The FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, enacted on Dec. 18, takes a significant step towards the full removal of sanctions on Syria by repealing the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 (Caesar Act), which provided for mandatory sanctions on those providing certain support to Syria and its government. This marks the latest in a remarkable series of developments following Assad’s sudden downfall and exile to Russia in December 2024. The transitional Syrian government formed after Assad’s ouster has worked to project stability and attract international development and investment funding, reversing years of isolation and the Assad regime’s reliance on Russia for survival. As Syria emerges from sanctions seclusion, numerous challenges remain to outside investment and development in Syria, which the World Bank estimates will cost $216 billion to reconstruct.

Led by transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new Syrian government has pursued a path towards building international legitimacy and demonstrated its willingness to reconsider Syria’s relationships with regional and global powers to fund its development. This shift was evident on November 10, 2025, when al-Sharaa joined President Trump in the White House for the first-ever meeting hosting a Syrian head of State. This followed an initial meeting with al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia on May 14, the day after Trump announced he would order the lifting of sanctions on Syria.

The repeal of the Caesar Act presents a key moment to review the U.S. government’s progress towards the goal reflected in Trump’s May 13 announcement and June 30 Executive Order of removing sanctions and other restrictions on Syria to support the new government and efforts to promote a stable, unified, and peaceful Syria. Key issues such as accountability, institutional reforms, and a successful democratic transition are closely interlinked with Syria’s ability to engage in effective reconstruction and economic recovery, and sanctions – or their removal – have the potential to significantly impact Syria’s ability to garner the support necessary for those processes. In this article, we take stock of where things stand along the path of Syria sanctions removal and what restrictions remain to inhibit burgeoning investment and development in post-Assad Syria.

Assad’s Ouster Leads to Reexamination and Removal of Sanctions

U.S. sanctions on Syria started with export controls and foreign assistance restrictions derived from Syria’s designation in 1979 as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) and grew over decades to include an amalgamation of export controls, economic sanctions and terror list designations, and assistance restrictions. They variously aimed to pressure Assad’s regime to either reverse course and end its interference in Lebanon, terrorist support, and human rights abuses or hasten the transition to a new Syrian government. Over 13 years after President Obama sanctioned the government of Syria and called for Bashar al-Assad to step aside, Syrian rebel groups including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ended the Assad family’s 50+-year reign in a matter of roughly 11 days. Following this quick change in government, U.S. policymakers were left with the question of whether and how to dismantle the entrenched Syria sanctions apparatus, which broadly impacted the country and its government, without regard to who held power.

Since becoming transitional president shortly after leading the overthrow of Assad, al-Sharaa has sought to quickly move beyond his militant past and attempted to establish himself as a moderate leader committed to preventing corruption and holding accountable human rights abusers, protecting minorities, and ensuring a stable and secure Syrian government  Significant questions and challenges surrounding al-Sharaa’s goals for his new government remain unresolved as Syria charts its course for the future. Outbreaks of government-affiliated sectarian violence raise concerns about al-Sharaa’s ability to ensure the safety of all Syrians. On the economic front, he has pressed the United States to permanently end its sanctions on Syria, including removing Syria as a State Sponsor of Terror and specific appeals for a permanent repeal of the Caesar Act, to further settle the nerves of potential investors and provide more clarity and stability for Syria.

While barriers to trade remain, repealing the Caesar Act is the latest in a number of significant sanctions relief actions that suggest al-Sharaa’s strategy is working. Since announcing he would roll back Syria sanctions on May 13, Trump has continued to voice his support for Syria and his desire to “give them a chance at greatness.” As detailed below, the U.S. government has already removed many sanctions measures to implement the May 13 announcement, while retaining sanctions on Assad and his supporters and other bad actors related to Syria.

Post-May 13 Syria Sanctions Relief

Step 1: Temporary Sanctions Relief

On May 23, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the State Department took the first significant steps towards sanctions relief by issuing OFAC General License 25 and a 180-day waiver of sanctions under the Caesar Act. These actions broadly authorized transactions with the new transitional Syrian government, al-Sharaa (under his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad Al-Jawlani) and transitional Interior Minister Khattab, and certain sanctioned entities. The Caesar Act waiver also temporarily removed the risk of sanctions designation under the Act. Absent a waiver or suspension, the Caesar Act provided for mandatory secondary sanctions on non-U.S. persons that engage in various significant transactions involving Syria, such as support to the Syrian government, Syria’s petroleum industry, or engineering services to the Syrian government.

Before its repeal, two distinct methods allowed the U.S. Secretary of State to temporarily halt application of the Caesar Act: a waiver under Section 7432 of the Act, or suspension via Section 7431 of the Act. Waiving sanctions under the Act required the Secretary to certify that such a waiver was in the national security interests of the United States. Suspension, however, required a more fact-based certification that seven enumerated conditions had been met, including with respect to the government of Syria’s actions related to destruction of chemical and biological weapons, the return of displaced Syrians, and accountability for the Assad regime. The statute limited both waiver and suspension to 180 days, renewable.

Step 2: Executive Order Roadmap

On June 30, President Trump issued Executive Order 14312, “Providing for the Revocation of Syria Sanctions.” This order laid out the following steps towards sanctions relief and reframing:

• Permanently Removing Syria Sanctions: The Executive Order terminated the national emergency with respect to Syria and revoked previous Executive Orders establishing the Syrian sanctions regime (EOs 13338, 13399, 13460, 13572, 13573 and 13582). This led to the removal of 518 individuals and entities associated with Syria from OFAC’s List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN List).

• Expanding Assad-related Sanctions: It further amended EO 13894 to expand sanctions authorities to “ensure meaningful accountability” for former Assad officials and their supporters, providing sanctions authorities to designate, e.g., those who threaten Syrian peace, security and stability, commit human rights abuses, trade illicitly in captagon, or are responsible for missing persons in Syria during the Assad era. OFAC designated 139 persons under these expanded authorities, as well as other relevant authorities, in conjunction with the Executive Order.

• Providing for Export Control and Assistance Relief: The Executive Order also waived statutory provisions under section 5(b) of the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 (Syria Accountability Act) and section 307(d)(1)(B) of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) that had underpinned prohibitions on virtually all exports to Syria, restricted U.S. foreign assistance, denied U.S. government credit, credit guarantees, or other financial assistance, and restricted U.S. banks from making loans or providing credit to the Syrian government.

• Secondary Sanctions Relief: The Executive Order also directed the U.S. Secretary of State to evaluate whether the criteria in the Caesar Act had been met to justify suspension of the Act’s mandatory sanctions.

• Counterterrorism Review and UN Engagement: Last, the Executive Order required the U.S. Secretary of State to take “all appropriate action” related to the terror designations applied to the new Syrian government and its members – including HTS’s designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Syria’s inclusion on the SST list, and al-Sharaa’s designation as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT). It also directed the U.S. Secretary of State to support a stable Syria at the U.N. and “explore” U.N. sanctions relief to Syria.

Evaluating the EO’s Effect – What Remains to Deliver on President Trump’s Promise?

Following issuance of the roadmap for sanctions removal in EO 14312, the U.S. Departments of State, the Treasury, and Commerce have continued along the path to remove sanctions on Syria. Additional steps, however, remain before the U.S. sanctions and export control apparatus applicable to Syria is fully dismantled. Below, we review actions taken in furtherance of the measures described in EO 14312 and remaining steps along the path to fully removing sanctions and restrictive export controls from Syria.

Sanctions Regulatory Changes: On August 26, OFAC removed the Syrian Sanctions Regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations. On September 25, OFAC also renamed the “Syria Related Sanctions Regulations” as the “Promoting Accountability for Assad and Regional Stabilization Sanctions Regulations” to reflect the expanded scope of the underlying national emergency. The removal of all Syria-focused sanctions regulations has the effect of underscoring that U.S. sanctions do not target Syria but rather target destabilizing actors in the region.

Initial Export Control Relief: On September 2, empowered by EO 14312’s waivers of the Syria Accountability Act and CBW Act, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published a final rule to allow greater trade with Syria, while maintaining restrictions relevant to malign or destabilizing actors.

This rule added a Syria-specific license exception, License Exception Syria Peace and Prosperity (SPP), which authorizes the export of “EAR99” items to Syria. EAR99 refers to low-technology consumer goods items that are not identified on the Commerce Control List and are therefore subject to the lowest level of U.S. export controls. It also expanded several other license exceptions to allow for specified exports to Syria without requiring an export license. These expanded exceptions apply to certain consumer communications devices; aircraft, vessels, and spacecraft; temporary imports, exports, and transfers; servicing and replacing parts and equipment; exports related to the U.S. government and its allies; technology and software; and baggage. Additionally, BIS now applies a presumption of approval for license applications to Syria that support economic and business development. These license exceptions represent an incremental step towards allowing exports for daily living, international travel, and global business operations to Syria, removing some of the export control impediments that stymied the early response to the Syrian earthquake in 2023.

Of note, however, Syria remains subject to significant export controls resulting from its designation in Country Group E of the Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”), which applies to terrorist list countries. This country group designation means that items subject to even the lowest levels of control require a license or license exception for export to Syria, and U.S. export control jurisdiction extends to items that contain as little as 10% U.S. content.

Counterterrorism Relief: Effective July 8, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delisted HTS as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), citing the group’s announced dissolution “and the Syrian government’s commitment to combat terrorism in all its forms.” This meant the removal of criminal risk under the Material Support Statute associated with knowingly providing material support or resources to the group, although the group remains designated as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under EO 13224, as amended. Then, on November 6, with the support of the United States, the U.N. Security Council voted to remove U.N. terror sanctions from Al-Sharaa and transitional Interior Minister Khattab. One day later, on November 7, the United States itself removed the designations of al-Sharaa and Khattab as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, meaning they are no longer individually subject to U.S. sanctions.

Caesar Act Suspension: In conjunction with al-Sharaa’s November 10 White House visit, Rubio also announced the suspension of the Caesar Act for the maximum 180-day period. While Rubio had previously issued a Caesar Act waiver, suspension required his certification to Congress that Syria is meeting the conditions set out in the Act. This suspension had the effect of replacing the soon expiring waiver to remove the risk of sanctions designation for those engaging with the transitional government of Syria to support investment or development in Syria for the next 180 days.

Caesar Act’s Repeal: Prior to its repeal, the Caesar Act only allowed for suspension or waivers in 180-day increments. As a result, even when the Secretary of State acted to waive and later suspend the Act, its specter continued to stymie investment in Syria as investors remained reticent to invest in the face of sanctions uncertainty. On Dec. 18 Congress removed this impediment to long-term investment in Syria by fully repealing the Caesar Act in section 8369 of the FY 2026 NDAA, entitled “Repeal of Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019.” This section also requires the President to report to Congress every 180 days for four years and certify to that Syria’s government is: (1) taking action against ISIS and other terrorist groups; (2) taking steps to remove foreign fighters from Syrian government; (3) upholding religious and ethnic minority rights; (4) not taking unilateral, unprovoked military action against its neighbors, including Israel; (5) taking steps to implement the March 10, 2025, agreement between the Government of Syria and the Syrian Democratic Forces; (6) taking steps to effectively combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and the financing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; (7) actively prosecuting those that have committed serious abuses of internationally recognized human rights since December 8, 2024; and (8) taking verifiable steps to combat the illicit production and proliferation of narcotics, including Captagon. If these conditions are not met for two consecutive reporting periods, section 8369 provides that the President “may consider whether to impose targeted sanctions on individuals under existing authorities,” but critically for attracting investment into Syria, the NDAA includes no mandatory sanctions or snapback provision that would reimpose Caesar Act sanctions.

Looking Ahead: Post-Caesar Repeal

The repeal of the Caesar Act sets the stage for next steps along the path of sanctions removal. The key players in this next phase are the Secretary of State and BIS.

Syria State Sponsor of Terrorism Removal:  Syria was designated on the initial State Sponsor of Terrorism list in 1979, during the reign of Hafez al-Assad, and remains listed today despite the U.S. government’s steps to dismantle the Syria sanctions regime and the direction in EO 14312 to review Syria’s SST designation. As such, significant export controls still apply to Syria due to SST-related restrictions imposed under section 1754(c) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (relating primarily to export control requirements), section 40 of the Arms Export Control Act (related to munitions items), and section 620A of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (related to assistance). Until it is delisted, Syria is denied immunity by virtue of the SST-designation under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) if sued in U.S. court. Under the terrorism exception to the FSIA, if Syria is eventually delisted, any U.S. victims of Syrian terrorism will have six months from the time of delisting to make claims for damages incurred during the period Syria was designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

Export Controls: Delisting Syria as a State Sponsor of Terrorism would also remove the legal underpinnings requiring stringent export controls on Syria. If the Department of State delists Syria, the ball will be in BIS’s court to update the EAR to account for Syria’s new status. Looking to the regulatory change BIS made following Sudan’s SST removal as an example, this will include the removal of Syria from EAR Country Group E:1 and a change to the de minimis threshold for U.S. export control jurisdiction from 10% to 25%, meaning that fewer items destined to Syria will be subject to U.S. export control. It will also make Syria eligible for additional license exceptions under the EAR and remove it from the most stringent, anti-terrorism-related controls. Once implemented, these changes should make it easier for developers and investors in Syria to obtain parts and machinery necessary for reconstruction and development, and they will remove barriers to consumer imports and business operations that support the country’s economic recovery. None of these changes will occur, however, until (1) Syria is removed as an SST; and(2) BIS publishes a rule change to amend the EAR.

Syria has a long road ahead towards reconstruction, development, justice, and accountability. As the country rebuilds and emerges from years of isolation, it requires international funding, technical assistance, and support. Removing Assad era barriers to engagement with the international community is a critical step along this path.

The post Caesar Act Repeal and the Syria Sanctions Removal Report Card appeared first on Just Security.

As a result of his alleged multi-year crime spree, Martin is charged with, among others, five counts of producing CSAM, 11 counts of distributing CSAM, and three counts of coercing minors to engage in sexual activity. Indeed, the debased acts identified by authorities against his victims are beyond horrific and likely force Martin to stare down the possibility of a life sentence for the CSAM charges alone.

Even so, one charge stands out most among the litany of federal offenses: a single count of 18 U.S.C. § 2339A — that is, conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. It is the first time that a member of 764 or its many splinter groups has been charged with violating the statute. More specifically, the government alleges that Martin knowingly provided support for the act of killing, kidnapping, maiming, or injuring persons in a foreign country. This underlying criminal act violates one of several laws within 18 U.S.C. § 2339A. Choosing to charge Martin with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists is a significant development in not only how the DOJ prosecutes 764 but it also signals a shift in how the U.S. government classifies NVE groups – namely, as terrorist organizations.

Background on 764 and The “Com”

Born in the dark, small-town Texas bedroom of then-15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead in early 2021, 764 has emerged as one of the FBI’s top domestic terrorism threats. Named after the first three digits of Cadenhead’s hometown ZIP code, 764 primarily operates as an online child exploitation enterprise. The FBI categorizes it within the newly minted extremist typology known as NVEs.

First appearing in court documents in early 2025, NVEs are individuals who commit crimes, either in the United States or overseas, driven by political, social, or religious motives rooted in a deep hostility toward society as a whole, and who seek to destabilize or destroy it through widespread, indiscriminate chaos, violence, and disorder. NVEs often traffic in depravity as ideology, weaponizing acts of sexual extortion, animal abuse, and self-harm to express their rejection of moral and social norms.

However, 764 is not the first digital community to engage in such behaviors. Its predecessor, a network known as CVLT, emerged between 2017 and 2019 as an online group primarily on the Kik messaging app, but later spread to Instagram, Discord, and Telegram, where it engaged in grooming minors and producing CSAM. As Canadian researcher Marc-André Argentino has noted, CVLT “was one of the earliest known groups to systematically combine child sexual exploitation, coercion, and accelerationist ideology within a digital ecosystem.” Yet both CVLT and 764 are only parts of a much larger and amorphous phenomenon referred to as “The Com,” or “The Community.” Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs has described The Com as a “kind of distributed cybercriminal social network that facilitates instant collaboration” and consists of multiple, overlapping pillars that feature cybercrime, sextortion, and offline criminal activity. Although The Com has existed for nearly a decade, law enforcement has only recently begun to grapple with the extent of its real-world harms.

In February 2021, Kaleb Christopher Merritt, one of the leaders within CVLT, was arrested in Virginia for the abduction and sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl he met and groomed on Instagram. One of Merritt’s compatriots and fellow CVLT leaders, Rohan Sandeep Rane, was arrested in France in 2022 for similar crimes, effectively splintering its leadership. By late 2023, these networks were receiving increased scrutiny from law enforcement, resulting in more arrests.

As prosecutions began to mount, CVLT’s remaining members who had not yet been swept up in legal prosecutions migrated to 764, which grew in parallel, thanks to the long hours Cadenhead spent unsupervised on the internet after dropping out of high school. It was around this time that, according to court documents, Martin began interacting with 764 and its members, going so far as to crown himself the “king of extortions,” and even authoring a guide instructing readers on how to identify young girls for grooming.

Martin’s Alleged Crimes and the Legal Mechanisms of Material Support

Domestic Terrorism

18 U.S.C. § 2331(5) defines domestic terrorism as acts that occur “primarily” within the United States that are “dangerous to human life,” violate other federal or state criminal laws, and are intended “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.”

Martin’s alleged conduct, and that of many of NVEs, fits squarely within this definition. Their intent, as stated in Martin’s indictment, is to engage in criminal conduct, in furtherance of a political, social, or religious goal derived primarily from a hatred of society, with a desire to bring about society’s collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability. NVEs aim to achieve their goals by grooming minors and other vulnerable individuals to become desensitized to violence by coercing them into committing acts of violence, either against themselves or others. Those acts include, for instance, forcing children to engage in sexual acts that are filmed and circulated online by NVE group members, and threatening to kidnap and kill the children and their family members. Unlike online sexual predators or child pornographers whose endgame is viewing the sexual acts of minors for their own sick pleasure, NVEs use those tactics as a means to their ends. They weaponize child pornography and violence to achieve their goal of intimidating and coercing the civilian population to bring chaos and tear down the government — the very definition of domestic terrorism.

Although there is a statutory definition of domestic terrorism in the federal criminal code, there is no criminal statute specifically making domestic terrorism a federal offense. Instead, the DOJ has turned to a statute traditionally used for violations of international terrorism and has applied it to Martin’s case.

Providing Support to an Act of Terrorism

18 U.S.C. § 2339A prohibits the provision of support to specific acts/crimes of terrorism, which are listed in 18 U.S.C. § 2332b(g)(5)(B). The statute focuses on a terrorist act rather than on the provision of material support to a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). 18 U.S.C. § 2339A has traditionally been charged in cases of international terrorism that occur overseas. By charging Martin with conspiracy to provide support to terrorists, thereby expanding the use of 2339A, the DOJ is correctly describing the actions of NVEs as terrorism.

For the government to convict Martin of this offense, the prosecutors must prove that Martin conspired to provide material support or resources and that he knew (or intended) the material support or resources were be used to carry out a violation of an underlying crime of terrorism.

Let’s break the charge down. First, he was charged with conspiracy. In essence, a conspiracy is two or more people agreeing to violate the law. The agreement does not have to be in writing. It does not even have to be spoken, as long as the criminal goal is understood among the conspirators. The proof of the agreement, unspoken or otherwise, is often born out of conspirators acting in concert.

Nor does the government have to prove that any conspirator took any steps to advance the conspiracy. In the general conspiracy charge, 18 U.S.C. § 371, the government must prove that one of the conspirators took a step — an overt act — to further the conspiracy. For example, if two people agree to rob a bank, and one buys a ski mask to wear during the robbery, then they have violated the general conspiracy statute. Once that overt act occurs, the crime has been completed, and the bank robbery’s success is irrelevant. Because § 2339A contains a conspiracy provision within itself, an overt act is not required. Once the agreement is reached, the crime is committed. Although unnecessary, the government’s case is stronger if it can show that acts were taken to further the agreement. In the Martin indictment, the DOJ alleges that nine conspiratorial acts were taken in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Second, as stipulated in 18 U.S.C. § 2339A(b), material support or resources can be anything except religious or medical material, to include oneself (personnel), services, money, or other tangible items. Martin has been charged with providing himself (personnel), services, and expert advice. Some of Martin’s charged conduct falls within all three categories. For example, he allegedly helped to author and circulate a manual, called the “Grooming/Manipulation Egirls Guide,” which was allegedly used to train other 764 members on how to target vulnerable individuals. The creation and circulation of the guide could be considered both a service to 764 members and expert advice.

Third, the government must prove that the material support was intended to further a violation of a separate crime of terrorism. The Martin indictment identifies the underlying terrorism offense to be a conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim, or injure persons in a foreign country, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 956(a). Specifically, the indictment alleges that Martin and others conspired to coerce Victim 7, who was located overseas, to kill and maim themself. Although the government must prove two separate conspiracies — in other words, two separate agreements — prosecutors will likely rely on the same evidence to prove both the § 956(a) conspiracy and the § 2339A conspiracy.

Conclusion

The addition of a § 2339A charge is not about stacking penalties. Rather, Martin faces multiple counts for his numerous other crimes that carry decades — or even life — in prison. Nor is the inclusion of the charge a procedural maneuver to bring new evidence in front of a potential jury; the facts needed to prove the terrorism charge substantially overlap with those supporting the child-exploitation charges. On paper, the 15-year maximum for material support barely changes Marin’s potential sentence.

Still, the charge provides a valuable clarification. By deploying a statute traditionally reserved for international terrorism, or more recently, other types of domestic terrorists, the DOJ has signaled that NVE networks like 764 are terrorist enterprises. They are engaged in organized campaigns of violence and coercion designed to terrorize, destabilize, and degrade society to the point of total collapse. By charging Martin with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, the shift represents a long-overdue recognition that such conduct is not just depraved — it is terrorism.

The post How the DOJ is Prosecuting Nihilistic Violent Extremism as Domestic Terrorism appeared first on Just Security.

In the early days after the first lethal strike, Vice President J.D. Vance gleefully said he “didn’t give a shit” whether the strike was illegal. And after government officials have (totally implausibly) suggested that the strikes are part of an armed conflict against the cartels, the President shrugged his shoulders at a reporter’s question about seeking a “declaration of war” from Congress, responding that “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”

At this point, we’d be fools if we did not get the message. Since the administration apparently received legal approval for the boat strikes from the Office of Legal Counsel (though it remains unclear whether any legal memo came after-the-fact), it is somewhat tempting to say, in the terms we’re most comfortable addressing these kinds of matters, that Trump is “claiming the right” to kill anyone he wants to call a terrorist. But as Charlie Savage recently pointed out in an important piece in the Times, Trump is not claiming any right at all—he is simply asserting that no one can stop him. In Savage’s paraphrase of former OLC chief Jack Goldsmith, with the lethal boat-strike campaign, Trump has “demonstrated an indifference to law that threaten[s] to hollow it out.”

But Goldsmith is only half right, because the hollowness of the law in this area is nothing new. The reality—which many people have had trouble coming to terms with over the past few months—is that no matter how seriously some lawyers in past administrations took their obligation to honestly interpret and follow the law, the executive’s unwavering insistence on secrecy combined with its vehement structural opposition to judicial review of national security decisions means that Trump’s latest campaign is not an aberration, but an extension of what came before. And this is what advocates have now been shouting for decades: impunity works for the bad guys, too.

Defending secret policies with appeals to secret law

To be sure, there is something very obviously different in the current administration’s approach. Most prominently, Trump administration officials hardly deign to even pretend that the law is a consideration, let alone an actual constraint. Even if you believe (as I do) that too many government lawyers over the past quarter century arrived at their conclusions about executive authority cynically, those lawyers at least felt compelled to speak the language of the law. Convincing the public that they were making sound legal judgments—when, thanks to journalists, things like the government’s use of torture or targeted killing became public—was often a central feature of consolidating support for, or more often beating back opposition against, government “national security” policies. But that does not mean that they all believed they had to speak that language publicly, and if they’d had their druthers, none of their work would have ever seen the light of day.

Take, for example, the “public relations campaign” (as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit put it) regarding the legality of the September 2011 U.S. drone strike that intentionally killed U.S. citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi. The same strike killed another U.S. citizen, Samir Khan, apparently incidentally. Two weeks later, another U.S. strike killed al-Aulaqi’s teenage U.S. citizen son, Abdulrahman—a horror that no government official has ever gone on the record to explain, apart from President Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, who (not kidding) blamed Anwar al-Aulaqi for bad parenting (“I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children.”).

It so happens that Savage was part of the reporting trio who, in March 2013 (eighteen months after al-Aulaqi’s killing) laid out, with reams of anonymously sourced details spanning more than 3500 words, the tick-tock and anguish of legal decision making that led up to the OLC’s authorization for the strike, as well as information about the government’s until-then secret allegations about why Aulaqi was lawfully targetable. This was, in David Pozen’s memorable construct, a “pleak”: an intentional and semi-authorized leak of classified information that served multiple purposes, primarily garnering public support for the administration’s actions through the attempted delivery of a one-sided narrative. By labeling the story as such, I do not mean to diminish the reporters or their reporting; these are very good reporters who do not simply reprint the government’s lines, and their article was a critically important contribution to the measly public facts surrounding the Aulaqi strike. Nevertheless, the government’s control over classified information, and its ability to manipulate secrecy in ways like this—here, to pre-empt or deflate pressure to have a court of law decide the legality of intentionally killing a U.S. citizen without due process—is a fundamental piece of the puzzle.

The Aulaqi article (the key section of which begins with the oddly jaunty announcement that “David Barron and Martin Lederman had a problem”) described the genesis and contents of OLC’s Aulaqi memo in striking detail, providing a window into the pair’s research and process. And the message that the Obama administration seemed to want to come out of the access it apparently granted for the story is that this was a hard question, and one its top lawyers took incredibly seriously. The piece also tried to assure readers that the OLC memo’s theory was limited, based not in expansive visions of Article II that Barron and Lederman had rejected as law professors, but in interpretations of statutes that could not easily be extended to people much unlike Aulaqi himself. Most importantly, the article suggested (without revealing the unprecedented legal arguments themselves) that the public should feel confident in the memo’s result.

The Aulaqi article was of a piece with much of the Obama administration’s approach to consolidating support for its national security policies, which notably enmeshed many of the practices that Obama had, during the 2008 campaign, appeared to promise to end.

During his candidacy, ending the Iraq War and closing Guantánamo were Obama’s hallmark stump-speech material, giving off the vibe that he would bring the nation’s post-9/11 Schmittian emergency to a close. Obama actually did try to close Guantánamo with a day-one executive order, and on the same day, declared, “For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city,” but “that era is now over.” That promise was, for many reasons, largely abandoned. All told, Obama vastly expanded the use of drones against al-Qaeda-related groups in countries like Yemen and Somalia where the United States was, in my and many experts’ views (pp. 39-40), simply not at war; approved bombings in Libya (again against AQ-linked/ISIS groups); and Syria (against an AQ-linked group and ISIL); continued to indefinitely detain scores of men at Guantánamo (while working, against fierce congressional opposition, to release or repatriate 197 others); opted to try detainees at Guantánamo by military commission instead of in criminal courtrooms (going so far as to reverse his own Attorney General’s decision to choose the latter); continued to press state secrets defenses in damages cases for Bush-era abuses; personally blocked release of images of torture and abuse; undermined the applicability of the War Powers Resolution by claiming an absurdly narrow definition of “hostilities” (notably, the Trump administration is now “doing a Libya” with respect to the boat strikes and the WPR); and aggressively pursued leakers of classified information notwithstanding the public interest value of particular disclosures.

It is true that the Obama administration cared far more than the previous one about providing the public with the broad outlines of the secret legal arguments justifying these policies, including most notably a series of speeches by administration officials like John Brennan and lawyers like Harold Koh and Jeh Johnson. But despite offering the public some scraps, the government vigorously defended (through a Swiss cheese of redaction) the total secrecy of its internal legal memoranda in court.

And because of the bipartisan insistence that national security policies and their justifications must remain secret, Obama sold his policies with personality instead. His administration was different than Bush’s because they were different, even “priest-like” in their self-professed devotion to defending the nation and attacking its enemies within the bounds of law and morality. (In a revealing story reported by Daniel Klaidman, CIA and military drone operators “talked about printing up T-shirts that said: ‘Drones: If they’re good enough for Harold Koh, they’re good enough for me.’”)

A bipartisan commitment to aggressive (and frequently wrong) interpretations of executive power

Whatever differences in public tone might have existed, the Obama administration built his national security policies upon the very same rickety legal architecture—and, even more, an attitude that embraced and encouraged broad assertions of executive authority—that many of Obama’s admirers on the left had reasonably assumed he stood against. Obama’s OLC rescinded some of the most notorious legal memos of the Bush era, including those concerning torture. But it left in place others that, as Goldsmith put it, “reach[ed] very broad conclusions about presidential power under Article II to use force to protect national interests, especially the defense of the nation.” Not only that, but the Obama administration advanced the executive into even more adventurous (and unlawful and unconstitutional) uses of executive power abroad—most notoriously, the 2011 bombing of Libya. The Obama administration also blessed the wild theory, which experts across the spectrum considered to be wholly implausible, that ISIS—a group that did not exist on 9/11 and was engaged in a fierce ideological battle with al-Qaeda—was a “successor force” of al-Qaeda, and therefore was covered by the 2001 AUMF. (It is not entirely clear which of Obama’s lawyers from which departments, including OLC, endorsed this theory, which was never tested in court. Notably, during Trump’s first term, the government detained a U.S. citizen alleged to be a member of ISIS under the same theory, but released him when the D.C. Circuit ruled that it had to prove its theory to a federal judge.)

While it may be true that Obama’s lawyers more frequently put forward their interpretations of congressional statutes, as opposed to pure Article II powers, that hardly affects the bottom line. For example, as we later learned, Barron and Lederman’s Aulaqi memo took a radically broad view of the meaning of the term “imminent threat.” Critically, the administration embraced “a more flexible understanding of imminence”—often referred to as “elongated imminence”—permitting, in the memo’s awkward words, the use of lethal force against a “continued and imminent threat.” That maneuver was the fulcrum of the government’s conclusion that it could, consistent with the Constitution, kill a man who no one seemed to argue was about to attack the United States, but was instead “continu[ing] to plot attacks” from afar. (Beyond the details published by the Times and some other reporting over the years, the actual factual basis for the memo’s conclusions has never been disclosed.) As Rebecca Ingber recently explained, even with those and other questionable moves to get past “a lot of barriers” to “suggest that there was a legal justification” for killing Aulaqi, “it was still a very tough question that many people think was wrongly decided.”

I’m sure that many will see a fairly wide gulf between, on the one hand, reliance on a groundbreakingly flexible version of “imminence” to use lethal force, even against a U.S. citizen, as part of what the government had concluded was a statutorily authorized armed conflict in order to prevent future armed attacks against the United States, and, on the other, whatever is happening in the Caribbean today. But whether President Obama’s lawyers like it or not, echoes of the Aulaqi memo can be clearly heard in the Trump administration’s deeply unserious justifications regarding imminence and the boat strikes, with Secretary Marco Rubio proclaiming, “We’re not going to sit back anymore and watch these people sail up and down the Caribbean like a cruise ship,” and reports indicating the government is relying, in its armed conflict determination, on its fantastical notion that profits from the drug trade might eventually cause violence in the United States. And, if we ever get to see the OLC memo that apparently authorized the ongoing boat strikes, it would not be at all surprising to see the Aulaqi memo cited in it when we do.

As Goldsmith himself recently explained, “This is how presidential power expands. They build on precedents, they point to the precedents, they pick up on language in the precedents, and they extend it to a new factual situation.” Even though he agrees the strikes are unlawful, Goldsmith explained that “the OLC opinions on Article II power are so open-ended and permissive that it’s just not a crazy interpretation of the OLC opinions to say that the President has this authority under Article II.” That this can even be said of such a blatantly unlawful killing campaign is deeply damning—not only of the current administration’s positions, but the past ones as well.

What did you “sign up for”?

What is missing from most of the criticism of these strikes so far is that the courts have not reviewed significant steps in this “expansion” (treating ISIS as a successor group covered by the AUMF, targeting Al-Shabaab in Somalia, etc.)—because the government has convinced them that they cannot. Internally reasoned executive-branch authorizations, ordinarily located in OLC, for ever-expanding national-security powers have been essentially unreviewable in court based on all kinds of executive-driven doctrines like standing, state secrets, political questions, and the shriveling availability of remedies for violations of the Constitution by federal officials. Through these doctrines, which have bloated beyond recognition in the 24 years since 9/11, the executive has maintained that litigation over matters involving classified information would jeopardize the security of the nation, including putting classified information in the hands of life-tenured judges, who aren’t used to handling such material and might inadvertently leak it. The government has also consistently argued that judicial review in cases seeking accountability for abuses of rights committed in the name of national security would intolerably intrude on the political branches’ constitutional powers.

And the executive has even argued that judicial review would chill national security officials from doing their best to protect the country, choosing to put American lives at risk by cowering in fear from potential damages lawsuits for unconstitutional behavior. As my ACLU colleague Ben Wizner once said, that position “takes a dim view of public officials,” as it is hard to “imagine a Secretary of State, or any other Cabinet official, being lackadaisical about national security to save a little money that might go to a victim of government abuse.” In Mitchell v. Forsyth, the Supreme Court said much the same thing in rejecting the government’s bid for absolute immunity from suit in national security matters, remarking that “the mere threat of litigation” was “unlikely” to “significantly affect the fearless and independent performance” by executive officials of their “national security tasks.”

It is of course not the job of OLC lawyers to put forward these types of litigation positions shielding the merits from any judge’s purview. Their job is different, aimed at setting the bounds (and open lanes) of executive action in the first instance. But to disregard or fail to appreciate what their colleagues were arguing in lawsuits challenging the very things (like torture, extraordinary rendition, surveillance, and targeted killing) that OLC had approved, as a tandem part of the system of executive impunity, is, as we have learned all too well over the past few months, a grave mistake.

The Aulaqi episode is particularly illustrative. Three months after the Times piece, the government continued to argue in court that it had no obligation to release the Aulaqi memo to the public, because “disclosure of such legal analysis could reasonably be expected to cause serious and exceptionally grave damage to national security.” (It ultimately lost that argument because it had been cornered into acknowledging as authentic a leaked, unclassified summary of the memo’s conclusions.) And less than three months before the Times report, the government had argued—in defending, on justiciability grounds, against a lawsuit seeking accountability for Aulaqi’s killing—that their positions did not “suggest that the Executive has unchecked power to conduct purported missile strikes abroad, particularly against citizens,” partly because of congressional oversight, but also because “checks and balances exist within the Executive Branch itself.” But whatever those kinds of checks were ever worth, they were always a matter of executive grace, bound to be ignored by an ungracious executive.

All told, the executive branch’s clear and unrelenting position has been that the lawyers who work for the President will always have the final word—and with the courts depressingly playing along, the executive has in practice amassed for itself the kind of absolute immunity from judicial inquiry in national security matters that the Supreme Court in Mitchell flatly rejected. Trump has taken that to the next level and then some, issuing an executive order commanding that he alone “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch,” rendering any OLC opinions purely advisory. But that is a codification of reality, not a warping of it.

And that is why, when people like Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes look at the recent spate of lawless and lethal strikes in the Caribbean and say things like they “never signed up for this kind of targeted killing,” they are deluding themselves.

The problem is, and always has been, that playing with executive power is a dangerous game, and its consequences are hard and perhaps impossible to contain. If critics of the Trump boat strikes truly want to usher in a new era of respect for the rule of law, they must acknowledge that, in the shadow of the mounting democratic menace that Trump’s entire second administration represents, the legal process that yielded these strikes should not be seen as an aberration from the last quarter century of always-secret and often-unreviewable executive-branch legal reasoning, but the apotheosis of it.

The post From Secret Law (2001-2024) to None at All (2025-present) appeared first on Just Security.

The Trump administration has been hyping the threat posed by Antifa for months. “Antifa is an existential threat to our nation,” Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has argued that the “network of Antifa is just as sophisticated as” ISIS and Hezbollah, two international terrorist organizations that have murdered tens of thousands of civilians and combatants in attacks and guerilla warfare around the globe.

The new designations do not support the administration’s case that Antifa presents an “existential” threat to Americans. Indeed, the move appears to do little, or nothing, to protect Americans either at home or abroad. If anything, the State Department’s announcement shows that the administration is unsuccessfully laboring to portray “Antifa” – an amorphous “anti-fascist” movement with no clear leadership or hierarchy – as a significant terrorist threat. And it could be used to undermine the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. 

A Far Cry from the Threat Posed by Al-Qaeda on 9/11

 The U.S. government created the SDGT listing process as part of Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, which was signed by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Nearly 3,000 people perished during al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Thousands more have succumbed to, or still suffer from, related illnesses. Around that same time, the United Nations Security Council, NATO, and Organization of American States mobilized to respond to the al-Qaeda threat.   

From that moment forward, the SDGT list created a powerful tool, overseen by the U.S. Treasury Department, to cut off the international finances of terrorists capable of such large-scale attacks. Prior to the second Trump administration, the overwhelming majority of entities on the list were associated with al-Qaeda, ISIS, Iranian proxies or other global terrorist networks that had killed or threatened Americans.

The threat posed by the four newly designated entities, which have been responsible for small-scale attacks resulting in minimal casualties outside of the United States, falls far short of al-Qaeda or the other global terror networks previously designated. The State Department does not allege that any of the newly designated entities are capable of 9/11-style attacks. The Department does not claim that any Americans have been killed in their operations. Nor has the Department demonstrated that they endanger Americans or U.S. interests either at home or abroad, even though such threats are a prerequisite for inclusion on both the SDGT and FTO lists, which are authorities statutorily provided through congressional legislation. Indeed, the relevant statute giving the Secretary of State authority to designate an FTO requires “the terrorist activity of the organization threatens the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States.”

Under E.O. 13224, the Secretary of State is authorized to “designate foreign individuals or entities that he determines have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the U.S.” The criteria for inclusion on State’s FTO list, under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), contains similar language. 

Nothing in the State Department’s fact sheet satisfies this criterion – even if one were to read it in the broadest possible manner. Antifa Ost’s followers have engaged in street fights with suspected “fascists” in Germany and Hungary (more on that below). The FAI/FRI “primarily operates in Italy,” has affiliates elsewhere, and has threatened “political and economic institutions” in other countries, but the State Department does not claim it has plotted against the U.S. government or Americans. The remaining two entities – Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense – are based in Greece and have targeted the Greek government and police. The latter group, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, has claimed responsibility for two minor attacks in Greece that resulted in little damage and no injuries. As Reuters reports, such attacks are hardly new, as “[s]mall-scale attacks on businesses, police, politicians and embassies are frequent in Greece, which has a long history of political violence by leftist and anarchist groups.”

If the Trump administration has intelligence indicating that these groups pose a real threat to Americans, the U.S. government or its interests, then it should present it. The publicly available evidence does not support such a conclusion. Instead, the evidence shows that the targeted networks are responsible for a low-level of violence in European countries.

Inflating the Threat Posed by “Antifa”

The Trump administration has not clearly defined what it means by “Antifa.” Experts have long recognized that Antifa is an amorphous movement with no clear national, let alone international, leadership or hierarchy. According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) assessment published in 2020, the “U.S. antifa movement appears to be decentralized, consisting of independent, radical, like-minded groups and individuals” and “lacks a unifying organizational structure or detailed ideology.” The first Trump administration’s national security leaders agreed with this assessment.

As mentioned above, in contrast, DHS Secretary Noem has compared Antifa’s “network” to ISIS and Hezbollah. She also compared Antifa to international criminal gangs such as MS-13 and Tren de Arugua, as well as Hamas. But Antifa lacks the organizational structure and hierarchy of each of these five organizations. Indeed, Noem’s comparison inadvertently reveals the weakness of the Trump administration’s case, as it has failed to demonstrate how Antifa is a cohesive group or “network” comparable to the world’s leading terrorist organizations.  

Without specific criteria for defining “Antifa,” the U.S. government has no firm basis for concluding which groups or individuals belong to it, beyond those who somehow self-identify as its adherents. This opens the door for the Trump administration to abuse the term as a catch-all for leftwing groups and individuals who are broadly opposed to “fascism,” but may otherwise have no ties to one another.

This talk of “Antifa” untethered to facts is evident in the State Department’s treatment of the four foreign entities. 

Only one of the four entities designated by the State Department, the German-based Antifa Ost, openly brands itself as part of the Antifa movement. But the administration has not alleged that Antifa Ost is connected to any American Antifa adherents. It is not clear what ties, if any, there are between Antifa Ost and the other three entities, which are based in Italy and Greece. Nor is it clear if the other three have any ties to Antifa at all, either in other countries or inside the United States. It appears that the administration is simply conflating other far-left extremists and anarchists with Antifa, as if they are all part of the same network.

For instance, the first known American Antifa group was established in Portland, Oregon in 2007. As the State Department itself notes, the anarchist FAI/FRI began operating approximately four years earlier, in 2003, meaning that it predates the birth of the American Antifa movement. The Trump administration has not explained why it considers FAI/FRI, which has a long track record of violence on its own, to now be a part of Antifa in any meaningful sense.

The Trump administration has not designated neo-Nazi groups banned by democratic allies

The first entity listed by the State Department is Antifa Ost, also known as Antifa East and the “Hammer Gang,” a name its adherents earned by wielding hammers in their street attacks. Although Antifa Ost is based in Germany, the Trump administration reportedly did not coordinate its designation process with the German government. It is easy to see why. After the designation was announced, a spokesperson for the German Interior Ministry explained that Antifa Ost’s capacity for violence has “decreased significantly” after a series of arrests – an assessment that directly undermines the Trump administration’s desire to portray Antifa as a global menace. Indeed, the State Department does not attribute any attacks to Antifa Ost’s adherents since February 2023 — that is, more than two and half years ago.

The State Department notes that Antifa Ost is “accused of having conducted a series of attacks in Budapest in mid-February 2023.” But the Department’s announcement omits a key detail – namely, these “attacks” occurred during the “Day of Honor” event – an annual neo-Nazi rally held in the Hungarian capital.  

 The “Day of Honor” rally commemorates a battle in which Nazi soldiers and Hungarian troops joined forces to break the Soviet Union’s siege of Budapest in 1945. Even though the joint Nazi-Hungarian campaign was unsuccessful, modern neo-Nazis see it as an inspiration. Hundreds of far-right extremists from around the world attend the “Day of Honor” event in Budapest each year, including in February 2023, when Antifa Ost’s adherents showed up as counterprotesters.

The “Day of Honor” rally is organized by Légió Hungária, a neo-Nazi organization. According to Bellingcat, Légió Hungária maintains close relationships with other international neo-Nazi and skinhead groups that participate in the “Day of Honor” rally. These include Blood & Honour (B&H), which originated in the United Kingdom and has maintained presence inside the United States since the 1990s, and Hammerskins. America’s allies have long recognized the international threat posed by both groups.     

In 2000, Germany banned B&H after it was linked to a series of racially motivated murders. In 2010, a Spanish court ordered the dissolution of a B&H chapter after 18 of its members were “found guilty of illicit possession of arms and inciting hate for racist and anti-Semitic reasons.” In 2019, the French government dissolved a B&H affiliate inside the country. The Canadian government banned B&H and Combat 18 that same year, explaining that the group had carried out “murders and bombings” across several countries, including the murders of two homeless men in Tampa Bay, Florida in the late 1990s. In 2020, Germany then added Combat 18 to its list of prohibited groups. Finally, in January of this year, the U.K. government froze B&H’s financial assets, finding that there were “reasonable grounds to suspect [it] of being involved in terrorist activities through promoting and encouraging terrorism, seeking to recruit people for that purpose and making funds available for the purposes of its terrorist activities.”

 In 2023, the German government banned Hammerskins (also known as Hammerskin Nation), which was founded in Dallas, Texas in the late 1980s. The German interior ministry explained that “Hammerskins affiliates exist in a number of countries” and its “members call each other ‘brothers’ and see themselves as part of an elite ‘brotherhood,’” with approximately 130 members in Germany alone. Authorities “seized cash and large quantities of weapons,” as well as Nazi paraphernalia, in raids across the country. The interior ministry specifically thanked the American government for its cooperation, saying it “worked closely with its U.S. partner agencies to bring about this ban on a right-wing extremist and racist organization.” Such bilateral cooperation stands in direct contrast to the U.S. government’s unilateral designation of Antifa Ost.

Thus far, the administration has failed to employ the U.S. government’s powerful designation authorities against the neo-Nazi organizations that participate in the “Day of Honor” rally, or any other like-minded groups, even though several allied democratic nations have already done so. Instead, Trump’s State Department has followed the course set by Viktor Orban’s autocratic regime, focusing the power of the state mainly on the leftwing counterprotesters who clashed with neo-Nazis in Budapest in February 2023. The administration has done so even though the far-right was also culpable for the violence. 

For example, a previous report by the State Department clarified that violence broke out during the 2023 event when “extreme-right and neo-Nazi groups clashed with antifascist counterprotesters.” Although local police attempted to ban the rally beforehand, “several hundred extreme-right and neo-Nazi sympathizers gathered” and “antifascist demonstrators … assaulted several individuals they assumed to be affiliated with the extreme right.” The violence was not one-sided, however, as “extreme right sympathizers reportedly attacked groups they took to be antifascist demonstrators.”  

Concern that the Trump Administration Will Abuse the Designation Process to Target Domestic Opposition

 Since the murder of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, senior administration officials have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that a leftwing terrorist network, supported by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), threatens the security of Americans. Antifa is the main foe they cite. 

On Sept. 22, President Donald Trump issued an E.O. deeming Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.” The E.O. lacked legal teeth, as the label does not create any new legal authorities to target groups operating inside the United States. Still, the E.O. signaled that the administration was probing for ways to conduct a broader crackdown on leftwing groups.

On Sept. 25, Trump followed up with a national security presidential memorandum (NSPM-7) claiming that the “anti-fascist” “lie” is used by “domestic terrorists” to threaten America’s “democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.” The memorandum directs agencies of the U.S. government to take various actions against these supposed “networks.” Civil liberties and pro-democracy groups immediately saw NSPM-7 as a threat to free speech and civil society, as the memorandum imagines a broad conspiracy requiring a whole of government effort to combat. The memorandum seemingly invites branches of the U.S. government, including Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) around the country, to surveil and investigate groups and individuals based on “indicia” (beliefs) such as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked those three types of beliefs when announcing the designations of the four “Antifa” groups, vowing to “continue using all available tools to protect our nation from these anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-Christian terrorist groups.” Indeed, the State Department’s SDGT and FTO designations are the latest step in the administration’s campaign to portray Antifa as a top-tier threat.

FTO designations are powerful by design, as Thomas Brzozowski, the former counsel for Domestic Terrorism in the Counterterrorism Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, has written in these pages. Once a group is designated as an FTO, the U.S. government can invoke legal authorities that allow it to surveil and harass any party connected to it – including organizations inside the United States. It is for that reason that the State Department’s designations of four alleged “Antifa” groups is potentially worrisome. Although the administration has not yet branded “Antifa” in its entirety as an FTO, it is apparently seeking ways to invoke those intrusive authorities against an enemy that is conjured without evidence and conceptually undefined. 

None of this is to suggest that the threat of leftwing political violence should be dismissed. It is real, but the U.S. government already has the tools needed to combat it. And as the review above is intended to show, the new designations are unnecessary. They are surely not based on a bottom-up assessment of the threat that these entities pose, but instead a top-down desire to create a bogeyman.

When Trump first announced his intent to designate “Antifa” as a foreign terrorist organization in mid-September, Hungary’s Orban quickly cheered. Orban’s enthusiasm was telling, as he has used the power of the state to hollow out opposition to his autocratic regime, which he has described as an “illiberal democracy.” Some hard-right politicians in different parts of Europe followed Trump’s statement by announcing their own interest in designating “Antifa” a terrorist organization. On Sept. 26, Hungary declared Antifa Ost a terrorist organization and then “added the group to its national anti-terrorism list.” It was conspicuous that Orban did not take a similar action against any of the neo-Nazi groups that march in Budapest every February. After all, they do not protest his rule. Meanwhile, the policy actions taken by the Trump administration to address domestic terrorism thus far, including NSPM-7, fail to address the threat posed by far-right extremists in the United States.     

The post State Dept’s Foreign Terrorist Designations Undermine Claims of “Antifa” Threat appeared first on Just Security.

The development marks an escalation in the administration’s efforts to recast anti-fascist activism as a matter of national security, carrying far-reaching legal and political consequences. Experts think the move could lay the groundwork for targeting organizations and activists here in the United States, potentially undermining the right to free speech. 

Tom Joscelyn, a senior fellow at Just Security, is joined by Tom Brzozowski, former counsel for Domestic Terrorism at the U.S. Department of Justice, to discuss what the new designations mean for civil liberties, and how they might reshape the boundaries of permissible speech and association.  

Show Notes: 

• “How Designating Antifa as a Foreign Terrorist Organization Could Threaten Civil Liberties” by Tom Brzozowski (Just Security, October 27, 2025)  
• Just Security’s Terrorism and Violent Extremism Archive
• Just Security’s Counterterrorism Archive

The post The Just Security Podcast: Examining the Trump Administration’s New Antifa Designations appeared first on Just Security.

Though violence across Nigeria has certainly increased in recent years, Trump’s threat of military intervention appears to be primarily a performance for his evangelical base overlaid on a multifaceted security crisis. In reality, military intervention would be diplomatically and operationally complex, and would not address the drivers of conflict across the country. On the contrary, it would alienate a key partner and regional hegemon, while forcing the U.S. military to turn its attention to an unproductive mission and accept risk in other parts of the world.

Nigeria’s Security Landscape and Military Capacity

The empirical reality of Nigeria’s security situation is infinitely more complex than the Christian persecution narrative driving recent U.S. policy. Boko Haram and its ISIS-aligned splinter group, the Islamic State-West Africa (ISIS-WA), operate in the northeast, while armed criminal gangs plague Zamfara, Kaduna, and Katsina states in the northwest. The Lakurawa militant group, affiliated with the Islamic State Sahel Province, operates in the border areas of Sokoto and Kebbi states along the country’s frontier with Niger. Farmer-herder conflict destabilizes Benue and Plateau states in the Middle Belt, while a Biafran separatist movement continues to simmer in the southeast. Oil theft persists in the Niger Delta, and piracy and armed robbery at sea periodically threaten the country’s Gulf of Guinea coastline. The geographic and operational breadth of these security challenges has stretched Nigerian security forces to their limits, despite their historic capability to project power across the region.

The narrative of Christian persecution that has drawn the ire of the American president appears to conflate two distinct security issues. In the Middle Belt, farmer-herder conflicts are fundamentally resource-driven disputes between predominantly Muslim Fulani herders seeking grazing land and predominantly Christian farming communities competing for land and water access. These tensions have intensified due to climate change, desertification, and the breakdown of traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms, rather than representing the targeting of specific populations on the basis of religion.

Meanwhile, in the northeast, Boko Haram and ISIS-WA operate as jihadist insurgencies opposed to secular governance, attacking both Muslims and Christians indiscriminately. During the first half of 2025, killings attributed to Boko Haram and ISIS-WA reached their highest level in five years, with fatalities rising by 18 percent year-over-year. Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) repository cited in a recent BBC report estimates that approximately 53,000 civilians across all religious backgrounds have died in targeted political violence since 2009. Of these casualties, between 2020 and September 2025, Christians were specifically targeted in 384 incidents that resulted in 317 deaths, representing a small fraction of total civilian fatalities.

Despite considerable investments in security on the part of the Nigerian government over the past decade, its military has faced shortfalls in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) as well as inadequate logistics and maintenance. This has undermined efforts to hold territory and prevent ISIS-WA’s increasingly sophisticated attacks, which have included the increasing use of commercially-available explosive-rigged drones. The failure of the super camp strategy, implemented in 2019 to consolidate military personnel and equipment into fortified hubs in population centers for security reasons, has instead left garrisons and rural communities vulnerable. Moreover, corruption and poor resource management have compromised critical supply chains. The Abuja-based Center for Democracy and Development estimated in 2022 that approximately $15 billion had been squandered through fraudulent arms procurement deals over the previous two decades.

At the same time, tensions linger between local populations and the military over systematic, widespread crimes against humanity perpetrated during earlier phases of the conflict. Finally, despite more than a decade of counterinsurgency operations, the Nigerian government has failed to address the root causes of the conflict, including the extreme economic inequality between northern and southern Nigeria – instead relying almost exclusively on security-centered responses. Oddly enough, despite its heightened focus on Nigeria in recent weeks, the Trump administration defunded programs earlier this year that focused on early warning, conflict mitigation, and peacebuilding, which all could have helped address the underlying drivers of Nigeria’s multifaceted security challenges.  

The Nigerian Christian Persecution Narrative in U.S. Politics

The narrative that Christians are being systematically targeted in Nigeria has been a fixture of U.S. domestic politics for over two decades, beginning when USCIRF first placed Nigeria on its Watch List in 2002. This issue remains deeply important to the electoral coalition that twice delivered the White House to President Trump, who won support from nearly two-thirds of Protestant voters and 55 percent of Catholics in 2024. The first Trump administration designated Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern in December 2020, which was then reversed by the Biden administration in 2021.

Although the issue had been relatively peripheral to mainstream U.S.-Africa policy, years of sustained congressional focus has included advocacy by Republican Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey (the current chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa) and by former Republican members of Congress including Frank Wolf and Jim Moran, both of Virginia. Meanwhile in Nigeria, select church leaders have leaned into the narrative that Christians are being targeted on the basis of their religion, while many Nigerian legislators have actively resisted this framing, emphasizing that violence affects both Christians and Muslims without sectarian distinction.

Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican chairing the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy, introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025 (S.2747) in September, which has a companion bill (H.R.5808) in the House of Representatives introduced by Representative Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) in October. Both bills would require the secretary of state to designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (now done, as noted above, without the legislation – see below) and to designate Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa as Entities of Particular Concern. The bills also would require the president to impose targeted sanctions under Executive Order 13818 on Nigerian officials who have “enforced blasphemy laws, including through prosecution, conviction, imprisonment, or other deprivation of liberty of individuals pursuant to such laws.”

Both S.2747 and H.R.5808 would codify the CPC designation in law, preventing future administrations from reversing it without congressional action. However, neither has cosponsors, indicating they function primarily as messaging to domestic constituencies and to garner favor with Trump rather than as serious legislative vehicles that have a chance at making it to his desk. Both bills face uncertain prospects and would require additional cosponsors and prioritization by committee chairs before advancing to committee action and then to floor votes. Two additional measures more recently introduced by Smith (H.Res.860) and Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV)  (H.Res.866) in early November commend the president for redesignating Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern and, as resolutions rather than bills, are also symbolic measures that have no legal impact.

Diplomatic Disconnect

The diplomacy on this issue has also been complicated at both ends. For Nigeria’s part, it lacks accredited diplomatic leadership in Washington, due to President Tinubu’s decision to recall all Nigerian envoys worldwide in September 2023 for what was described as a reorganization of the country’s diplomatic corps. Furthermore, since taking office in May 2023, Tinubu has not visited the U.S. capital. However, enhanced diplomatic engagement may have offered only marginal opportunities to pre-empt or de-escalate diplomatic tensions. In this respect, Trump’s allegations of Christian persecution in Nigeria mirror the debunked conspiracy theory he and others on the American right continue to wield against South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) that there is a “genocide” of white farmers in their country.

Indeed, this pattern of championing selective narratives while dismissing broader evidence offers a cautionary lesson: there is minimal return on investment in persuading the president and his inner circle with facts once they have acquired their own ideologically entrenched truths. Notably, even after several months of diplomatic outreach and lobbying, including an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ramaphosa, the U.S. president recently declared that no U.S. government officials would be attending the G20 in South Africa – and that the country should not even be a member of the G20.

U.S. Military Options: Flight of Fancy?

In response to the Trump administration’s directive to develop military options, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has proposed a range of approaches, each constrained by distinct diplomatic, strategic, and operational considerations.  AFRICOM was originally created as — and largely continues to be — a ‘posture-limited theater,’ with a limited forward military presence and drawing on only 0.3 percent of the Department of Defense’s operating budget, according to the congressional testimony of previous combatant commanders. The command’s annual posture statements identify Nigeria as central to counterterrorism strategy in West Africa, prioritizing the containment and degradation of Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa through an approach intended to let African partners lead, with the United States and allies providing enabling support, rather than the United States engaging directly in combat operations. The backbone of bilateral engagement has been episodic training to build the capacity of the Nigerian military and associated institutions and robust foreign military sales, which has included the delivery of 12 A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft in 2021 and substantial munitions packages, such as a $346 million precision-guided weapons sale approved this August. Regionally, Nigeria has participated in annual multinational exercises such as Flintlock, which is focused on joint special operations, and Obangame Express, which is billed as the “largest multinational maritime exercise in Western and Central Africa.” The U.S. military also provides advisors, training, equipment, and intelligence-sharing, to the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), a five-nation regional security mechanism comprising forces from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger (until withdrawing earlier this year), and Nigeria.

The first option presented by AFRICOM, deepening “partner-enabled operations” with Nigerian security forces, essentially represents an intensification of the bilateral security cooperation already underway, which has not resolved longstanding conflicts across the country. Moreover, longstanding legal restrictions under the Leahy Law, which prohibits assistance to security forces that have perpetrated human rights abuses, have rightfully put guardrails on the bilateral security relationship for more than a decade. Lastly, the evisceration of the foreign assistance apparatus means that bureaus like the State Department’s Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) and the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in the former U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration shut down, are no longer working to address the root causes of insecurity in the country. Those efforts ordinarily would work hand-in-glove with military- and law-enforcement responses.

A second option that AFRICOM floated would involve drone strikes on militant camps and convoys launched from bases in southern Europe (presumably Morón air base in Spain or Sigonella in Italy) or Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which serves as AFRICOM’s only permanent military installation on the African continent. Operating from any of these locations would require roughly eight hours of transit for an armed MQ-9 Reaper, leaving approximately 10 hours on-station time. While this duration would permit extended surveillance of militant camps and convoys and enable multiple strikes, it would prove insufficient for sustained counterterrorism operations. Furthermore, such operations would require overflight authorizations from multiple countries across the continent; yet, given the Nigerian government’s concerns about sovereignty and territorial integrity, unilateral drone strikes from foreign bases would be diplomatically untenable for the region absent their consent. Nigeria’s possession of its own strike-capable aircraft, including the 12 A-29 Super Tucanos delivered in 2021, means Abuja would likely demand operational control over any targeting decisions rather than ceding sovereignty to U.S.-directed strikes from abroad. More importantly, such operations would divert MQ-9 assets already committed to counterterrorism missions against al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia, assessed as higher-priority threats to U.S. national security interests.

The third option AFRICOM presented would be to deploy an aircraft carrier group in the Gulf of Guinea that would enable fighter jets and long-range bombers to conduct airstrikes into northern Nigeria. One immediate limitation of this option is that the United States possesses 11 aircraft carriers, usually allocated between theaters deemed to be national security priorities to the United States – such as U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in the Middle East– with the remainder undergoing scheduled maintenance or training cycles. Additionally, U.S. officials have indicated that the 2025 National Defense Strategy will prioritize homeland defense and the Western Hemisphere, thus implying that operations in other theaters, including counterterrorism in the AFRICOM area of responsibility, will be deprioritized. With the USS Gerald R. Ford rerouted from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean for what the administration describes as counter-narcotics operations, and the other currently-deployed carriers in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility, deploying a carrier strike group to the Gulf of Guinea would require the U.S. military to accept risk in the CENTCOM and INDOPACOM areas, leaving the United States more vulnerable to opportunistic challenges from adversarial actors and peer competitors. One way to buy down risk in this scenario could be to deploy submarine-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, which would enable strikes throughout northeastern Nigeria from international waters without diverting carrier groups or requiring forward basing.

Beyond the strategic, operational, and tactical constraints of these options is the question of the legal framework that would theoretically enable military action in Nigeria – most likely the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) or the president’s inherent Article II constitutional powers as Commander-in-Chief to conduct limited military operations without explicit congressional authorization, as modern presidents have done frequently. In any event, the president’s stated justification for military action in Nigeria stretches the conceptual limits of both authorities, as the protection of Christians is neither counterterrorism nor directly linked to a national security threat to the United States. Nonetheless, the administration’s approach to foreign assistance, immigration enforcement, and tariffs would seem to suggest that it views legal limitations as mere suggestions.

The Illusion of Impact

Ultimately, Trump’s threatened military action appears more as political theater choreographed for his domestic base, akin to deploying the National Guard to American cities. Whatever response the administration settles on in this case is highly unlikely to improve the plight of Nigerian civilians, including Christians, due to the structural governance, economic, and security drivers of conflict across the country. Much like other countries that have found themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, Nigeria will discover that this disconnect is something that will need to be carefully managed – and unlikely to be resolved — for the duration of Trump’s tenure. In other words, increased diplomatic engagement and lobbying will not hurt, but ultimately is not likely to resolve this impasse in the bilateral relationship.

Working in Nigeria’s favor is that it is one of Africa’s largest economies, and can fortify relationships with other countries, should U.S. influence wither.  The Trump administration’s decision to gut foreign assistance and bully a State that possesses regional clout simply accelerates this pivot, undermining American strategic interests on the continent while expanding the influence of competitors at minimal cost.

The post The Political Theater Behind Trump’s “Guns-a-Blazing” Nigeria Threat appeared first on Just Security.

During the roundtable, Trump was asked directly whether he would designate Antifa as an FTO. The president’s response was unambiguous: “I think it’s the kind of thing I’d like to do. If you agree, I agree. Let’s get it done.” This was not casual political rhetoric. It was a directive from the Commander-in-Chief to his national security apparatus, witnessed by millions of Americans. It is also something the first Trump administration took steps toward enacting near the end of the president’s first term in office. (For example, see section 2 of the  Executive Order issued on Jan. 5, 2021.) The implications could extend far beyond anti-fascist activists to the entire architecture of American civil society and constitutional governance.

The FTO Framework: Powerful by Design

To understand why an Antifa FTO designation would be so consequential, one must first grasp the extraordinary scope of authorities that such designations unleash. The FTO system was deliberately constructed to maximize governmental power against international terrorist threats. Created by the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the framework provides the executive branch with extraordinary authorities that are designed to dismantle terrorist networks quickly and comprehensively.

Once an organization is designated as an FTO, providing “material support” to it becomes a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison, or life if the support results in death. The statutory definition of “material support” is intentionally expansive and includes providing: “currency or monetary instruments, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, personnel, and transportation.” Only medicine and religious materials are explicitly exempted.

The breadth of this definition reflects Congress’s determination to eliminate all forms of assistance to designated organizations. The statute applies to U.S. persons regardless of where the prohibited conduct occurs, creating global reach for American terrorism prosecutions. The Supreme Court’s decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project clarified that even speech intended to promote peaceful conflict resolution may constitute material support if provided to a designated organization.

Financial consequences activate automatically upon designation. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) requires all U.S. financial institutions to freeze assets within ten business days and report the frozen funds to the government. This financial disruption is designed to immediately sever designated organizations from the global financial system, preventing them from accessing resources needed for operations.

The Holy Land Foundation case demonstrates the scope of these authorities when applied to charitable organizations. Five charity officials received sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years for providing aid to Palestinian communities that prosecutors argued were under the influence of Hamas, a designated FTO. While the defendants maintained they were providing legitimate humanitarian assistance, the court found that the statutory framework criminalized their support regardless of the charitable intent.

Immigration Consequences and the Specter of Denaturalization

Beyond criminal prosecution and financial sanctions, FTO designation triggers severe immigration consequences that could create an underclass of vulnerable individuals subject to expulsion. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, any non-citizen who is a member or representative of a designated FTO is automatically inadmissible to the United States and subject to removal proceedings. The State Department may immediately revoke visas of any foreign nationals deemed to be members, representatives, or supporters of the designated organization. This authority extends to individuals who have “endorsed or espoused terrorist activity” or provided any form of material support, creating an exceptionally broad basis for visa revocation and deportation. (That said, similar provisions for removal of foreign nationals lawfully in the United States are currently being challenged in court on First Amendment grounds.)

The consequences reach even further for naturalized American citizens. Federal law permits denaturalization of individuals who were members of or affiliated with a “terrorist organization” within five years immediately following naturalization. Once Antifa receives FTO designation, any naturalized citizen who attended a counter-protest, donated to a legal defense fund, or expressed support for anti-fascist principles during their first five years as a citizen could face citizenship revocation proceedings.

The recent expansion of denaturalization enforcement, with the Department of Justice announcing in June 2025 that denaturalization cases would become one of its top five enforcement priorities, creates a particularly acute vulnerability for many of the estimated 25 million naturalized Americans. Consider a German immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 2023 and maintained connections with anti-fascist groups in her home country, or a French national who was naturalized in 2024 after years of participating in counter-demonstrations against far-right movements in Europe. Both could face potential citizenship revocation and deportation based on activities that were entirely legal when undertaken.

The denaturalization standard requires only “clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence” in civil proceedings — a lower threshold than criminal conviction — and carries no statute of limitations. This creates a permanent cloud of legal jeopardy hanging over millions of naturalized Americans whose past political associations could be reinterpreted as terrorism support under an expansive FTO designation.​

Civil Liability Under the Anti-Terrorism Act

The designation of Antifa as an FTO could also potentially expose individuals and organizations to devastating civil liability under the Anti-Terrorism Act (18 U.S.C. § 2333). The ATA authorizes any U.S. national injured “by reason of an act of international terrorism” committed by a designated FTO to sue for treble damages, plus attorneys’ fees and costs. The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), enacted in 2016, expanded this authority to include aiding-and-abetting liability against “any person who aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance, or who conspires with” those who commit acts of international terrorism. This creates possible exposure not just for alleged Antifa subjects themselves, but for anyone deemed to have provided material support — including nonprofits, donors, and service providers.

Unlike criminal cases requiring proof beyond reasonable doubt, ATA civil cases proceed under the lower “preponderance of the evidence” standard, making them easier to win. Even frivolous ATA lawsuits could impose crippling litigation costs — defense firms specializing in terrorism cases charge hundreds of dollars per hour, and cases routinely take years to resolve. The threat of ATA liability could force organizations to obtain expensive specialized insurance (if available at all), conduct exhaustive vetting of all partners and donors, and potentially abandon any activities that could be remotely connected to anti-fascist activism. This civil liability mechanism could thus accomplish through private litigation what criminal prosecution alone might not achieve: the significant curtailment of civil society organizations engaged in political opposition to “anti-fascism,” not through direct government action but through the specter of catastrophic financial liability.

The FISA Surveillance Integration

An FTO designation would also seamlessly integrate Antifa into America’s most sophisticated surveillance infrastructure. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the government may conduct electronic surveillance of “agents of foreign powers,” including “groups engaged in international terrorism.” Once Antifa is designated as an FTO, anyone deemed an “agent” of this “foreign power” becomes eligible for FISA surveillance — including American citizens (though with some stricter standards).

This surveillance integration represents a qualitative escalation beyond traditional criminal investigation. FISA surveillance operates under different standards than domestic criminal investigations. Federal agents need only demonstrate probable cause that “the target of the surveillance is a foreign power or [an] agent of a foreign power” and that “a significant purpose” is obtaining “foreign intelligence information.” The standard does not require demonstration that criminal activity is planned or imminent.

The National Security Agency’s (NSA) authorities under FISA are extensive and largely classified, but publicly available documentation confirms the agency “relies on Title I of FISA to conduct electronic surveillance of foreign powers or their agents, to include members of international terrorist organizations.” These capabilities extend beyond simple wiretapping to include comprehensive electronic monitoring, physical searches, and business records collection.

For American citizens associated with anti-fascist activities, FISA designation could mean potential subjection to the full spectrum of intelligence community surveillance capabilities, all conducted in secret with limited judicial oversight. Unlike criminal investigations, FISA surveillance does not require notification of targets, potentially allowing years of monitoring without the subject’s knowledge.

Social Media Transformation: From Resistance to Compliance

The surveillance implications extend beyond government agencies to encompass the private sector platforms where much contemporary political organization occurs. The impact on digital platforms would be immediate and comprehensive. Major social media companies — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram — maintain terms of service prohibiting content from designated terrorist organizations. Currently, these platforms often resist government information requests about political activists based on First Amendment principles. An FTO designation could eliminate the legal foundation for such resistance.

Facebook’s Community Standards explicitly state that “organizations that are engaged in terrorist activity are not allowed on the platform.” Once Antifa is designated as an FTO, any content expressing support for anti-fascist principles, sharing protest logistics, or providing resources for activists could become prohibited terrorist content subject to immediate removal. Users posting such content could also face permanent account suspension.

The technological infrastructure already exists for comprehensive content monitoring. Social media companies have developed sophisticated algorithmic systems to identify terrorist content, with Twitter reporting suspension of over 1.5 million accounts for terrorism-related violations between 2015 and 2020, 90 percent identified through automated systems rather than user reports.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) – comprised of YouTube, Twitter/X, Facebook, and Microsoft, and other platforms – maintains shared databases of “digital fingerprints” from known terrorist content. Anti-fascist organizing materials, protest footage, and political commentary could be added to these databases, creating automated, cross-platform content removal and user identification systems.

These changes could extend beyond direct content removal to comprehensive user profiling. The same machine learning systems currently used for content recommendation could begin identifying users based on engagement with anti-fascist content, creating detailed profiles for potential government intelligence gathering. This transformation would convert social media platforms from potential sources of opposition to government overreach into comprehensive surveillance and enforcement networks.

Organizational Vulnerabilities: A Hypothetical Case Study

The abstract legal framework above becomes more concrete when applied to real-world organizational structures. Consider how an FTO designation could impact the “Alliance for Democratic Resistance” (ADR), a fictional but realistic progressive non-governmental organization (NGO), as well as other civil society organizations. ADR operates from a headquarters in Washington, D.C., with regional offices in Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, and Austin. The organization maintains partnerships with civil rights groups in Germany, the U.K., and France, and receives grants from European foundations supporting anti-fascist education programs.

ADR’s activities include organizing counter-protests against white supremacist demonstrations, providing know-your-rights training for protesters, maintaining a legal defense fund for arrested activists, publishing research on far-right movements, and hosting international conferences on combating extremism. These activities, while entirely legal under current law, could become potentially criminal once Antifa is designated as an FTO.

The organization’s international partnerships could be recharacterized as coordination with foreign terrorist entities. Its legal defense fund might constitute material support for domestic terrorists. Research publications could be classified as terrorist propaganda. Training programs might be deemed terrorist instruction.

Within ten business days of designation, OFAC would require ADR’s banks to freeze all accounts and report holdings to the Treasury Department. Staff members would face FBI investigation for potential material support violations. Donors — from major foundations to individual contributors — could become targets for financial crimes prosecution. International partners would be barred from entering the United States.

Beyond criminal charges and asset freezes, ADR could conceivably face civil suits from anyone injured during a protest or counterdemonstration where Antifa was present. A business owner whose property was damaged, a counter-protester who was injured, or even a police officer hurt during a demonstration could sue ADR for treble damages under the ATA, arguing the organization aided and abetted Antifa’s activities by providing meeting space, legal support, or protest coordination. The treble damages provision means a $100,000 injury claim could result in a $300,000 judgment, plus potentially millions in legal fees.

The organization would face immediate operational collapse regardless of whether criminal charges are ultimately filed. Legal defense costs alone could reach millions of dollars. Donors would flee to avoid association with designated “terrorists.” Foundation grants would be suspended pending investigation. Staff would resign to protect themselves from legal jeopardy. Office leases would be terminated, insurance policies cancelled, and nonprofit tax status revoked.

This scenario reflects how FTO designations can destroy organizations through the process itself, independent of successful criminal prosecutions. The mere initiation of terrorism-related investigations creates financial and reputational damage from which most organizations cannot recover.

Cascading Effects Across Civil Society

The destruction of directly targeted organizations represents only the beginning of a possible broader social transformation. The impact could cascade far beyond directly targeted entities, creating a comprehensive chilling effect across the entire progressive political ecosystem. Every progressive nonprofit, civil rights group, and political organization would face immediate compliance assessments. Legal counsel would advise clients to avoid any activities potentially construed as supporting anti-fascist principles. Foundation boards could vote to suspend grants to organizations with possible connections to counter-protest activities.

Academic institutions would face particularly complex challenges. Universities might cancel conferences on combating fascism, restrict faculty research on anti-fascist movements, and suspend student organizations engaged in counter-protest activities. The chilling effect on academic freedom would be profound, as scholars avoid research topics that might create legal jeopardy.

Media organizations may similarly self-censor. Publishers might refuse books on anti-fascist history or strategy. Journalists could avoid reporting on anti-fascist activities to prevent potential material support liability. Documentary filmmakers might cancel projects examining anti-fascist movements.

Religious and community organizations engaged in social justice work would face difficult choices about continuing programs that could be interpreted as supporting a designated terrorist organization’s ideology. Labor unions might prohibit solidarity activities with anti-fascist activists. Nonprofit legal organizations could suspend representation of activists facing charges.

This phenomenon, known to scholars as “anticipatory conformity,” demonstrates how the mere existence of broad criminal penalties can achieve censorship objectives without formal enforcement. Organizations and individuals modify behavior to avoid potential prosecution, effectively accomplishing the government’s regulatory goals through self-censorship. The cumulative effect would be the systematic elimination of civil society infrastructure supporting resistance to far-right political movements.

International Coordination and Enforcement

These domestic effects would be amplified by international coordination that extends the reach of American FTO authorities globally. The European response to Trump’s domestic Antifa designation in September reveals the international dimension of this campaign. Far-right parties across Europe have demanded similar designations in their own countries. The Dutch parliament passed a resolution calling for a terrorist designation. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced parallel measures. A draft resolution reportedly backed by 79 Members of the European Parliament from 20 countries calls for EU-wide designation.

This international far-right strategic coordination – simultaneously targeting “Antifa,” an amorphous movement with no clear organizational hierarchy, across multiple democracies – serves a common purpose: eliminating organized resistance to far-right governance by recharacterizing political opposition as terrorism.

An American FTO designation could provide legal foundation for far-right European prosecutions of American activists traveling abroad. Under existing mutual legal assistance treaties, European authorities could request extradition of Americans for “terrorism-related” activities that constitute protected political speech in the United States. International asset freezing orders could create global enforcement networks targeting democratic opposition.

The Hungarian approach illustrates these possibilities. The government of Viktor Orbán has used its Antifa classification to pursue terrorism charges against Italian MEP Ilaria Salis for allegedly participating in counter-demonstrations against far-right groups. This demonstrates how terrorist designations can transform routine political disagreement into criminal conspiracy, creating a template that could be applied to American activists abroad.

The integration of domestic and international enforcement could create a comprehensive global system for monitoring and prosecuting political opposition, transcending national boundaries and constitutional protections that have traditionally limited government surveillance authority.

The Self-Defeating Logic of Counterterrorism Overreach

The profound irony of designating Antifa as an FTO is that weaponizing counterterrorism authorities against domestic political movements will inevitably undermine those very tools when deployed against genuine international terrorist threats. The FTO framework and material support statutes have proven remarkably effective in disrupting al-Qaeda and ISIS networks precisely because courts have afforded them substantial deference based on their narrow application to FTOs that pose legitimate national security threats.

Once these authorities are stretched to encompass domestic political opposition — applied to Americans engaged in constitutionally protected speech and association — that judicial deference should evaporate. Federal courts confronting cases where naturalized citizens face denaturalization for attending protests, or where nonprofits are prosecuted for providing legal defense funds, will likely be compelled to impose constitutional limitations that have been unnecessary when the targets were genuinely foreign terrorist networks. The inevitable wave of successful constitutional challenges will probably force courts to narrow material support definitions, impose heightened intent requirements, and establish First Amendment protections, as well as other safeguards, that will then apply equally to prosecutions of actual terrorism support.

Congressional appetite for FISA reauthorization — already strained by documented FBI abuses in querying Section 702 data on protesters, political donors, and even members of Congress — will surely further erode when those authorities are systematically deployed against political opposition rather than foreign intelligence targets. The House Judiciary Committee has already advanced legislation to substantially curtail FISA authorities in response to civil liberties concerns, and adding domestic political targeting to this record could make reauthorization politically untenable.

The result of pursuing the chimera of “Antifa terrorism” could lead to the systematic dismantling of the legal infrastructure that has successfully prevented another September 11th-scale attack, opening genuine vulnerabilities to al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other international terrorist organizations that pose real threats to American security. By misappropriating tools designed to protect Americans from foreign terrorism to instead target Americans for their political beliefs, the administration risks achieving the ultimate counterterrorism failure: strengthening the nation’s real enemies while weakening the legal framework designed to combat them.

Strategic Response Options for Civil Society

Despite these formidable challenges, civil society organizations and democratic institutions retain several avenues for strategically responding. Understanding these options becomes crucial as the threat of FTO expansion moves from theoretical to imminent. Congressional oversight represents a potential avenue for institutional resistance, though one unlikely to bear immediate fruit given current political alignments. While the House and Senate Judiciary Committees technically possess authority over terrorism designations and could demand detailed justifications for applying FTO frameworks to domestic political movements, prominent members of Congress have become some of the loudest advocates for FTO designation.

Congressional appropriators theoretically could restrict funding for enforcement activities targeting constitutionally protected political speech, but such efforts would face steep political headwinds. The more realistic congressional strategy focuses on building a factual record through minority oversight efforts — hearings, letters, and reports documenting constitutional concerns — that could support future legal challenges and lay the groundwork for legislative reform should political conditions change after subsequent election cycles. In the immediate term, however, civil society must look beyond Congress to other institutional mechanisms for resistance.

State and local governments also retain significant authority to resist federal overreach. State attorneys general possess independent prosecutorial discretion and could refuse cooperation with federal investigations targeting protected political activity. Several states are considering legislation limiting cooperation with federal political surveillance operations, similar to existing immigration sanctuary policies.

Legal challenges could focus on multiple constitutional vulnerabilities. First Amendment protections for political association create barriers to criminalizing ideological movements. Due Process violations in the secretive designation process could provide grounds for challenge. Equal Protection concerns about selective targeting of left-wing movements while ignoring comparable right-wing threats might support discrimination claims or claims of arbitrary and capricious government conduct.

Out of an abundance of caution at least, organizations should establish robust compliance monitoring and due diligence frameworks to navigate the evolving regulatory landscape. This includes implementing comprehensive legal review processes for activities, partnerships, and funding sources that could face heightened scrutiny under expanded terrorism authorities. Legal counsel should regularly assess organizational exposure under material support statutes and maintain current knowledge of designation criteria and enforcement trends. Organizations should establish systematic tracking of relevant legislative and regulatory developments, including congressional hearings, agency guidance, and judicial decisions that could affect operational parameters. Financial compliance protocols should include enhanced due diligence on funding sources, grant recipients, and international partnerships to ensure alignment with applicable sanctions regulations. Regular legal audits of programs, communications, and institutional relationships can help identify potential vulnerabilities before they become predicates or excuses for enforcement issues. Organizations should also establish clear documentation protocols for activities, decision-making processes, and compliance efforts to demonstrate good faith efforts to operate within legal boundaries.

Professional associations — bar organizations, academic societies, and press freedom groups — must take public stands against FTO expansion into the domestic political space. The American Bar Association, representing over 400,000 lawyers, could provide crucial legitimacy to constitutional and other legal challenges while offering resources for targeted individuals and organizations.

Strategic communications efforts must educate the public about the implications of applying foreign terrorism authorities to domestic political movements, though public opinion on constitutional rights presents a complicated picture. Recent polling shows 53 percent of Americans believe the First Amendment “goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” while 47 percent support “a strong leader that breaks the rules.” These attitudes create favorable conditions for executive overreach, making strategic communications critical to connect abstract FTO designation to concrete consequences such as: targeting nonprofit donors, criminalizing protest participation, censoring social media, and enabling deportation of naturalized citizens for political activities. These tangible consequences may resonate more powerfully than appeals to constitutional principles, particularly when framed around personal vulnerabilities that terrorism authorities would create for millions of Americans across the political spectrum.

Constitutional Crisis and Democratic Resilience

These response strategies operate within a broader context of a constitutional crisis that transcends any single policy or legal framework. The potential designation of Antifa as an FTO represents a fundamental test of American constitutional democracy’s resilience. To be clear: The U.S. government already has the legal tools necessary to investigate domestic criminal activity by Antifa adherents. The FTO framework was designed to combat genuine foreign terrorist threats to American security. Applying these powerful authorities to domestic political movements would represent an unprecedented expansion that threatens core constitutional principles.

The implications extend well beyond anti-fascist activists to any domestic political movement maintaining international connections. Environmental groups coordinating with European counterparts, labor unions participating in international solidarity campaigns, and human rights organizations working with foreign partners could all theoretically face similar targeting under expanded FTO authorities.

As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has articulated, the administration views opposition to its policies through a conspiratorial lens. He has characterized the Democratic Party as “a domestic extremist organization” and claimed the existence of “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country.” This stated worldview creates conditions where routine political opposition could be reframed as terrorism worthy of the full spectrum of counterterrorism responses.

The systematic weakening of oversight mechanisms — from inspector general dismissals to civil rights office closures — has created ideal conditions for expanding terrorism authorities into the domestic political space. Without effective institutional constraints, the powerful authorities designed to combat foreign terrorism could be redirected against American citizens engaging in constitutionally protected political activity.

The designation would mark a dark turn in American democratic development. Once the precedent is established that domestic political movements can be criminalized through foreign terrorism designations, constraining these authorities becomes exponentially more difficult. The secrecy surrounding counterterrorism operations, the broad scope of material support statutes, and the deference courts typically show to national security claims create conditions where such authorities tend to expand rather than contract.

The current moment requires extraordinary vigilance from American civil society. The FTO system represents one of the most powerful tools in the federal government’s legal arsenal, deliberately designed to dismantle targeted organizations quickly and comprehensively. While these authorities have served important national security purposes when applied to genuine foreign terrorist threats, their application to domestic political movements would fundamentally alter the balance between security and liberty that defines American constitutional democracy.

The only reliable safeguard against such expansion is sustained lawful opposition from informed citizens, civil society organizations, and constitutional institutions committed to preserving the framework that makes democratic opposition possible. The stakes have never been higher, and the time for preventive action is rapidly diminishing.

The post How Designating Antifa as a Foreign Terrorist Organization Could Threaten Civil Liberties appeared first on Just Security.

But the CSIS study suffers from fatal analytic flaws. For starters, like shark attacks, the number of events attributed to left-wing terrorism this year is so low in absolute terms that it simply does not justify inducing panic with eye-popping headlines.

Indeed, these five events are doing a lot of heavy lifting in Byman and McCabe’s analysis. They are given an unwarranted level of causal and predictive power. For instance, while the report clearly specifies the authors are analyzing attacks “so far” in 2025, elements of the data presentation leave the piece open to interpretation, implying these events are a forecast of what is to come. The opening paragraphs alert readers that “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber those from the far right.” The authors compare the number of left-wing events to both right-wing and jihadist attacks and plots, arguing that the latter two types of threats have declined. This pronouncement is, at best, premature, given that a quarter of the year remains.

It is also misleading. Consider that according to the authors’ own data, 13 victims died as a result of left-wing attacks from 2016 through the first six-plus months of 2025. During that same time period, 82 victims perished in jihadist attacks, while 112 people were killed in right-wing attacks. In fact, 14 people were killed in an ISIS-inspired car ramming attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025 alone – more than all those who perished in left-wing attacks inside the United States in the last nine-plus years. 

In addition, in the week following the report’s release there were at least two incidents that, while still under investigation, may meet the authors’ definition of right-wing political violence. The first was an anti-LGBTQ plot to attack a Texas pride parade. The second was an attack on a Michigan Mormon congregation by a man who, by all appearances, was a conservative who supported President Donald Trump, though his motives were not immediately clear. The second attack left four people dead and eight injured, a casualty count that is greater than all five of the events from this year that are attributed to left-wing terrorism in the CSIS report. Additional examples of attacks and plots this year that could be attributed to far-right actors are cited below. When just a few events could virtually eliminate a supposedly strong statistical finding, readers should be skeptical of any predictive claims made from the data. 

What Longer Term Trends Tell Us 

There are good reasons to be worried about a possible increase in far-left violence, especially as the Trump administration’s actions risk provoking further backlash. However, forecasts must be informed by recent and historical data.

Indeed, according to the authors’ own data, far-right extremism accounted for an average of approximately 20 plots and attacks per year over the last decade, while far-left extremists were responsible for just four incidents per year during the same period. Even if attacks were to continue at their current pace, far-left extremism in 2025 will not come remotely close to the scale of violence that Americans have become accustomed to experiencing from the far right.

Small differences in incident rates can be quickly wiped out by a single mobilizing issue for a group, movement, or ideology. Even a short-term spike in far-right extremism would eliminate the small gap between far-left and far-right attacks that exists in the authors’ data. More importantly, even if far-left incidents outpace far-right ones this year, the low overall, absolute numbers alongside the far right’s history of violence indicate that it would be foolish to reallocate resources to focus exclusively on far-left threats. While the authors do not advocate for resource allocation exclusively to potential threats from the far left, it is a conclusion that must be more strongly guarded against in a political environment in which the entire American left is being cast as a clear and present danger.

Are Far-Right Attacks Really Declining?

Another fundamental problem with the report is the authors’ failure to clearly explain why some incidents were included and others excluded from their analysis. While the report and its accompanying codebook provide definitions of far-right and far-left terrorism, the authors do not detail how they applied their definitions to real-world violence to make inclusion decisions. 

For example, the authors include an allegedly far-left terrorist plot from January in which a woman armed with a knife and two Molotov cocktails told U.S. Capitol police of her desire to attack several administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and House Speaker Mike Johnson. While this was not a particularly sophisticated terrorist scheme, a defensible argument can be made for counting it as a disrupted far-left plot.

But why were seemingly similar events perpetrated by allegedly far-right actors excluded from the authors’ analysis? For instance, Byman and McCabe claim “there was only one right-wing terrorist incident in the United States—the killing of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband in June.” They apparently exclude from their report a case from March in which a 17-year-old was arrested for allegedly killing his mother and stepfather as part of a larger plot to assassinate President Donald Trump. Although his ultimate target was a Republican president, the teenager was not motivated by far-left ideology. Rather, he was active in neo-Nazi accelerationist communities online that fit squarely into most researchers’ understanding of far-right terrorism.

There were numerous other plots in the first six months of the year that could plausibly be attributed to right-wing actors, but the authors apparently determined did not meet their operational definitions of far-right terrorism. These incidents include: a man allegedly stalking the mayor of Salt Lake City in response to her LGBTQ+ pride flag policies, as well as plots to attack an Islamic center in Arizona, a shopping mall in Washington, and synagogues in Massachusetts. There were also half a dozen school-based attacks and plots that were motivated, at least in part, by neo-Nazi ideology or past far-right attacks that did not find their way into the authors’ data. (The authors “generally” exclude school shootings because they claim the “[a]ttackers…are typically motivated by a mix of personal grievances.” While personal grievances often do play a role in attacks at schools, so do ideological motivations, as evidenced by the far-right beliefs reportedly held by some of the school shooters this year.)  

The point here is not to argue that far-right extremists have plotted more attacks this year than those on the far left, although that could be true. Rather, without clearly articulated inclusion rules, the data are untrustworthy. Problematic data are a concern at any time, but particularly when Americans sense that they are witnessing a rapid growth in political violence and are desperate for evidence to help them understand what they are experiencing.

A False Equivalence Between Far-right and Far-left Violence

 The potential threat that far-left extremists pose is also artificially inflated in the report by how much substantive significance the authors attributed to the five events from this year. The authors note that historically left actors have been “disorganized” with “limited skill,” as well as limited “effectiveness,” and that their attacks are of “limit[ed] scale and sophistication.” They also correctly note that “the typical target selection, scope and weapon selection of left-wing attackers reflect an intent to signal opposition or cause disruption rather than inflict mass casualties.”

However, paradoxically, the authors then go on to suggest that far-left extremism is a significant threat to public safety because the “recent increase [in plots and attacks] is likely to translate into realized violence.” If left-wing extremists typically do not inflict significant harm, why would recent events portend a future of highly lethal far-left violence? The five incidents detailed in the report do not provide compelling evidence that the far left is becoming increasingly organized and dangerous. Indeed, with the possible exception of a July 4 attack on an ICE detention facility in Texas, the incidents were low in tactical sophistication, were not carried out by organized groups, and were non-lethal. The report nonetheless uses these incidents to draw a moral and strategic equivalence between left-wing and right-wing violence, essentially framing the left as a rising concern equivalent to right-wing extremism that has persistently dominated the threat landscape.

The Complexity and Responsibility of Analyzing Political Violence

It is possible that politically motivated plots and attacks by far-left extremists are on the rise. But objective, robust data are needed to make that determination. Fortunately, there are other data that researchers can analyze to understand the current threat environment, and those sources suggest that it would be a mistake to pin recent increases in plots and attacks on a single group, movement, or ideology.

The Terrorism and Targeted Violence (T2V) in the United States dataset, for example, identified 154 terrorist plots and attacks that occurred in the first six months of 2025.* These incidents represent an 85 percent increase in terrorism when compared to the same period in 2024. The data also show a corresponding 343 percent increase in deaths and a 789 percent increase in injuries from the terrorist attacks that took place during that timeframe.

However, the T2V data, which are made available online for researchers to use and validate, reveal tremendous diversity in the motivations, targets, and ideological leanings of those who committed acts of terrorism this year. For example, there were at least 20 plots or attacks that targeted federal immigration enforcement officers or facilities in the first six months of the year. An argument can be made that these instances should be treated as far-left terrorism, though a closer assessment of each assailant’s motivation is needed to make that determination.

Other incidents in the T2V data were more likely animated by far-right motivations. There were 13 premeditated plots and attacks that targeted peaceful demonstrators who were protesting against these immigration enforcement actions and the broader expansion of executive power — acts that could arguably be categorized as driven by far-right extremism. A closer look at the attackers’ motivations, including any ideological beliefs, is necessary to make a determination.

There were also more than 30 plots and attacks with links to antisemitism, which can be driven by beliefs across the left-right ideological spectrum. Some of these were perpetrated by individuals who were upset over Israel’s actions in Gaza, which Byman and McCabe refer to as ethnonationalist terrorism but other commentators attribute to the far-left. Other antisemitic plots were perpetrated by adherents of far-right neo-Nazism. There were plots and attacks targeting both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. There was also violence perpetrated against LGBTQ+ and Muslim communities and a plethora of property crimes targeting Tesla owners.

Rather than pointing to one ideology as the cause of what feels like an increasingly dangerous environment, T2V’s data point to something worse: growing civil unrest from across the political spectrum that is the result of a vitriolic and mobilizing information environment, the increasingly zero-sum nature of U.S. politics, and the rapid abandonment of targeted violence research and violence prevention programs by the Trump administration.

Researchers have a profound responsibility to not only conduct research ethically but to also share it responsibly. This means considering word choices, avoiding logical fallacies, and clearly spelling out the implications of their work, especially in a highly polarized environment.

It is unsurprising that the CSIS report’s findings were quickly weaponized. For instance, the White House Deputy Press Secretary tweeted an image from an Axios summary of the report with a corresponding caption that blamed Democrats for a “30-year high” in leftwing terrorism.

The post received mocking comments from commentators noting that it ignored how right-wing activity still dominated the last three decades of political violence. (The grey bars in the chart above show attacks attributed to right-wing actors, while the yellow bar shows those attributed to left-wing actors.) Still, many Americans could easily be misled by the headlines generated by the report, especially if they do not evaluate its methodology and findings. The way the CSIS report was used highlights an essential responsibility for researchers in the current politicized era: maintaining methodological rigor and accurate interpretation of data to prevent the weaponization of findings for ideological and political ends.

*One of the authors of this piece, Michael Jensen, was formerly part of the team that produces the T2V dataset.

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In May 2025, federal authorities extradited Georgian national Michail Chkhikvishvili (aka “The Butcher”) on charges including soliciting hate crimes and acts of mass violence in New York City. According to the FBI, Chkhikvishvili is the leader of the Maniac Murder Cult (MKY), a transnational violent extremist group that “adheres to a neo-Nazi accelerationist ideology and promotes violence against racial minorities, the Jewish community and other groups it deems ‘undesirables.’” The charged offenses relate to a plot to conduct a mass casualty attack on New Year’s Eve involving, in part, a fake Santa Claus handing out candy laced with poison to Jewish children. To date, the United States has not designated MKY under any of its various counterterrorism sanctions programs. Yet on July 1, 2025, the United Kingdom’s Home Office announced plans to ban MKY under its proscription regime for providing instructional material on terrorist attack planning.

Although MKY poses a clear national security threat to both countries, each has chosen a different response. These divergent methods can be attributed, in part, to distinctions in the structure and criteria associated with each country’s designation authorities. But if the United States and the United Kingdom, along with other foreign partners similarly afflicted by the scourge of transnational violent extremism, could strategically deploy their respective counterterrorism proscription programs to deliberately target a common enemy, all would mutually benefit.

U.S. Counterterrorism Sanctions Programs

The United States uses two main sanctioning efforts against terrorists: the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list and the designation of groups and individuals as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) under the authority granted by Executive Order 13224. Although both methods can be applied to transnational violent extremist groups and individuals, only the SDGT option has been used to counter transnational far-right violent extremism.

Several peculiarities distinguish domestic terrorism from its international counterpart. Whereas the Secretary of State, pursuant to section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, may designate certain groups as “foreign terrorist organizations,” no authority presently exists for a similar designation of domestic terrorist organizations. Likewise, although federal law criminalizes the provision of material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations, no comparable sanction outlaws material support to domestic terrorist organizations. First Amendment jurisprudence largely necessitates this result. A line of case law in which the Supreme Court has taken pains to observe the “marked difference [in Executive authority] between foreign … and domestic affairs” also contributes to the pronounced distinction between domestic and international terrorism.

The FTO List

As noted above, the Secretary of State is vested with the authority to designate a group as an FTO. The Secretary makes this determination based on three criteria: (1) the organization is a foreign organization; (2) the organization engages in terrorist activity, or terrorism, or “retain the capability and intent to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism”; and (3) the terrorist activity or terrorism of the organization threatens the security of the U.S. nationals or the national security of the United States. International Islamic extremist organizations currently make up the bulk of groups designated under the FTO sanctions regime. The United States has yet to proscribe any transnational far right violent extremist groups as FTOs.

SDGT Designations

Although the SDGT process has broader application, it is primarily a counterterrorism finance tool designed to deny designated individuals and groups access to the U.S. financial system. Although the Secretary of the Treasury shares the authority to designate groups and individuals under Executive Order 13224, it is the Secretary of State who is charged with listing groups and individuals who have “committed or have attempted to commit, pose a significant risk of committing, or have participated in training to commit acts of terrorism that threaten the security of United States nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States; or … to be a leader of an entity.”

In April 2020, the State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) and several of its members of as SDGTs, marking the first time in history that the Department designated a transnational far right violent extremist group. Since then, the State Department has added two additional transnational far right violent extremist organizations to the SDGT list: the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) and the Terrorgram Collective.

Although a few foreign governments similarly have banned RIM, NRM and the Terrorgram Collective, the United States has conspicuously declined to list several of the most prominent domestic violent extremist organizations – such as The Base, Atomwaffen Division or the Proud Boys – even though all have considerable international dimensions. In addition, as the legal distinction between domestic and international terrorism begins to collapse, the number of transnational far right violent extremist groups operating in the United States with transnational links continues to grow exponentially.

Foreign Partners Step into the Breach

The Base, Atomwaffen Division and the Proud Boys have all enthusiastically embraced violence to advance their respective ideologies. Although each group originated in the United States, all have global aspirations and each currently has significant international dimensions. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has been reluctant to list these organizations, likely concluding that their respective activity does not squarely fit either the FTO or SDGT criteria. In addition, sanctioning far right groups raises political, constitutional and practical issues unique to the United States.

Luckily, America’s foreign partners have been far less reticent to employ their respective proscription regimes to target these malign actors. For example, Canada and the U.K. have listed Atomwaffen Division. Canada also has proscribed the Proud Boys as a terrorist group. The Base has attracted the most attention and is currently designated as a terrorist organization by Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands. The European Union (EU) also recently listed the Base, marking the first time it has designated a far right group as a terrorist entity.

Other foreign partners also have been very aggressive in listing far-right transnational violent extremist groups. Germany has banned over 50 far-right violent extremist organizations, including Combat 18 and Hammerskins Deutschland. Australia just recently listed the Terrorgram Collective, characterizing the online terror network as a “giant chat group dedicated to evil.” France has dissolved Generation Identitaire, a far-right “paramilitary” group linked to Brenton Tarrant, the gunman in the Christchurch mosque attack.

Although these individual efforts by other countries should be applauded, there are important distinctions in the criteria each uses to make designation determinations. Germany’s association ban framework, for example, is grounded in its Basic Law and operates under the principle of “militant democracy,” a standard unique to Germany that permits restrictions on associations whose activities contravene criminal law or are directed against the constitutional order or peaceful international relations (Völkerverständigung). Conversely, France does not have any formal, public list of designated terror groups but instead uses specific legislation on a case-by-case basis to dissolve groups or associations representing a significant security threat.

All this activity clearly reflects the growing international recognition of the threat posed by far-right transnational violent extremist groups and the increasing use of legal proscription as a counterterrorism tool. Designation regimes work. Coordinated designation regimes, strategically deployed by like-minded partners targeting a common enemy, might work even better.

Single Walls, Shared Fortress: The Value of Collective Action

Much of the scaffolding for closer collaboration is already in place. In addition to standard bilateral cooperation and intelligence-sharing in ongoing investigations, many countries have contributed to a variety of international efforts on issues related to transnational violent extremism.

The International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law (IIJ), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), the Council of Europe and other multilateral institutions all have brought countries together to develop a shared understanding of the ever-evolving threat and to foster dialogue on how to contend with it. These initiatives have produced several best practices guidelines and manuals, toolkits and other valuable resources. At the operational level, entities like Europol have coordinated measures like Referral Action Days (RAD), designed to tackle online violent extremist propaganda and terrorist content targeting minors. Europol also operates several Analysis Projects, one of which (AP Dolphin) serves as a kind of clearinghouse for intelligence on far-right violent extremist networks operating in the EU.

Despite the inevitable obstacles – such as lack of political will, institutional resistance between and among departments and agencies, and differing opinions on issues like free expression and association – the benefits of strategic collaboration on sanctions and proscription regimes clearly outweigh the costs. Coordinated, sequenced action using these systems allows for political signaling (acknowledging transnational violent extremism as threat vector worthy of attention); it freezes assets and curbs violent extremist financing; it isolates designated terrorist organizations internationally; it heightens public awareness of proscribed organizations and aids content moderation efforts. Most importantly, it denies transnational violent extremist groups safe harbor.

The foundation for future cooperation is in place. The next step is to build a durable framework to strategically leverage the full weight of each country’s individual authorities, including – crucially – proscription and sanctions regimes. The common target of this collective action are those transnational violent extremist groups whose violence extends across borders and impacts the lives of people all over the world. As with most things in life, working together is almost always better than going it alone.

The post A New Approach in the Fight Against Transnational Violent Extremism is Needed appeared first on Just Security.

Now charged with conspiring to carry out a terrorist attack, the teens’ plot is just one example of how fast, and how deeply, children and young people can be radicalized to violent extremism.

Security and intelligence agencies across the Five Eyes nations – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States – are observing a concerning rise in the involvement of children and young people in violent extremism related activities. But why?

We argue that the answer can be found in the distinctive vulnerabilities of youth – a transitional period in life that, together with current structural drivers, provides opportunities for new forms of violent extremism to emerge. This creates an enabling environment where rising numbers of children and young people are radicalizing to violent extremism and mobilizing to commit acts of terrorism. Children and young people are confronted with an unprecedented threat environment, one that is compounded by the rise of fluid and hybrid extremes, beliefs and behaviors that blur the boundaries between ideological forms of extremism, conspiratorial narratives, personal and public grievances, violent misogyny, child sexual abuse, extreme gore and violent subcultures, and even organized crime.

As such, we argue that applying an ideology-centric lens to understand why children and young people engage in violent extremism is ill-suited to countering the current trend. Instead, to effectively respond to the evolving threat landscape, prevention efforts must shift toward a model that addresses the systemic drivers and underlying causes of youth vulnerability to violent extremism.

The Vulnerabilities of Youth

Children and young people can be vulnerable to violent extremism in ways that differ from adults. The transition from childhood to adulthood is an important developmental stage characterized by identity formation, emotional volatility, moral development, and growing independence – a constellation of push and pull factors that have the potential to drive engagement with violent extremism. When young people face uncertainty or lack stable support systems, they may gravitate toward influences that offer clear rules, identity, and meaning. Extremist narratives, particularly those based on rigid us vs. them thinking, can appeal to youth who feel their group identity is threatened or who lack pro-social alternatives. These narratives often provide simplistic explanations for complex problems and promise a sense of purpose and significance.

Social dynamics can further increase vulnerability. Peer influence is especially strong during adolescence, as youth seek external validation and approval. Those with low self-esteem or weak peer connections may turn to extremist communities online, where interaction can become immersive and addictive. These communities offer recognition, status, and group identity – powerful incentives for engagement. The development of gender identity can also play a role. Boys and young men who feel they fall short of societal gender ideals may experience shame and resentment, sometimes channeled into hypermasculine or misogynistic beliefs. Extremist groups often strategically exploit these attitudes, reinforcing harmful gender norms and glorifying male dominance, aggression, and entitlement. These dynamics are evident in the growth of incel communities, where boys and young men channel feelings of rejection into misogynistic worldviews that glorify violence against women and girls. Incel and misogynistic beliefs have already inspired attacks around the world.

Adolescence is further marked by significant neurocognitive developments, including the ongoing maturation of self-regulation. During this time, self-regulation is not fully developed, rendering youth more prone to thrill-seeking, risk-taking, and impulsive behaviors. This can make violent extremist content particularly appealing. For neurodiverse youth, particularly those with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC), traits like focused interests and social communication differences can increase exposure to and engagement with extreme content, especially in unregulated online spaces. More generally, mental health struggles, combined with complex needs such as trauma, bullying, or family dysfunction, can further exacerbate vulnerability. These challenges can impact on emotional regulation and resilience, increasing the appeal of extremist groups that promise meaning, belonging, and power in their otherwise unstable lives.

There is no single “cause” of violent extremism. Instead, a complex mix of push and pull factors, which occur in certain settings and at certain times, creates the conditions conducive to youth vulnerability to violent extremism. In other words, it is the constellation of multiple compounding factors in space (online and offline) and time, that creates vulnerabilities for children and young people. To that end, the vulnerabilities we describe here do not exist in a vacuum, but instead are further compounded and influenced by the unique social context children and young people exist in.

Structural Drivers

Combined with the unique vulnerabilities of youth, the structural and social conditions facing today’s children and young people contribute to environments conducive to violent extremism. Failures in governance – such as political exclusion, corruption, and unresponsive institutions – can erode trust and leave young people feeling alienated and powerless. In environments where young people see limited pathways to participate meaningfully in society, extremist groups can fill the void, offering identity and the illusion of agency. When institutions are seen as unjust, violence can be framed as a legitimate means of change.

Economic hardship, including high youth unemployment and limited educational or career opportunities, can create chronic frustration, especially among marginalized or migrant youth who also face cultural exclusion and discrimination. The intersection of poverty and denied identity can deepen existential crises. Extremist narratives exploit these conditions by offering simple, black-and-white answers to complex problems.

International conflicts and global injustices are often personalized through online spaces, framing distant violence as local grievance. Youth exposed to polarizing debates may feel increasingly pushed out of society, fueling an us vs. them mentality. At the same time, the breakdown of community ties and family stability weakens protective social anchors, leaving youth more vulnerable to extremist influences.

Compounded by the increasing digitalization of children and young people’s lives, the current conditions are unique to the present generation. Online platforms now play a central role in young people’s lives, where we know extremist content spreads quickly through algorithm driven echo chambers and AI tools. Children and young people are increasingly exposed to unregulated online spaces that glorify violence and normalize extremist ideologies. The accessibility of such content lowers the barrier for recruitment and indoctrination.

Together, these systemic drivers foster a landscape in which children and young people are increasingly vulnerable to engagement in extremist violence.

The Emerging Violent Extremist Threat Landscape

Traditionally, the violent extremist threat facing the West centered around discrete and (somewhat) coherent ideologies, like jihadism or far-right extremism. However, today, we are confronted with a more fragmented and fluid landscape. Among children and young people, this is especially visible.

Many extremists no longer adhere to traditional ideologies but instead adopt hybrid or ambiguous narratives that combine elements from different belief systems. These narratives can be linked through shared grievances, symbols, and online communities, and cultivated to target youth specifically, creating a cross-pollination of extremist ideas. This is particularly visible across decentralized online networks such as Terrorgram[1], or the Com[2], where online subcultures such as 764[3] exist. The loosely networked communities borrow aesthetics from accelerationist and cultish groups, such as Order of Nine Angles[4], strategy from organized crime Com groups (such as swotting, doxxing, and sextortion), and bridge the terror-crime nexus through child sexual abuse and inciting offline violence.

While targeting children and young people is not new, the scale and speed enabled by technology has transformed extremist recruitment and dissemination strategies. Digital ecosystems now play a central role in youth engagement in violent extremism. Online, extremist content is purposefully aestheticized and gamified, making violence appear exciting or heroic. Tactics such as live-streamed attacks and gaming-style framing (e.g., first-person shooter views), glamorize mass violence and appeal to young users. The Christchurch shooter, for example, used video game aesthetics to engage a young audience. Extremist messages are also masked as humor through memes or edgy content, making them more acceptable and even appealing to young people. The intentional use of irony and satire desensitizes youth to violence by normalizing extremist views and fostering a sense of belonging within online communities. Over time, this content erodes moral boundaries and can lead to deeper involvement in harmful online communities and the acceptance of violent extremist narratives.

Extremist material online easily crosses physical borders and is shared and adopted by youth on a global scale, contributing to the rise of transnational extremist subcultures. These digital communities promote a shared language and aesthetics, helping young people find identity and validation in extremist spaces. The result is a more complex and borderless threat environment, where local grievances are amplified by global narratives, and youth are increasingly exposed to violent extremism through interconnected online ecosystems.

Conclusion

Taken together, we argue that individual vulnerabilities combined with the unique social context facing today’s young people have created the necessary conditions for increasing youth violent extremism. However, the increasing proportion of young people involved in violence is not just a symptom of the problem, but also a cause, as youth people are actively driving the emergence of new and more violent forms of extremism. In other words, young people’s involvement in today’s threat landscape is not only a danger to themselves, but at scale, it is reshaping the extremist ecosystem, accelerating the emergence of new extremes and lowering the barriers for others to enter radicalizing environments.

To tackle this threat, responses need to move beyond an ideology-centric lens. Rather than simply treating radical beliefs, a more effective and sustainable solution is needed. Such an approach would treat the root causes of youth vulnerability and target the environments that allow extremism to flourish, thereby tackling the multiple causes of the problem. Without such a shift in preventing and countering violent extremism, society runs the risk of children and young people continuing to be drawn into the cycles of harm that deepen and accelerate the terrorism threat.

[1] Terrorgram is a transnational terrorist group that primarily operates on the social media and digital messaging platform Telegram.

[2] The Com is a primarily English speaking, international, online ecosystem comprised of multiple interconnected networks whose members, many of whom are minors, engage in a variety of criminal violations.

[3] 764 is a network of nihilistic violent extremists who engage in criminal conduct in the United States and abroad, seeking to destroy civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors.

[4] The Order of Nine Angles (O9A) is a decentralized, satanic, neo-Nazi organization.

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