Having designated “Antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” President Donald Trump is expected soon to sign an executive order seeking to “dismantle” what he is calling domestic terror “networks” in the wake of a deadly shooting this week at an immigration facility in Texas.
Trump has solely blamed Democratic officials and left-leaning groups for incidents of political violence while largely dismissing evidence against right-wing or other ideologically motivated attacks.
Administration officials have repeatedly argued that Trump’s political opponents are fueling a surge of threats against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents tasked with carrying out his mass deportation agenda.
In remarks from the White House Thursday, the president claimed Democratic officials and “radical left rhetoric” are “out of control” and “will get to a point where people won’t take it anymore.”
“It’s gonna get worse, and ultimately it’s gonna go back on them,” Trump said, before issuing a thinly veiled threat.
“Bad things happen when they play these games. And I’ll give you a little clue: the right is a lot tougher than the left. But the right’s not doing this … and they better not get them energized, because it won’t be good for the left,” Trump warned. “And I don’t want to see that happen, either. … Radical left Democrats are causing this problem, and it gets worse. It will get to a point where people won’t take it anymore.”
On his Truth Social platform Wednesday, Trump explicitly blamed the shooting in Dallas on “Radical Left Democrats” who are “constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to ‘Nazis.’”
Before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, alleged gunman Joshua Jahn, 29, shot three ICE detainees, killing one. No federal or local law enforcement officer was harmed.
Within minutes of the shooting, FBI director Kash Patel said there was an “idealogical [sic] motive” behind the attack, and posted an image on X showing four unspent shell casings, with one reading “ANTI ICE” in blue ink. Vice President JD Vance also stated “we know that this person was politically motivated.”
“I AM CALLING ON ALL DEMOCRATS TO STOP THIS RHETORIC AGAINST ICE AND AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT, RIGHT NOW!” Trump said Wednesday.
The administration is “fully rooting out the Left Wing Domestic Terrorism that is terrorizing our Country,” he said.
The Independent has requested comment from the White House.
Trump’s executive order labeling “Antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization” drew warnings from First Amendment experts and civil rights groups that the president is using the label as a cudgel against left-wing opposition.
The president’s order singles out an antifascist movement and the people who financially support it, though there is no “domestic terrorist organization” designation under U.S. law, and “Antifa” is not a specific organization but a term that encompasses a wider ideologically driven movement against fascism. It’s not clear what legal weight, if any, the order will have.
The latest threats follow months of lawsuits, criminal investigations and arrests targeting his political opponents, international students, media companies and the lawyers and legal groups that support them in a government-wide crackdown on dissent.
The order also follows his instructions to the Department of Justice to immediately prosecute his political enemies as he threatens protesters and donors to progressive groups after the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Top Justice Department officials are reportedly demanding federal prosecutors across the country launch investigations into billionaire philanthropist George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
Trump’s latest directives could also force left-leaning donor networks supporting Democratic campaigns and causes to reconsider, pause or withdraw funding over fears that the Trump administration could try to connect them to protests if “Antifa” is present, or if prosecutors consider the organizations “Antifa” themselves, solely because of their political affiliation.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has suggested that the developers of an app that allows users to crowd source ICE location data could be targeted by the administration. The suspected gunman in Texas allegedly “searched apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents,” according to Patel.
News organizations that reported on the app are “complicit” in threats against ICE, Leavitt claimed Monday.
“We see it every day — they are quick to write a fake story portraying ICE in a negative light, often omitting the real facts of these cases, and they hardly ever write about the vicious criminals that ICE is arresting every day to make our country safer,” Leavitt said.
Between the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol and the 2024 election, there were at least 300 cases of political violence in the U.S., marking the largest surge in such attacks since the 1970s, according to a Reuters analysis.
Yet a large body of research has found that right-wing extremists have killed more people than those associated with any other political cause in the United States within the last two decades, though many of those attacks don’t map neatly onto one political ideology.
The FBI is now exploring links between high-profile acts of political violence as the actions of “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” under a wider investigation into “domestic terrorism” that avoids partisan framing.
