State Department makes first-ever Antifa foreign terrorist designations across Europe

The State Department will formally designate four Antifa-linked groups operating in Europe as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specifically Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), Fox News Digital has learned.

The decision marks the first time the U.S. government has applied foreign terrorist designations to Antifa-linked groups, expanding President Trump’s previous domestic terrorism directive to an international scale.

The four Antifa-aligned cells active in Europe — in Germany, Italy, and Greece — are accused of organizing or carrying out bombings, shootings, and other politically motivated attacks.

The designation requires U.S. financial institutions to freeze assets of FTOs and SDGTs and ban entry of the group’s members into the U.S. It allows the U.S. to criminally prosecute those under U.S. jurisdiction who offer material support to FTOs or conspire to offer such support.

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One of the groups — Antifa Ost — is a left-wing cell that has been linked to attacks between 2018 and 2023 in Germany. German prosecutors have charged seven individuals linked to the group.

In September 2025, the Hungarian government designated the group as terrorists after nine members allegedly assaulted people with hammers, batons and pepper spray in Budapest in 2023.

The International Revolutionary Front, also known as the Informal Anarchist Federation, is an Italy-based coalition of groups that endorse revolutionary armed conflict against the state. The group has been tied to dozens of violent and criminal incidents over the past two decades: letter bombs to government and industrial targets, small explosive devices, shootings, including the 2012 shooting of a nuclear engineering executive.

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Two other Greece-based groups: Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self Defense, have carried out attacks on government buildings throughout Greece, most recently attacking the headquarters of Hellenic Railway in a bombing in April.

Revolutionary Class Self Defense dedicated the bombing to “the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance.”

“The anarchists, Marxists, and violent extremists of Antifa have waged a terror campaign in the United States and across the Western world for decades, carrying out bombings, beatings, shootings, and riots in service of their extreme agenda,” said principal deputy spokesperson Tommy Piggot.

“The State Department is committed to identifying and dismantling these terror networks that conspire to ruthlessly suppress the will of the people and violently undermine the very foundations of the United States and Western Civilization.”

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who had written to Rubio advocating for the designation, praised the move.

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“I’m grateful to Secretary Rubio and the Trump administration for working with me on this critical issue — holding these radical groups who enable, fund and support political violence in the United States and across the world accountable.”

The designation marks a rare use of foreign terrorism sanctions against far-left extremist groups, which are typically handled as domestic security threats by European governments rather than as international terrorist networks.