Antifa has been a boil on the backside of the U.S. for a few years now. Whenever they show up, whether it be at a protest or an organized event, nothing productive ever comes from their presence.
Amid reports that different groups associated with the far-left Antifa have played a large role in the level of destruction during country-wide riots following the death of George Floyd, President Donald Trump sent out a Sunday tweet announcing that the U.S. “will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”
The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2020
For those of us that have been aware of Antifa's actions for a while now, the following description from Deadline of the possible use of the USA Patriot Act might shed some light on how the Trump administration would be able to make such a designation (You can see the information directly from the ACLU here):
The American Civil Liberties Union said on its website that the USA Patriot Act “expanded the definition of terrorism to cover “”domestic,”” as opposed to international, terrorism. A person engages in domestic terrorism if they do an act “dangerous to human life” that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if the act appears to be intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.
Antifa has their activities classified as “domestic terrorist violence” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2017.
According to a September 1, 2017 POLITICO article:
Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.