October 30, 2025
Trump’s Domestic Terrorism Memo Targets Dissent, Doubles Down on Dangerous Post-9/11 Policies
Authored by: Sumayyah Waheed
Muslim Advocates has worked for 20 years with Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian (BAAMEMSA) communities with a long history of resistance to racist and unlawful executive power grabs. We recognize the dangers and threats implicit in President Trump’s September 25, 2025, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. The memo directs law enforcement and other agencies to investigate and dismantle U.S. organizations and activism that the Trump regime disagrees with. We’ve seen this pattern time and again: manufacture a crisis, blame marginalized communities, and subject them to surveillance and violence while expanding government power.
The memo pulls from the same playbook that’s historically been used to harm BAAMEMSA communities: debunked preventive policing and joint terrorism task forces (JTTFs). It also signals a disturbing plan to create a blacklist of “domestic terrorist organizations” outside of a legal framework or process. This piece will briefly discuss each of these elements.
Preventive Policing
Preventive policing, epitomized by the notorious Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program, is based on junk science that purports to predict patterns preceding violent acts, through a sloppy model of backwards-looking analysis that has no scientific basis. It treats targeted communities as threats and focuses police attention on them to monitor and “prevent” violence. After years of CVE programming and millions of dollars of public investments in it, the government could never prove that any of its CVE programs actually prevented violence. Muslim Advocates and multiple coalitions of civil rights organizations have repeatedly called for the government to dismantle CVE and its successor programs.
For Muslims, law enforcement infamously assigned threat to traits and acts protected by the First Amendment–such as growing a beard, dissenting from U.S. foreign policy, or attending mosque.
Needless to say, empirical studies show that violent threats cannot be predicted by profiling based on ideology or religion. The Trump regime expects us to believe the opposite. But we know this memo is about shutting down any organization or activist that holds the government accountable, fights discrimination, or opposes the regime’s police state. What’s more, their suppressive efforts will disproportionately result in governmental and vigilante violence against Black, Arab, Muslim, and Latine communities that dare to speak out in support of Black, Palestinian, and Brown immigrant lives. We’re already seeing this happen in cities across America, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s greenlighting racial profiling against Latine people in Los Angeles.
Everything is “terrorism”
In the September 25 memo, Trump highlights a sweeping set of views that his regime wants to unlawfully silence, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” (emphasis added). The Trump regime has repeatedly attacked and punished speech it doesn’t like, especially marginalized students supporting Palestinian rights or those critical of Trump’s many racist power grabs—and this is no different.
The memo references an infamous law passed soon after 9/11, the PATRIOT Act of 2001, which added a definition for “domestic terrorism” into federal law—but did not attach sanctions to it. That law defines as “domestic terrorism” acts primarily on U.S. soil that are: (a) “dangerous to human life,” and (b) violate U.S. criminal laws, and (c) appear intended to: intimidate or coerce a population, to influence government policy by intimidation or coercion, or to affect government conduct by “mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”
Beyond redoubling on policies popularized during the global “War on Terror,” the memo also demands that a breathtaking array of offenses be swept in under the concept of “domestic terrorism.” It requires the Attorney General to issue specific guidance ensuring that “domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder” (emphasis added). This rhetoric erases the violence that ICE and federal law enforcement create by their own dangerous escalation tactics. Further, by including common and minor protest-related offenses and casting them as “domestic terrorist acts,” the memo invites even more aggressive policing, arrest, and charging practices against protesters the regime (or any particular officer) disfavors. This escalates an authoritarian trend that is already operating against protesters in many states. We the people must refuse to allow such criminalization of our cherished rights to protest the government’s violence, racism, and wholesale usurpation of civil and human rights.
Joint Terrorism Task Forces
JTTFs don’t just enable collaboration and information sharing between state, local, and federal law enforcement: these task forces deputize local law enforcement, who are typically required to follow federal guidelines instead of conflicting local laws and policies, including sanctuary laws, that may be more protective of communities. After 9/11, the FBI ratcheted up the use of JTTFs to enable pervasive surveillance, including the broad use of informants, to amass loads of private information about Black, Muslim, and other communities of color. In the past two decades, several cities have withdrawn from JTTFs, following years of advocacy from community groups uplifting the harms and privacy violations they have experienced.
Domestic Terrorism Organizational Blacklist
The memo also allows the Attorney General to designate groups as “domestic terrorist organizations,” and submit a list of any such designations to the President through his advisor Stephen Miller. This is the Trump regime’s workaround to create a blacklist of organizations smeared with the moniker of “terrorist” without having to pass new laws through Congress or do the work of proving allegations in court. Just as with those called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the height of the McCarthy era, organizations would be deprived of the chance to defend themselves before a neutral judge. In more recent history, then-President George W. Bush’s Justice Department publicly designated hundreds of people and organizations as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the infamous Holy Land Foundation case, violating their Fifth Amendment rights–no formal charges ever followed, but the impacts of the label reverberate to this day.
Impact
As a reminder, the executive branch cannot create new laws or void existing ones. The September 25 memo itself does not officially launch any investigations or identify specific organizations that will be investigated. Its purpose is to scare us into silence and set the stage for politicized persecution of our movements.
Already, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a vague and broad undercover operation against “various groups affiliated with left-wing political violence,” also announcing “sweeping investigations into radical leftist organizations engaged in or providing support to those performing political violence.” This brazen call to trample Texans’ First and Fourth Amendment protections for freedom of association and speech and against unreasonable searches, is exactly what the September 25 memo sets up.
Meanwhile, the Trump regime is poised to turn the massive, well-funded array of federal law enforcement, plus its cooperation agreements with state and local law enforcement, into a weapon against our people. We’ve already seen government officials slap the “domestic terrorist” label on protesters against ICE raids, Stop Cop City protesters, and climate activists. And reports that the Justice Department is seeking to prosecute Open Society Foundations, apparently on the President’s orders, offer an alarming glimpse into what many progressive and BAAMEMSA community-serving organizations fear awaits them.
Moreover, the memo’s broad language targets dissenting views on a wide range of issues and works to chill those views. Its issuance came days after an executive order doing exactly what a fascist would: designate the antifascist movement as a “domestic terrorist” organization. “Antifa,” the named target of the order, is not a formal, legally recognized organization, and its designation by the president has no legal basis, but it was cited by Paxton and works to further attack and chill dissent.
On the legislative front, a senator has already introduced a bill to codify both the Antifa executive order and the September 25 memo into law—but as outlined above, the federal government’s existing powers and resources are formidable enough that the bill is mostly redundant. Its greatest danger may be to anyone labeled “Antifa”—fitting, albeit painfully ironic, that opposing fascism could subject a person to this fascist power grab.
Conclusion
As a reminder, the executive branch cannot create new laws or void existing ones. But for decades, Muslim Advocates and many partners have raised the alarm about unchecked executive powers in the post-9/11 era: to surveil, target based on identity or viewpoint, and prosecute. We’ve also reflected that throughout history, “when a group of people are seen as a threat, state power has been used to oppress them”; social movements and people of color have thus confronted and resisted state repression for centuries. Trump’s appalling memo is the predictable result of too many politicians, of both parties, sacrificing our democracy to lock up Black, Brown and Muslim people based on a dog-whistle appeal to “national security.” This vicious expansion demands that we unite to beat back the national security state once and for all.
So what can we do?
- Refuse to retreat.
- We refuse to be silenced and we know that our strength is in our numbers. We’ve joined with a broad coalition of community-serving organizations to denounce this memo [link], and encourage communities to refuse to be chilled.
- Know your rights and risks.
- We know that the police and immigration officers regularly violate people’s rights, so it’s important to understand our risks and assert our rights. For instance: non-citizens in the U.S. are protected by the First Amendment and the Constitution! However, widespread and abusive DHS/ ICE apprehension and surveillance tactics make it advisable to conduct an individual risk assessment with a qualified attorney when you’re a non-citizen who fears retaliation for your speech and/or plan to travel. Some resources:
- Here is a helpful post about why and how to organize publicly despite these authoritarian threats. Highlight: Mass Participation Creates Protection: https://open.substack.com/pub/antiauthoritarianplaybook/p/yes-we-are-afraid?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
- Resist federal encroachment on local officials. Organize locally to demand that state and local governments refuse to cooperate with the fascist feds, by pulling out of JTTFs and other federal task forces, passing privacy laws, and canceling contracts for surveillance technology. See the following toolkits for model language you can organize to pass locally:
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- Enact a ban on 287(g) ban or press your cities and counties to opt out of the 287(g) program that deputizes local officers in ICE enforcement.
- Contact your member of Congress to share your concerns, why you value community based organizations and mosques, and demand they act to protect local people and groups from this regime.