Trump Announces New Executive Order to Dismantle Antifa

President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he would be signing a new executive order to dismantle Antifa networks in the United States.

“We have already declared ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization, and I will be signing an Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, referencing an executive order he signed earlier this week to declare the far-left group a domestic terrorist organization.

Individuals who identify themselves with Antifa have engaged in violence during protests, particularly those related to Black Lives Matter or opposing Trump. They generally subscribed to extreme political views that are communist or anarchist.

Antifa was initially part of the Soviet Union’s front operations to bring about communist dictatorship in Germany, and it worked to label all rival parties as “fascist.”

The organization can be traced to the “united front” of the Soviet Union’s Communist International (Comintern) during the Third World Congress in Moscow in June and July 1921, according to the German booklet “80 Years of Anti-Fascist Action” by Bernd Langer, published by the Association for the Promotion of Anti-Fascist Culture. Langer is a former member of the Autonome Antifa, formerly one of Germany’s largest Antifa organizations, which disbanded in 2004.

The idea of the united front strategy was to bring together left-wing organizations in order to incite communist revolution. The Soviets believed that after Russia’s revolution in 1917, communism would next spread to Germany, since Germany had the second-largest communist party, the KPD (Communist Party of Germany).

In the United States, it gained popularity with far-left wing activists after Trump was elected for his first term in 2016.

In a Sept. 22 executive order, Trump described Antifa as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” Trump declared the group a domestic terrorist organization.

However, as a domestic entity, Antifa isn’t eligible for inclusion in the U.S. State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations. Despite some calls over the years for the federal government to create an equivalent domestic terrorist designation system, these efforts have faltered due to First Amendment concerns.

Trump’s latest announcement followed a shooting at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility that left one dead and two injured. All three victims in the facility were being detained there, and no law enforcement officers were harmed in the Wednesday attack. The suspect died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Trump stated in the same post on Truth Social that the attack was the latest instance of left-wing violence, coming two weeks after the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.

“The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped,” Trump said.

In all capital letters, Trump called on Democrats to “stop this rhetoric against ICE and America’s law enforcement, right now.”

In the post, Trump also referenced findings by the FBI that the shooter had written a message critical of ICE on one of the shell casings used by the shooter. FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in an X post that an “initial review of the evidence” shows an ideological motive behind the attack.

“One of the unspent shell casings recovered was engraved with the phrase ‘ANTI ICE,'” Patel wrote.

Speaking about the attack, Trump said, “The Brave Men and Women of ICE are just trying to do their jobs, and remove the ‘WORST of the WORST’ Criminals out of our Country, but they are facing an unprecedented increase in threats, violence, and attacks by Deranged Radical Leftists.”

He attributed a rise in violence to what he said are “Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to ‘Nazis.'”