Secretary of State Marco Rubio will host foreign nations next week in a summit to discuss counterterrorism efforts.
Leaders from over 60 nations are invited to the meeting, which will discuss efforts to counter antifa, a decentralized political movement that the Trump administration has designated as a domestic terrorist organization.
Antifa is loosely defined and its members espouse revolutionary political ideologies such as anarchism, communism and other left-wing ideas.
In November of last year, the State Department labeled four European antifa groups as terrorists, which prevents Americans from providing the group with material support.
“If there’s anybody involved in activities such as (fire bombing) that could potentially inspire or lead to violence in the United States, we’re going to designate them (as terrorist groups),” Rubio said to White House reporters following the designations in November.
The State Department sent invitations to countries across the world, including in Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Trump administration rolls out counterterrorism strategy
The Trump administration has made going after antifa a central part of its counterterrorism effort.
In October of last year, President Donald Trump held a roundtable on antifa at the White House.
“It should be clear to all Americans,” said Trump at the roundtable, “that we have a very serious left-wing terror threat in our country: Radicals associated with the domestic terror group antifa.”
“Other far-left extremists have been carrying out a campaign of violence against ICE agents and other officials charged with enforcing federal law,” the president continued.
Trump’s counterterrorism strategy, signed in May of this year, states that the administration will identify and counteract “violent, secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically transgender or anarchist, such as Antifa.”
The strategy also says that it “will not permit the weaponization of America’s unparalleled CT capabilities for partisan purposes.”
In their efforts to combat antifa, the administration began looking to different designations that would help it identify and counteract members of the organization.
The Washington Post reported that three current and former U.S. officials said Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, has been considering labeling antifa as a foreign terrorist organization. Doing so could “unlock certain investigative tools,” the officials said.
The same officials told The Washington Post that they feared that use of these labels could embolden future Democratic administrations to go after conservative movements.