Months of violent left-wing anti-ICE rhetoric achieved its apparently desired end state this week as an alleged Antifa cell conducted an attempted assassination of police officers outside the Praireland Detention Center, being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a detention facility for illegal aliens.
On July 4, 11 black-garbed individuals, some equipped with body armor, ammunition, and firearms, conducted what the Department of Justice described as a “planned ambush.” Two of the attackers allegedly opened fire on ICE officers after their comrades initiated a disturbance to lure officers out of the building and into the line of fire by launching fireworks and spray painting anti-ICE slogans on nearby property. A police officer was shot in the neck but is expected to live. According to the criminal complaint filed by the Department of Justice, pamphlets on insurrectionary anarchism and propaganda materials, including a “Resist Fascism” flag, were recovered by law enforcement.
The equipment, tactics, political literature, and target selection are all consistent with Antifa, short for Anti-Fascist Action, a networked movement of anarcho-communist groups that use violence against political opponents.
For a decade now, I have been a student of this network, its origins, and ideology. As I told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution in 2020, Antifa is the direct linear descendant of the violent communist urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s like the Weather Underground.
Like its predecessors, which also began with campus protests and street riots, Antifa has over the past several years evolved to the use of bombings, especially firebombings targeting police vehicles, pregnancy resource centers, and more recently Tesla dealerships. And to this escalation, we can now add the planned ambush of federal officers.
This was a totally foreseeable development. As a 2021 German Ministry of the Interior report noted, Antifa and related left extremists were demonstrating:
…an obvious shift away from the ‘mass militancy’ of demonstrations and towards violent acts by small groups acting covertly. Their violence has shifted to the sidelines of gatherings or is entirely independent of these events.
In other words, a warning was provided. Since 2020, I have traveled the country providing threat briefings on Antifa to state and local law enforcement agencies, warning of the increased likelihood of violence, including a case study of Willem Van Spronsen, the Antifa member who used Molotov cocktails and a rifle in an attack on a Tacoma, Washington, ICE detention center in July of 2019. Many of the officers I speak to have privately expressed a frustration about the ability to get quality information about Antifa and similar left-wing extremist threats from the federal government.
It’s not surprising. There’s still little work that has been done at the federal level to confront Antifa. Not just under the Biden administration, which of course notoriously refused to admit that Antifa even existed. But even now, seven months into the Trump administration, despite repeated assaults on ICE facilities and multiple efforts to dox and threaten federal agents, there has been no DHS bulletin warning of the threat from Antifa and affiliated left-wing extremists, despite the high likelihood that such activities will continue. The federal government remains largely incapable of even saying the word “Antifa.”
The same cannot necessarily be said at the state and local level. The San Diego district attorney successfully prosecuted 11 Antifa members for conspiracy to riot, perhaps the first case where Antifa was explicitly named by prosecutors as the responsible party. In Georgia, over 60 individuals face domestic terrorism and material support charges over antifa and eco-terrorist violence as part of the so-called Defend Atlanta Forest campaign.
That’s the first known Antifa case where law enforcement successfully “followed the money,” raiding the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and its fiscal sponsor, The Network for Strong Communities, over charity fraud allegations for their alleged role in backing violent protests. The Florida Attorney General won a civil case against Antifa members. And since 2020, several states have strengthened their anti-rioting, terrorism, and racketeering laws to target the criminal offenses commonly associated with Antifa.
The DOJ and FBI have made some arrests of street perpetrators, and for this they should be commended. Federal agents have also admirably advanced their mission, despite the threats of violence. But compare the federal response to Antifa to the full court press the Biden Administration unleashed, creating an entirely new “domestic terrorism” intelligence product, a new category of “extremists,” and holding global conferences with U.S. allies to coordinate plans. Not to mention directing the DOJ and FBI to spend Biden’s entire term targeting thousands of individuals as alleged terrorists over a single riotous incident.
As the Trump administration heads further into its four-year term, we can expect Antifa to continue to escalate. The logic of trending violence is baked into its terrorist DNA. Now is the time to do something to stop it before it’s too late.
Kyle Shideler is senior analyst for Homeland Security at the Center for Security Policy.
