A month after
Donald Trump issued an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist group, an intelligence unit inside the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office in Florida sent out a confidential bulletin.
Trump’s announcement was widely criticized as a
legally baseless attempt
to
criminalize
his enemies on the left, but the Southeast Florida Fusion Center took it very seriously.
Citing sources that included right-wing social media accounts, the bulletin described antifa as a “decentralized autonomous network of cells” that “stand against capitalism and want to overthrow governments they feel are oppressive through violence and silence their opposition by any means necessary.”
“Antifa has been very active, their most prevalent presence during the George Floyd riots and recently during the anti-ICE protests,” it said, citing the 2020
national uprising against police brutality
and the protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that
followed
Trump’s rise to power.
The
Miami-Dade bulletin
went on to describe the National Lawyers Guild — a
left-leaning
collective once villainized by Joseph McCarthy — as the “legal representative” of antifa. It also warned about the danger of zines as tools to “recruit new sympathizers” and of inflatable animal costumes as a “form of propaganda implemented by Antifa to soften their image.”
Trump’s Communist Boogeyman Playbook: Charging Protesters as Terrorists
It was just one example of how, as the administration accelerates its crackdown on left-wing organizers, Trump’s
push to paint antifa as a terror group
has seeped into local law enforcement.
Previously unreported documents obtained by The Intercept show how local fusion centers are borrowing the tone and some of the language of Trump’s invectives against the left. They draw on his September 22
executive order
designating antifa as terrorists and on prosecutions launched after a similar but more
wide-reach
… [more]
