The State Department recently moved to designate four international “Antifa groups” — in Germany, Italy and Greece — as “foreign terrorist organizations.” That shift marks a major escalation in the government’s campaign against left-wing dissent, signaling a new willingness to frame opposition ideologies as threats. It also further sets the stage for domestic policies that could target U.S.-based activists and organizations under broadly defined national security powers.
Two months ago, President Donald Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), a rarely issued but strategic document outlining the administration’s approach to national security. Unlike executive orders, which can vary widely in scope and importance, national security memoranda often articulate broader administration-wide strategies, and are frequently classified. In Trump’s case, this was only his seventh such memo this term (he has since issued one more), and was released to the public.
The memo frames its purpose as combating what it sees as a rise in “left-wing political violence,” but it does so using language so incredibly broad that it encompasses a wide array of beliefs and behaviors.
“This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties,” according to the document. “Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
It directs the federal government to mobilize law enforcement resources, including the post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus and Joint Terrorism Task Forces, against individuals and organizations that fall within these expansive categories. In the months since, the administration has apparently already started kicking law enforcement into gear to crack down on its political enemies.
“They’re saying we’re going after this wider group of people, which is a very frontal assault on First Amendment rights.”
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein has reported on multiple instances of arrests being made through the directives laid out in NSPM-7. For example, Klippenstein reported on one incident involving Elias Cepeda, an English professor arrested on Sept. 26 participating in a protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. DHS issued a press release describing him as having “suspected ties” to antifa and highlighting several of his social-media posts as concerning. Cepeda was carrying a firearm for which he reportedly has a valid concealed-carry permit. He was held about 12 hours in federal custody before being moved to state custody and quickly released.
“In other words, you don’t have to have committed a crime to be investigated or even arrested and detained,” Klippenstein wrote last month. “You just have to have committed wrongspeech, as defined by NSPM’s broad indicators.”
While some have noted that NSPM-7 carries little formal authority — there is no provision in U.S. law for designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations — the memo’s power does not rely on legal force. Its intent is to shape behavior, which is already having tangible effects. By signaling that a broad range of ideological positions and activities could draw federal scrutiny, NSPM-7 is intended to chill speech and activism.
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“It puts in the crosshairs of federal law enforcement not just the criminal activity, but this entire range of activity, including protest activity that has been going on in the country,” Faiza Patel, a national security expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Salon.
In practice, critics say NSPM-7 functions as a form of “pre-crime,” sending a signal to nonprofits, activists and civic organizations that opposition, and even lawful dissent, could invite scrutiny.
The memo’s vague language is intentional. Patel observed that imprecise terms like “anti-Christian” or “anti-capitalist” give the administration flexibility to target a broad array of people. “From a normal lawyerly perspective, these things are really imprecise. But that imprecision gives maximum flexibility so that a range of people can be targeted and, potentially, chilled,” she said. The potential consequences extend beyond law enforcement: nonprofits could face IRS or Treasury scrutiny, reputational damage, and obstacles to fundraising.
Major law firms echoed these concerns, warning clients that the risks extend well beyond individual activists. “The stakes are high: The Presidential Memorandum makes clear that DOJ intends to target tax-exempt organizations and their funders for investigation and potential criminal prosecution, including based on activities that have historically been viewed as protected by the First Amendment,” according to a blog post from the powerful DC law firm Arnold & Porter.
“This is something that could clearly be abused by an administration that has no problem abusing people’s civil liberties.”
“Organizations should seek legal counsel to understand what activities could create criminal or administrative exposure for them and their employees and how to mitigate any such exposure,” the post reads. “For example, organizations would be well-served to conduct both pre- and post-award due diligence on the activities of their grantees, funders, fiscal sponsors and partners.”
The firm also cautions nonprofits to tighten their compliance practices by seeking legal advice on potential risks, vetting partners and funders, and adding oversight where needed.
This caution has started to resonate on Capitol Hill as well. Rep. Mark Pocan, D‑Wis., one of the leading signatories on a letter to the administration raising concerns about NSPM-7, sees parallels with historical patterns of targeting dissent, in the U.S. and elsewhere.
“This is something that could clearly be abused by an administration that has no problem abusing people’s civil liberties,” the Congressman told Salon.
Pocan and the 30 other House Democratic signatories voiced alarm over the memo’s potential to overreach. “Your memo uses ideologically charged language (e.g., “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”) that invites enforcement based on an individual’s personal opinions or political beliefs rather than any objective concern for public safety,” the letter reads. “This approach threatens our constituents’ civil liberties.”
Part of the challenge now, Pocan says, is raising public awareness about the issues at hand. “I think this is going to have to be something we take to the people,” he said. “But right now, I know very few people know about this.”
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This broad approach is not unprecedented in U.S. national security policy. Similar strategies have appeared in the past, such as during the Civil Rights Era when the FBI secretly targeted Black leaders, civil rights groups, labor unions, and other activist organizations with investigations and disruptive tactics that often violated civil liberties.
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, federal agencies built an extensive domestic intelligence infrastructure, developed open-source surveillance capabilities, and benefited from new technologies that make monitoring far more granular than ever before. Loosened rules allow the FBI to open investigations without evidence of criminal activity, enabling surveillance based on ideology or identity rather than actions. Much of that infrastructure has still not been reigned in more than two decades later, and has instead been weaponized to target domestic actors and made Trump’s more explicit crackdown on speech possible.
Patel points out that after 9/11, officials at least maintained the pretense of pursuing “terrorists or potential terrorists,” using “fairly specific terms” — even though, in reality, agencies used a much broader approach and carried out extensive spying, targeting and abuses against Muslim Americans and protesters. What’s different now, she says, is the abandonment of even that narrow framing.
“They’re not saying we’re going after this narrow group of people and then widening that,” she says. “They’re saying we’re going after this wider group of people, which is a very frontal assault on First Amendment rights.”
The concern is echoed by Rep. Ro Khanna, D‑Calif., who described NSPM-7 in a social media post as “a greater infringement on freedoms than the Patriot Act.”
Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official who served during Trump’s first term, warned on CNN that the memo effectively treats peaceful dissent as terrorism: “This would be like if George W. Bush had said CodePink was al‑Qaida, or people protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were associated with the Islamic State.”
