President Trump’s new counterterrorism strategy prioritizes investigating left-wing extremist groups, undoing years of the Biden administr...
President Trump signed a new counterterrorism strategy identifying three primary threats to the United States: narco-terrorists and transnational gangs, global jihadists including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and violent left-wing extremists including anarchists and anti-fascists.
These categories are not as distinct as they appear. Domestic left-wing organizations have documented operational ties to Hamas-linked networks, with the same financial infrastructure financing campus encampments, Gaza flotillas organized by designated terrorist entities, and solidarity operations supporting hostile foreign governments.
Open borders and opposition to immigration enforcement, central tenets of the left-wing political program, directly enabled the transnational gangs and cartel networks responsible for human trafficking, drug trafficking, fentanyl overdose deaths, gang violence, rape, intimidation, and murder in American communities, making the three threat categories, in practice, mutually reinforcing.
The 16-page document reorients federal priorities away from the white supremacist organizations Biden designated as the primary domestic threat, groups that produced no operational terrorism record, and toward left-wing, jihadist-linked, and transnational criminal networks that were generating documented mass violence, territorial seizures, and attacks on federal law enforcement throughout the Biden years.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence annual threat assessments continued throughout Biden’s tenure to lead with China, Russia, Iran, and transnational terrorism, not domestic right-wing groups, as top-tier strategic threats.
The FBI’s 2021 congressional testimony declared racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically white supremacists, the top domestic terrorism threat, citing incident counts from 2018 and 2019, two years in which white supremacists were the primary source of lethal domestic attacks. The FBI did not disclose that in 2020, the year before that testimony, no lethal attacks were committed by white supremacists at all, and that three of the four lethal domestic extremist attacks that year were carried out by left-wing anarchist.
The most documented of those was the August 2020 killing of Patriot Prayer supporter Aaron Danielson in Portland by Michael Forest Reinoehl, a self-described “100% antifa”supporter who told a journalist he had no regrets.
The statistical case was methodologically flawed regardless, counting incidents rather than measuring organizational capacity, lethality, or coordinated group activity, and including lone actors with no organizational affiliation. The result was a picture that supported a political narrative without establishing that named organizations, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, or KKK, were running operational terrorism campaigns inside the United States. None were.
The ADL’s annual accounting found that in 2024 only three of 13 documented extremist-related murders appear clearly to have been committed for ideological motives, and in 2023 only one incident involved an extremist known to belong to an organized group.
The white supremacist prison gangs that do generate documented criminal activity, the Aryan Brotherhood, Aryan Circle, Nazi Low Riders, are primarily drug trafficking and extortion operations. The largest federal prosecution ever focused on white supremacist prison gang members, a 2017 case involving the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and Aryan Circle, resulted in 89 convictions for drug trafficking in North Texas, not terrorism or mass-casualty attacks.
Against this thin record, the Biden administration ignored transnational criminal organizations that were seizing territory inside American cities. Tren de Aragua operatives entered the United States during the Biden-open-border period and within years were documented occupying apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado. A law firm investigation found gang members engaged in assaults, human trafficking, sexual abuse of minors, unlawful firearms possession, and extortion targeting Venezuelan immigrant populations. A bank-commissioned investigation found TdA had attempted to seize up to half of rent payments from building residents.
Vice President Kamala Harris denied gang activity existed in Colorado during the September 2024 presidential debate even as a 10-month federal investigation was producing indictments. A letter from a former Venezuelan intelligence official stated TdA operatives were sent to the United States under explicit instructions to continue kidnapping, extorting, and killing, describing every crime committed on U.S. soil as ordered by the Maduro regime.
Since January 2025, DOJ has federally indicted over 260 TdA members across five U.S. Attorney offices for murder, robbery, extortion, kidnapping, money laundering, and narcotics trafficking.
Another example of Biden’s misguided ignorance is MS-13, the only street gang the U.S. Treasury has ever designated a transnational criminal organization. It has an estimated 10,000 members across the United States receiving murder orders from leadership in El Salvador, with approximately 74 percent of federally prosecuted defendants in the U.S. illegally. Similarly, the 18th Street Gang operates with an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 members across 44 cities in 20 states, its California membership approximately 80 percent composed of illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America, engaged in homicide, extortion, narcotics trafficking, and production of fraudulent identification documents including fake passports and Social Security cards.
These organizations were generating extensive documentation from DEA, DHS, ICE, and CBP throughout the Biden years. The threat assessments and the political narrative pointed in opposite directions, and the political narrative prevailed.
The left-wing violence the Trump strategy now formalizes has an equally well-documented record. The 2020 George-Floyd riots produced insured losses of $1 billion to $2 billion, making them the costliest civil disorder in U.S. insurance history and the first multi-state catastrophe designation issued by Property Claim Services, which has tracked such claims since 1950. It is important to note that insured losses do not equate to total losses, which would also include uninsured property damage and theft. As a result, the total economic impact of the riots may far exceed current estimates.
Studies documented 570 protests in 220 locations turning violent, with at least 15 deaths. In Seattle, left-wing protesters seized six city blocks including an abandoned police precinct and governed the territory for weeks. Two people were murdered inside the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, including a 16-year-old who had traveled from California believing he was attending a peaceful protest. A jury awarded his family $30 million, citing city negligence.
In Portland, Antifa conducted more than 100 consecutive nights of attacks on the federal courthouse. By 2025, ICE reported a 700 percent increase in assaults against its agents, with rioters targeting the Portland ICE facility nightly with mortar fireworks, rocks, bricks, lasers, and improvised grenades. President Trump authorized 200 National Guard troops to defend the facility. Federal charges against Antifa-affiliated individuals included blinding officers with high-powered lasers and attempting to trap agents inside the building.
The left-wing ideological violence has extended to targeted assassination. Tyler Robinson, 22, shot and killed Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk from a rooftop at Utah Valley University in September 2025. Utah Governor Spencer Cox confirmed Robinson held leftist ideology and had radicalized on far-left internet communities. Robinson’s mother told investigators her son had shifted hard left in the year before the shooting, texting afterward that he “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.”
Ryan Wesley Routh, convicted of attempting to assassinate Trump at his Florida golf course, was sentenced to life plus seven years. Routh had expressed left-leaning ideology publicly, previously written that Iran was “free to assassinate Trump.”
A documented pattern of mass shootings by trans-identifying individuals with anti-Christian and anti-conservative motivations runs from 2018 through 2026, including the 2023 Covenant School massacre of three children and three adults at a Nashville Christian school, the 2025 Annunciation Catholic Church shooting that killed two children aged 8 and 10 during morning Mass, and the 2026 Tumbler Ridge school attack that killed eight. The Minneapolis shooter left a manifesto containing antisemitic content, references to “Free Palestine,” and stated desire to target conservative figures including Trump.
The left-wing violence is organized nationally and transnationally. Campus encampments at more than 100 universities in 2024, organized primarily by Students for Justice in Palestine, which the Senate HELP Committee formally investigated for Hamas ties, produced building seizures, the physical exclusion of Jewish students from campus areas, swastikas spray-painted on buildings, chants of “10,000 October 7ths,” and distribution of “Death to America” literature at NYU and the University of Michigan.
Police searching the home of SJP chapter leaders at George Mason University found firearms, ammunition, foreign passports, Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and signs reading “death to America” and “death to Jews.” SJP is funded and controlled by American Muslims for Palestine, whose board members have documented ties to the Holy Land Foundation, whose leaders were sentenced in 2009 for providing financial support to Hamas.
The flotilla operations that have attempted to breach the Gaza blockade are organized by the same network. OFAC designated the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad, identified in Hamas documents as the gang’s overseas political bureau, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in January 2026, explicitly for organizing flotillas. The IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, the Turkish anchor of the flotilla coalition, is a member of the U.S. Treasury-designated Union of Good, described by Treasury as “an organization created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization.”
France’s former chief anti-terrorism judge testified in U.S. federal court that IHH had links to a 1999 al-Qaeda plot targeting Los Angeles International Airport. The domestic financing infrastructure for these operations runs through a network of U.S. nonprofits funded by Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based tech billionaire with documented CCP ties, who has funneled $285 million since 2017 into the People’s Forum, CodePink, Tricontinental, and BreakThrough Media, organizations that simultaneously coordinated domestic protests, campus encampments, flotilla operations, and Cuba solidarity convoys. DOJ and Treasury are investigating the network for potential sanctions violations and foreign influence operations.
The new counterterrorism strategy addresses a threat the Biden administration enabled, namely the growth of organized left-wing violence and the disturbing connection between Islamist extremism and left-wing extremism. At the same time, left-wing extremism supports open borders and opposes law enforcement, exposing the country to violence and crime from drug cartels and street gangs.
Despite all of this taking place between 2020 and 2024, the Biden administration focused on white-supremacy groups that either did not exist in any meaningful capacity or were not particularly active or threatening.
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