What is Antifa and why is Donald Trump targeting it?

US President Donald Trump said he would designate an antifa as a “major terrorist organization” as part of his efforts to target the “radical left”, after the murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

In an article on his Truth social platform, Trump qualified the group as a dangerous, dangerous and dangerous left-wing disaster and left that the group was “fully studied”.

Antifa – A decentralized and left -wing movement that opposes far -right groups, racist and fascist – has long attracted Trump’s anger.

But the experts quickly asked how the president will really target the group, which does not have a separate leader, membership or structure list. In 2020, the director of the FBI era, Christopher Wray, told Congress that Antifa was better defined as an ideology than as a formal organization.

Antifa has remained a popular touchstone for certain right-wing influencers and politicians who argue that it is a key element of a leftist network which, according to them, seeks to undermine the United States, freedom of expression and firearms.

Antifa is short for the anti-fascist. It is a loose and without leaders affiliation of activists mainly on the left.

The word antifa comes from the German word “antifaschistisch”, a reference to a German anti-fascist group in the 1930s.

While the existence of an antifa in the United States dates back decades, she gained importance after Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016 and the far-right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, where various anti-fascist groups began to meet.

Since then, activists identifying themselves in Antifa have regularly clashed with right-wing groups, both in online animated arguments and also in physical altercations across the United States.

The absence of a centralized organization means that antifa cells tend to form organically, both in line and offline, and its activists include anarchists, the Communists and the socialists who largely share anti-government, anti-capitalist, pro-LGBTQ and pro-immigration views.

But Antifa is sometimes used as a state of conservative politicians and commentators to include other liberal and left groups to which they are politically opposed.

Critics say that what distinguishes antifa from traditional left -wing groups is the will of some of its activists to use violence to continue their cause, which they in turn claim are in a state of self -defense.

Activists often dress in dark clothes and cover their faces in public. Online videos consulted by the BBC show transport clubs, shields, sticks and pepper spray in gatherings.

In 2017, a hundred masked activists carrying panels and flags linked to the antif attacked a group of right -wing demonstrators in Berkeley, California, causing multiple arrests.

During the troubles that broke out in the United States after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, an autoproclamed anti-faded activist, Michael Reinoehl, 48, killed and killed a supporter of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group in the Portland region. Reinoehl was then killed by the police.

Anti -fascist activists also regularly release the identities and personal details of those they deem far -right activists. Tactics – commonly known as “doxxing” – aims to have people of their work and otherwise socially ostracized.

In the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, the BBC Verify has seen messages from certain members of self -identified antifa – on Reddit and X – defending the shooting.

Trump did not say how he planned to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization and we asked for more details in the White House.

The American government can designate a group as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) – “legal criteria” for this indicates that the targeted group “must be a foreign organization”.

An FTO designation means that members of a group can be prohibited from the United States or withdrawn from the country and gives the government the power to seize funding and target donors.

The State Department lists the current FTOs, which include groups like Isis and, more and more, drug cartels from Latin America.

But we do not know how these powers could be extended to Antifa.

“There is no legal mechanism which I am aware of which would officially establish a group as a national terrorist organization,” said Luke Baumgartner, researcher on the program of George Washington University on extremism, told us.

“As far as I know, it is just a proclamation on social truth, which means nothing, and unless the congress wants to take concrete measures, I do not see this happening,” he said.

Other legal experts who spoke to the BBC verify that the rights to freedom of expression under the first amendment to the American Constitution could limit Trump’s ability to implement the designation.

Professor David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, said: “The first amendment protects the right of association, which encompasses the right of individuals to train groups and prohibits the government from interfering with the operations of these groups, unless, of course, violated the law.”

“The designation by the president of such a group as a” major terrorist organization “does not change these fundamental constitutional rights,” he added.

Brad Evans – Professor of political violence at the University of Bath – warned that the lack of antifa of organizational structure and membership “offers a remarkable opportunity to extend the [government’s] Return and apply it to anyone who can be supposed to belong to an ill-defined organization “.

“This means that anyone suspected of belonging to Antifa should refute his association. The dangers of overcoming are too apparent.”

Other legal experts have asked why the Trump administration cannot challenge antifa under existing legislation to combat crimes such as incentive to violence.

This is not the first time that Trump has targeted Antifa – he said that he would declare the group a terrorist organization in 2020 but that he would not follow him at the time.

His last intervention is part of a broader campaign against the “radical left” after the murder of Charlie Kirk, the declaring president: “radical political violence has injured too many innocent people and has taken too many lives.”

The authorities said that Tyler Robinson – who is accused of Kirk’s murder – had a “left -wing ideology” but did not provide a lot of details and he was not directly linked to Antifa.

This week, the United States Ministry of Justice (DOJ) abolished a study on political violence in America which concluded that extremely right extremism was ahead of “all other types of violent extremism”.

The BBC asked the DoJ why the study, published in 2024 by the department’s research agency, had been deleted. He said he had “no comments”.

BBC VERIFY examined five independent studies that have examined political motivation attacks in the United States going up decades, which suggests that there has been more cases of political violence in the United States committed by people who have attributed a right-wing ideology by researchers than on the left.

However, as there is no coherent or universal definition of “right” or “left” ideology, it is difficult to measure the tendencies of political violence over time.

Professor Robert Pape, of the University of Chicago, said that the last years had seen “historical heights in political assassinations and assassination attempts” – with republican politicians and targeted democrats.

“What we see in our data on what is happening when a political leader blames a part for violence is that it produces more support for political violence, no less,” he added.

Additional Mike Wendling report, Matt Murphy and Lucy Gilder