When the State Decides Who Is a Terrorist
By: Jeremy Loffredo
Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the United States would begin directing its counterterrorism efforts toward what he called “far-left political terrorism.” For nearly twenty-five years, counterterrorism has provided the legal and political justification for some of the broadest powers exercised by the American state, encompassing intelligence surveillance, financial monitoring, Joint Terrorism Task Force investigations, terrorist watchlists, material-support prosecutions, and military operations overseas. Florida has already begun translating that framework into state law.
On the first morning a new Florida law took effect allowing state officials to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups, Governor Ron DeSantis stood at the Tampa office of the state prosecutor and announced that Florida was designating a domestic civil rights nonprofit, an anti-fascist movement, and a religious organization as domestic terrorist organizations, placing them on a state blacklist alongside more than ninety foreign groups that included Mexican drug cartels and a branch of the Iranian military. The machinery came from two bills the legislature passed in March, HB 1471, “Systems of Law and Terrorist Organizations,” and its companion HB 1473, “Public Records/Terrorist Organizations.” The first lets one appointed official, the head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, designate an organization as a domestic or foreign terrorist group, subject to approval by the governor and cabinet, with no criminal charge, no evidentiary standard, and no hearing before a neutral decisionmaker before the label and its penalties take hold. The second exempts the evidence behind a designation from Florida’s public records law, so that a group told it’s now a terrorist organization cannot see the case the state built against it.
Both bills were written by the same legislator, Representative Hillary Cassel of Dania Beach, and the pairing’s the point. HB 1471 creates a designation that carries criminal and financial consequences, lets the state administratively dissolve the group, and makes it a crime to knowingly provide it material support. HB 1473 makes the basis for that designation secret, so that a group cannot rebut what it’s not permitted to see, and the state can shield anything it deems “critical to state or national security,” which is to say anything it chooses. Cassel told a House committee that the measure “protects” free speech.
There’s no federal process to brand a domestic organization a terrorist group, which is what makes Florida’s move unprecedented, and it is also what makes it worth watching, because a measure a single state can prove workable, defend through a friendlier appeals court, and normalize before the rest of the country is paying attention can become a template for the country. Washington already looks to be reaching for the same tool. Over the past year the Trump administration has built the apparatus and signaled the intent, prosecuting protesters at a Texas immigration detention center as domestic terrorists and issuing a presidential directive that treats dissent itself as a security threat. Florida has now built the piece the federal government does not yet have, a working list, and it did so in the same months, aimed at the same targets, on the same premise, that the government can attach the word “terrorist” to its political opponents by decree rather than prove the charge in a courtroom.
Trump’s memorandum
That directive is National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which President Donald Trump issued on September 25, 2025, expanding on an executive order he had signed three days earlier that purported to designate the loosely defined movement known as antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the memorandum claims that recent political violence in the United States isn’t a scattering of separate crimes but a coordinated campaign requiring a new law enforcement strategy, and it says that campaign is driven by a set of beliefs it lists as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for overthrowing the government, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility toward those holding what the document calls traditional views on family, religion, and morality.
The memorandum tells the Treasury Secretary and the IRS commissioner to find and choke off the financial networks and tax-exempt entities it assumes are funding this violence, orders the Justice Department to prosecute every federal crime its investigations turn up, and puts the roughly two hundred FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces in charge of a national strategy to investigate and dismantle the organizations, funders, and officers it holds responsible. The day it was signed, FBI Director Kash Patel described the plan in blunter terms, saying the government would follow the money and chase down its targets “like the domestic terrorists that they are.”
The Brennan Center for Justice, which has studied the government’s counterterrorism apparatus for more than a decade, concluded that the antifa order and NSPM-7 are both ungrounded in fact and law, faulting the president for citing no statute or constitutional provision to support his claim of authority and noting that Congress and the Supreme Court authorized the designation of foreign terrorist organizations while refusing to extend that power to domestic groups. Faiza Patel and her colleagues at the center noted that the memorandum opens by piling up a mix of incidents, some genuinely criminal and some constitutionally protected, then treats the whole pile as proof of a conspiracy its own text never establishes.
The FBI mission center
A presidential memorandum only states intent, and what’s given NSPM-7 teeth is the enforcement apparatus federal agencies have quietly built around it. In December, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an implementation memo ordering prosecutors and the FBI to investigate so-called extremist groups, including for possible tax offenses, to compile a list of entities that might be labeled domestic terrorist organizations, and to review their files for any antifa-related intelligence and hand it to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The memo lists more than twenty statutes prosecutors are told to reach for, among them the federal material-support-for-terrorism law and the racketeering statute built for organized crime.
The independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, whose reporting has tracked the directive more closely than any mainstream outlet, revealed in April, going through the administration’s budget request, that the FBI had created an “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center” staffed by personnel from ten federal agencies and charged with proactively identifying and prosecuting the people the memorandum targets, a center whose stated job is to fuse intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis into a pre-crime unit aimed at political belief. Klippenstein made the point that has stuck, that the media had barely covered NSPM-7 at all even as the bureau reorganized itself around it, letting one of the largest expansions of domestic surveillance authority in decades unfold with almost no public scrutiny.
He also flagged language in the underlying documents warning of what they call a “Red-Green alliance,” a term he read as an attempt to cast the American left and Muslims as conspiratorially aligned, and this is where the separate strands of the crackdown meet, because the movements most exposed to the new machinery are the ones organizing against the war in Gaza and for Palestinian rights.
The anti-boycott decade
This isn’t the first time the government has turned its machinery against Americans for the specific offense of criticizing Israel, and the terrorism designations now arriving are the newest and harshest layer of a project that’s been building, with support from both parties, for a decade. Starting in 2015, state legislatures moved fast and with near-identical text to pass anti-boycott laws aimed at the Palestinian-led movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, much of it advanced by pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Heritage Foundation, and more than thirty states now condition public contracts and investments on a pledge not to boycott Israel, leaving a speech pathologist, a schoolteacher, a lawyer, and a newspaper each staring at a signed loyalty oath as the price of their work. Federal district courts in Arkansas, Arizona, Kansas, Georgia, and Texas found those pledges likely unconstitutional, ruling that the right to join a political boycott runs straight back to the civil rights movement and sits at the core of the First Amendment, and each time the legislature simply rewrote the statute to carve out the plaintiff and kill the lawsuit rather than drop the effort.
The line from those laws to the designations DeSantis has now issued runs through one organization. The Council on American-Islamic Relations brought or backed several of the early boycott challenges, suing Arizona in 2018 and Maryland in 2019 and representing the filmmaker Abby Martin against Georgia in 2020, and it’s the same group DeSantis has now moved to brand a terrorist organization. The logic has held steady across all of it, that speech and association on behalf of Palestinians can be treated as something less than protected expression as long as the state attaches a grave enough label to it. Only the severity has changed. A decade ago the penalty for the disfavored view was a lost contract. Now, in Florida and increasingly in the federal apparatus, the penalty is the terrorist label itself, along with the criminal charges and financial isolation that come with it.
Hillary Cassel
That Florida’s law was authored by Hillary Cassel is worth sitting with, because Cassel spent most of her career as a Democrat and switched parties in December 2024, saying she could no longer stay in a party she faulted for its “failure to unequivocally support Israel.” A year later she wrote the bills that let Florida brand a Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization and keep the evidence sealed. The provenance doesn’t by itself prove intent, but it’s difficult to read the sequence, the stated motive, the target, and the secrecy provision, as anything other than a law built to do what its author left one party in order to accomplish.
DeSantis has defended the designations as resting on conduct rather than viewpoint, saying the state had to draw a strong line in the sand and describing the targeted movements by their actions rather than their ideas, and his office calls HB 1471 a set of common-sense tools for keeping public money away from extremist groups while protecting Floridians’ constitutional rights. A federal judge has already doubted that account once, enjoining the governor’s earlier executive-order version of the same designation in March on the ground that it likely violated the First Amendment by coercing third parties into cutting ties with a group over its protected speech, and civil liberties lawyers are back in court against the statute written to replace it, arguing that it hands the executive branch unbridled discretion to punish and silence organizations on nothing more than an official’s say-so.
The danger does not depend on which group Florida reached for first. A state that can brand its critics terrorists without a charge, a trial, or a standard of proof has taken a power that will not stay fixed on the targets that happen to be convenient today, and if it survives its test run in Florida it will not stay in Florida. Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement of solidarity with the targeted groups, warned against treating the Florida scheme as a mere deviation from otherwise legitimate national-security powers, calling it instead the fulfillment of “a logic inherent in the architecture of the anti-terror regime,” which hands the executive unilateral authority to render its opponents radioactive. The constitutional protections now being tested were written for exactly the groups a government is most eager to place beyond them. The question raised by NSPM-7, and by the Florida law built in its image, shows what the machinery does once it runs, is whether the government should hold the power to decide that by decree at all.