Cover: Left: The 2002 Congressional hearing on ‘eco-terrorism’ that launched the Green Scare. Right: The Trump administration’s 2025 presidential memorandum targeting domestic ‘terrorists.’
Thomas Zeitzoff || Shortly after Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, Cameron,* a military veteran, climate organizer, and activist in the Pacific Northwest, made a prediction to me when we spoke on the encrypted app, Signal: “Antifa will be the boogeyman.” He told me that the Trump Department of Justice will investigate non-profits for tax crimes, and anybody remotely connected to left-wing protesters. Even those who just engage in critical speech, or peaceful protests, will be tarred as part of a radical Antifa conspiracy.
Cameron’s warning proved eerily prescient. On September 22, 2025 President Trump signed an executive order declaring “Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.” Unlike foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), there is no formal domestic terrorist designation. Just three days later, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) that laid out his administration’s view that there is a shadowy network of left-wing, Antifa-affiliated terrorists and non-profits seeking to disrupt and overthrow U.S. democracy.
Guided by this memorandum, the Department of Justice has refocused the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces on identifying and dismantling left-wing activist networks under the guise of going after “Antifa terrorists.” The terrorism label isn’t just a smear. It’s a formal designation that provides justification for harsher repression and intimidation of civil society and opposition, designed to turn the public against its targets.
In the past couple of months, it’s become clear what the federal law enforcement focus on the “Antifa threat” means in practice. The administration has been quick to label legal observers or those protesting immigration enforcement actions as “domestic terrorists.” As NBC and WIRED have reported, federal immigration agents have been seen using smart phones with facial recognition technology like the Mobile Fortify app, to scan the faces of immigrants, citizen legal observers, and protesters alike.
In Minneapolis, one of the main targets of federal immigration agents, defense lawyers have noted the recent rise in felony charges against ICE observers for impeding or assaulting agents. This tracks with Reuters reporting that prosecutions of people charged with interfering with federal officers have doubled since the uptick in immigration enforcement under Trump began in 2025. While many of the felony charges have been later reduced to misdemeanors, those accused are still forced to give DNA swabs and attend hearings.
On February 3, 2026 Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey sent a letter to Todd Lyons, the Acting Director of ICE, to raise concern about the widespread use of facial recognition surveillance, and asked whether it was being used to put together a “domestic terror database” of those protesting against ICE. In a recent House hearing, Lyons denied that such a database exists.
It’s not just been anti-ICE activists. The New York Times reported that in January and February activists from the climate group Extinction Rebellion have been visited in their homes by FBI agents. But critics see it as a clear pattern by the Trump administration to criminalize dissent, and label opposition activists as domestic terrorists.
So what happens to a social movement when protestors and activists get labeled as terrorists? The radical environmental movement provides some clues.
Twenty-four years ago, and just five months after 9/11, FBI Domestic Terrorism Chief James F. Jarboe appeared before a House subcommittee oversight hearing. The topic of the hearing was “eco-terrorism.” In his testimony Jarboe made the case for why leaderless radical environmental and animal rights groups—like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF)—that engaged in sabotage and property destruction were the number one domestic terror threats, even though they hadn’t killed anybody.
Jarboe’s testimony was a signal of repression to come. By the end of the decade a multi-year, multi-jurisdictional taskforce known as Operation Backfire, along with a well-placed informant, would destroy the ELF/ALF cells. More than 15 people were convicted and sentenced to 3-15 years in prison following plea deals. Activists would refer to this period as the Green Scare and its effects still linger to this day.
In interviews with more than 100 environmental activists and experts for my book, No Option But Sabotage, it became clear that activists took their security precautions seriously. Activists extensively vetted people in their groups, or even academics like myself who wanted to interview them. For example, one anti-pipeline activist wanted to see my faculty ID before she would talk to me to make sure I wasn’t law enforcement. Many, like Cameron, would only talk on encrypted platforms like Signal, and preferred I give them a pseudonym. Some refused to tell me their name at all, and told me to call them by their pseudonymous “forest name”—a common practice among activists carrying out actions to avoid prosecution. Current activists were also leery of talking about any action that involved property destruction or sabotage, preferring to talk in hypotheticals or generalities. These practices are hard-fought lessons from the Green Scare, and together activists refer to them by the umbrella term “security culture.”
How are activists responding to the terrorism label now? So far there’s been a diversity of tactics: from general strikes in Minneapolis, school walkouts, and protest theater. One movement activist who specializes in information security told me they’d been heartened by the discipline of activists to confront federal immigration officers while also avoiding “smashy-smashy” actions—like breaking windows, burning cars, or other tactics that could garner more repression.
Beneath the surface there’s a real tension for activists. As Cameron told me, “they’ve been calling us terrorists for 25 f–king years [going back to the Green Scare],” so to him, the terrorism label was nothing new. But he still was concerned about the possibility of terrorism enhancement charges being levied against protesters.
Back in 2022 I chatted with an activist who had been involved in the radical environmental hotbed of the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s. He made a point that the Green Scare wasn’t just about arrests. It was the subpoenas of any activist remotely connected to the radical environmental movement. Activists were rightly jittery about being accused of being terrorists, so many left the scene all together, and in his words “the movement died.”
A similar anxiety hangs over current activists according to Tim, a long-time left-wing activist and organizer. He told me that in the anarchist and antifascist world people are stressed out. They have plenty of reasons to be concerned. FBI Director Kash Patel said in late January 2026 that it was investigating left-wing Signal chat groups used to document and track immigration agents. And as Reuters reports, ICE has been compiling an internal list of anti-ICE protesters with names, photos, license plates along with a list of “suspicious actions.” Tim also believed that more radical activists are “laying low” because of the targeting. It’s why he said the anti-Trump No Kings rallies skewed older. To Tim, younger, more radical activists aren’t willing to risk public protests, but older, white liberals could. But he also is heartened by the school walkouts opposed to ICE. He cynically mused whether Trump would “start labeling high school kids [that walked out] as ‘terrorists.’”
The terrorism label still looms over current climate activists. The Trump administration has rolled back and drastically reduced the role of the EPA, killed or stalled many new renewable energy projects, and opened up public lands to mining and drilling. At the same time, it has promised to go after left-wing activists. Will the threat of repression scare activists, or radicalize them? Will they stay focused on climate, or will they shift to anti-ICE protests and democracy concerns?
The answer, according to Tim, is that they can’t have an environmental movement if the U.S. is no longer a democracy. So many of the radical environmental activists I interviewed for my book have now shifted into pro-democracy and anti-ICE activism. As Tim said, democracy is a precondition for doing climate work, so activists have to “do both.”
Alicia, a climate justice activist, is one of those who has shifted into anti-ICE activism. She told me that the “terrorism” label didn’t scare her and that it was part of a familiar playbook. To Alicia, the label was also a form of gaslighting by recasting the victim as the aggressor. In her view, ICE and federal agents are a threat to her community, and she and other activists are simply defending their neighbors.
Bernard has been a part of radical environmental campaigns in the Pacific Northwest since the early 2000s. Since Trump’s election, he has become involved in anti-ICE and anti-Trump actions. Bernard knows the terrorism label means fewer institutional constraints, more surveillance, harsher charges, and more forceful repression. But after two decades as an activist, he isn’t sure he feels optimistic or pessimistic. “I feel like we’ve succeeded in creating a situation where a lot of things feel possible,” he told me. “And that’s all I could have asked for.”
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