Thread by @Eric_Schmitt

Last month, I wrote to Secretary Rubio urging him to designate the international Antifa networks as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

Antifa is a global terror network—and it's time we treated it like one.

An international system is driving left-wing violence on U.S. soil. 🧵

On July 4, 2025, 11 members of an Antifa terror cell carried out an armed ambush on an ICE facility in Texas.

They had spent months preparing—scouting out the site, taking surveillance notes, coordinating attack positions, and writing an operations plan to maximize casualties.

The militants—who had staged at a safe house the night before—arrived in body armor, carrying rifles. They detonated fireworks to lure officers out into the open, and then opened fire, and kept shooting until their guns jammed. One cop was hit in the neck and critically wounded.

It was the first time the DOJ has ever brought terrorism charges against Antifa.

As the indictment notes, this was a highly organized, coordinated attack. The militants were found with phone jammers, tactical gear, over 50 firearms, and Antifa propaganda leaflets and materials.

They planned the attack via encrypted messaging services, as many Antifa cells use. Antifa’s “tech stack” relies on these services—many of which are foreign and transnational—to keep militant communications and fundraising anonymous and beyond the reach of law enforcement.

The Italy-based A/I Collective is one of the most popular services. It's a radical-left one-stop shop for Antifa tech operations, offering encrypted email, web hosting, mailing lists, pads, VPN, and even anonymous drop-boxes—purpose-built for militants to operate off-grid.

The group, which describes itself as a “radical left hacking collective,” is specifically built for radical Antifa militants. It's not for public use; A/I "manually vets" every request for access, and only provides its services to groups that align with its "principles."

A/I is intimately linked to many of the most violent Antifa cells in the U.S. For example: Rose City Counter-Info (RCCI), an Antifa platform based in Portland, OR, is hosted on A/I’s NoBlogs service, where it routinely encourages and helps coordinate domestic terrorist acts.

In October, RCCI used the A/I platform to coordinate efforts to shine high-powered lasers at federal helicopters in Portland—seeking to crash the helicopters by blinding the pilots.

They also doxxed ICE agents, publishing their home addresses with the threat: "No peace for ICE."

“Abolition Media” is another radical left-wing forum hosted by A/I, directly tied by the FBI a domestic terror case last year. A left-wing extremist firebombed multiple police vehicles in California, and glorified the attack with photos posted on the A/I-hosted service.

Jane’s Revenge—a network of far-left pro-abortion militants that carried out firebombings of U.S. pro-life facilities after the the Dobbs ruling leaked in 2022—used A/I’s services to propagate their communiques taking credit for, describing and glorifying their terror attacks.

In 2023, the Antifa-driven "Stop Cop City" riots used A/I infrastructure as a hub for coordinating and promoting violent attacks.

Georgia’s AG noted that militants arrested at the violent Antifa uprisings were an “international group,” including French and Canadian nationals.

These are just a few examples of one particular node in the international Antifa network. Antifa cells are highly organized, and they coordinate and communicate with one another via transnational networks, and even travel to collaborate on attacks (as we saw at Stop Cop City).

There is recent precedent for applying terrorist designations to decentralized, cell-based extremist networks: In January 2025, the Biden State Department slapped a terror designation on a group called the "Terrorgram Collective" and three of its leaders.

Terrorgram is a transnational white-supremacist network operating primarily online. The collective is not a formal group but functions as a "transnational forum…to share propaganda, exchange operational guidance, and valorize the perpetrators of previous terrorist attacks."

That structure parallels Antifa. (If anything, Antifa is far MORE organized).

The Biden State Department designated Terrorgram and its affiliates as "Specially Designated Global Terrorists"—a designation that can be used alongside the FTO designation to dismantle Antifa cells.

We have the tools. We have the precedent. Now, it's time to use them.

I'll have more to say on this issue in the coming weeks. You can read the full letter I wrote to Secretary Rubio below. ⬇️