the Trump White House issued two pivotal policies for the future of free expression in the United States. On the evening of September 22, Trump signed an executive order designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” Antifa is short for “anti-fascist.” It refers to an ideology. Although there may be groups that would classify their beliefs as “anti-fascist,” there is no singular or central “Antifa” organization. Nevertheless, on some parts of the right, the mythical Antifa has started to play the role of boogeyman formerly reserved for the Communist Party. Whereas Communists were argued to be the hidden driving force behind everything from Civil Rights to peace activism, the nonexistent Antifa is now fingered as the secret, sinister mover of domestic protest—and the legally dubious move of declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization has become a major rallying point on the right.
To carry out the renewed war on left-wing protest, Trump has not needed to pass new laws nor create new agencies.
Under U.S. law, there is no statutory framework for designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations. Congress has empowered the Secretary of State to designate Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The executive branch has also used the International Emergency Powers Act to sanction Specially Designated Global Terrorists. While this designation has been applied to U.S. groups and even U.S. citizens, to be designated the U.S. government must allege they acted on behalf of or provided services to foreign terrorists. Because the U.S. considers activity that in any other context would be First Amendment–protected speech to be “coordinated advocacy,” these designations have sweeping ramifications for domestic political speech.
These designations have no domestic counterpart, but the FBI under its current guidelines is empowered to conduct “enterprise” investigations into terrorism or racketeering. While there may be no designation for domestic terrorist organizations, the FBI does investigate domestic groups as “terrorist enterprises.” And as recently as 2019, the FBI was demarcating its domestic terrorism investigations by ideology, such as “anarchist extremism, “black separatist extremism,” “Puerto Rican Independence Extremism,” “militia extremism,” and “white supremacy extremism.” This included a case classification for terrorist enterprise investigations into anarchist extremists. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray previously told Congress that the FBI had opened anarchist extremist investigations into individuals inspired by Antifa beliefs. likely gave the FBI the greenlight to pursue them.
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If there was any question as to whether his Executive Order was merely bluster, Trump clarified the matter three days later when he issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). Bearing Trump’s signature, NSPM-7 was clearly drafted with a deep understanding of the U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy. It seeks to “disrupt” not just those allegedly carrying out left-wing violence, but those who fund it and those who “radicalize” and recruit individuals to partake in it. It declares domestic terrorism to be a top priority and defines domestic terrorism priorities to include “civil unrest” and “doxing.”
The memo lays out a range of responsibilities for government agencies. It tasks the Secretary of Treasury to apply powers traditionally used against money laundering and international terrorism to ferreting out the funders of so-called domestic terrorism. It instructs the IRS to make sure no “tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism,” and refer those that are to the Department of Justice for prosecution. It instructs the Attorney General to come up with a list of “recurrent motives” and indicators of groups that engage in supposed domestic terrorism so that resources can be directed at similar groups to “prevent potential violent activity.”
At the heart of the strategy lies the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). The first JTTF was created in 1980 to bring the FBI and the New York Police Department together in response to politically motivated robberies by radical groups. Since that time, the model has spread across the country. Currently, there are 200 FBI JTTFs around the country. By comparison, the FBI has 55 field offices. While the JTTFs are FBI entities, carrying out FBI investigations, their staff are drawn from other federal and local law enforcement agencies. According to the FBI, as of October 2024 the JTTFs consisted of “4,000 members—including FBI personnel and task force officers (or TFOs) from more than 500 state and local agencies and 50 federal agencies.” Deputizing local police to carry out FBI terrorism investigations dramatically increased the FBI’s manpower, making sprawling investigations such as a nationwide pursuit of a nebulous idea, possible. It also creates a pool of agents and officers ordered to go out and find terrorists, facing pressure to open investigations in line with the FBI’s political priorities.
Whether it be regular FBI agents or Task Force Officers, those carrying out the FBI counterterrorism mission are instructed to be proactive in finding terrorists before they strike. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller retooled the FBI’s focus away from a law enforcement agency that prosecuted terrorists after they acted to an intelligence agency dedicated to preventing and disrupting terrorists before they can strike. To do this, Ashcroft and his successor Michael Mukasey dramatically rewrote the guidelines under which the FBI operated. These guidelines were originally put in place after revelations of the abuses of the J. Edgar Hoover years, when the FBI spied on antiwar and civil rights protesters. Ashcroft and others pushed a false narrative that such restrictions left the FBI helpless to prevent terrorism while regearing the Bureau toward the preventative approach.
The preventative approach to terrorism is rooted in the long history of FBI political spying. For many of the Hoover years, the FBI used a questionable interpretation of Presidential Directives to claim it had the right to investigate subversive activities. In the early 1970s, following Hoover’s death and growing criticism of the FBI, the Bureau concocted a new legal theory: The FBI’s intelligence gathering on political groups was justified by the need to prevent violations of a handful of federal statutes. Barry Goldwater and others then turned the same logic toward terrorism. Through a dissenting opinion on the Church Committee, white papers from right-wing think tanks, and a Reagan-era Senate subcommittee on terrorism, the narrative was crafted that restricting FBI investigations to those with actual suspicion of a crime meant the FBI could not prevent terrorism.
Today, the FBI still operates under Mukasey’s guidelines. These guidelines tell FBI agents not to “wait for leads to come in through the actions of others, but rather must be vigilant in detecting terrorist activities to the full extent permitted by law, with an eye towards early intervention and prevention of acts of terrorism before they occur.” The guidelines dramatically lowered the bar to open a case by creating a new category of investigation called an “assessment.” FBI officers can start an “assessment” without a factual predication, i.e. evidence, to believe the subject may violate federal law or threaten national security, allowing the FBI to engage in incredibly intrusive techniques like tasking an informant to clandestinely spy on someone or rifle through their trash.
On paper, the FBI is not allowed to open an investigation solely on First Amendment-protected speech. But in practice, the loose guidelines and preventative framework open the door to exactly that. For example, an FBI agent or local police officer acting as a Task Force Officer is told to find potential terrorists and disrupt them before they strike. They are warned that the priority is “anarchist extremists.” And they are told that anarchists extremists are those who oppose “capitalism, corporate globalization” or “perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies.” How else does an agent interpret that mandate, other than to locate and surveil those who express those opinions?
Even before the creation of assessments, FBI documents released under FOIA show, agents often merely regurgitated the beliefs that make up supposed extremist groups as the predicate for their investigation. When justifying opening an terrorist enterprise investigation into a nonviolent Palestine solidarity group, for example, FBI agents referenced their “predisposition to anti-capitalist and anti-global philosophy.” The language comes directly from the FBI’s definition of anarchist extremism. And now NSPM-7 has added a whole new list of suspect ideologies as being behind violence, including vague categories like “anti-Americanism” or “extremism on gender.” During Trump’s first term, similar high-level hysteria about Antifa led to the FBI and its JTTFs to question George Floyd protesters about Antifa.
The open invitation to target political speech is made even worse by the fact that the FBI treats “civil unrest” or violations of federal riot statutes as terrorism. In theory, any protest could transform into a riot. In the past, the FBI has distributed intelligence bulletins to local law enforcement alerting them to common tactics used during protest. A Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel opinion found nothing unconstitutional with the FBI preemptively monitoring protests if the stated goal was looking for terrorism. NSPM-7 makes clear it is doubling down on the FBI’s preventative framework, as well as the treatment of civil unrest as terrorism.
NSPM-7 features two other notable changes. For one, it calls for the use of the Foreign Agent Registration Act against “non-governmental organizations and American citizens residing abroad or with close ties to foreign governments, agents, citizens, foundations, or influence networks.” This might appear strange in a memorandum on combatting domestic terrorism. But it closely mirrors calls from Congressional Republicans for similar actions to be taken against Americans based on conspiracy theories about China being behind domestic protests for immigrants’ or Palestinian rights.
It also creates a pipeline of intelligence from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to Trump that passes through the Assistant to the President and the Homeland Security Advisor–Stephen Miller. Miller is responsible for some of the most inflammatory language about crushing the domestic left. He has also been using his role on the Homeland Security Council to consolidate his own power. Miller played a central role in the Trump administration’s politically motivated deportations of pro-Palestinian students, and he has been guiding Trump’s extrajudicial executions of alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers in international waters. And now Miller will be the intermediary between the White House and the FBI and Attorney General as they carry out Trump’s crackdown on the political left.
While this consolidation of power into the Homeland Security Council, and into the hands of Miller, is a troubling reorganization of the national security leviathan, nearly all of what Trump is doing is firmly rooted in existing powers. To carry out the renewed war on left-wing protest, Trump has not needed to pass new laws nor create new agencies. For decades, the FBI and other executive branch agencies have amassed powers to investigate Americans on the premise of combating terrorism. No matter who was in office, the FBI has abused these powers to spy on dissent.
Chip Gibbons is policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, where he edits the Gaza First Amendment Alert. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Imperial Bureau: The FBI, Political Surveillance, and the Rise of the U.S. National Security State.
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