SAN DIEGO — In the weeks since President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization,” he and his administration have repeatedly and forcefully sought to describe left-wing protesters, both peaceful and violent, as domestic terrorists.

But the question of who actually constitutes antifa and the legal and political consequences of Trump’s executive order remain murky. For starters, antifa, which is short for anti-fascist, is an ideology whose adherents are not part of any unified organization. And more importantly, experts said Trump has no legal authority to designate a group as a domestic terrorist organization, since the U.S. government only designates alleged foreign terrorist organizations but keeps no such list of domestic groups.

As the administration barrels forward anyway in its campaign against antifa, holding a roundtable Wednesday at the White House where Cabinet leaders promised to investigate, prosecute and dismantle what they described as a sophisticated antifa terrorist network, there may be increased attention and lessons to be learned from the one place where prosecutors have successfully alleged an antifa conspiracy — San Diego.

In late 2021, District Attorney Summer Stephan charged 11 defendants described as “antifa supporters” with conspiracy to riot and other crimes stemming from their actions fighting and assaulting Trump supporters at a “Patriot March” earlier that year in Pacific Beach. All 11 defendants pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial, and after sentencing last year, Stephan’s office touted the accomplishment as the “first criminal case in the nation where crimes committed by members of Antifa were brought to justice and held accountable.”

It’s too early to know just how significant the Pacific Beach antifa case could be in the new light of Trump’s executive order and a related national security memorandum seeking to link a wide array of liberal organizations to terrorism. But the case holds lessons about the nature of antifa and could potentially be looked to nationally as a road map for prosecution.

While there is a generally agreed-upon definition of what constitutes terrorism, the definition of domestic terrorism is not quite as clear, and there is even more disagreement about whether antifa would qualify.

“At the most basic level, terrorism … is the use of violence or threat of violence by non-state actors in furtherance of some political or social goal,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said in an interview.

Federal law defines domestic terrorism similarly, but provides no way for the State Department to designate a U.S. group as a terrorist organization the same way it designates and lists alleged foreign terrorist groups such as al-Qaida or branches of the Islamic State group, or even drug-trafficking organizations such as the Sinaloa Cartel.

“There is no domestic terrorist organization list,” Lewis said.

William Aceves, a professor of constitutional law and civil rights at California Western School of Law in San Diego, said Trump’s executive order on antifa “does not have (any) type of legal impact.” The legislative branch, not the executive branch, would have to pass a law to create a domestic terror designation, Aceves said.

Why has Congress never created a domestic terrorism list — not even for groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Earth Liberation Front?

“That would run afoul of various constitutional protections on speech, assembly and membership,” Lewis said. “We have the freest speech in the world. We, as a country, have traditionally held that you cannot prosecute individuals simply for their membership or affiliation with other individuals who may have committed some criminal acts.”

But Aceves said the political consequences of federal government actions, including the antifa executive order, can be equal to or even more significant than legal ramifications.

Just because the administration has no legal authority to designate a domestic terrorist organization, Aceves said that does not mean the administration won’t devote a great amount of resources toward it. He said the order could also “serve to dissuade people from participating in legitimate First Amendment free exercise behavior because of fear they might be designated or targeted by the federal government.”

The history of the anti-fascist movement dates back to the period between World War I and World War II when left-wing groups banded together to fight rising fascism in Germany, Italy, England and elsewhere across Europe. Antifa first rose to prominence in the U.S. in August 2017 when counter-protesters clashed with right-wing hate groups and White supremacists at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump first tweeted that he would designate antifa as a terrorist organization during his first term, in May 2020, amid the sometimes violent protests around the country sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer. Trump never followed through during his first term, and his FBI director at the time, Christopher Wray, testified to Congress in September 2020 that antifa was “not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.”

Trump’s second-term Cabinet leaders have taken a much harder line, and his executive order described antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”

Joe Gaskins, 25, was a defendant in the Pacific Beach antifa case. He said he regrets some of his actions that day, while adding that it’s important to put those actions in context. The “Patriot March” he showed up intending to stop was happening Jan. 9, just three days after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn the presidential election results. Some pro-Trump marchers had been at the Capitol, and some, according to trial testimony, were members of right-wing extremist groups such as the Proud Boys.

Gaskins, who is half-Black and grew up in Pacific Beach, said he wanted to ensure Pacific Beach remained a “safe place for kids who look like me.” He wanted to “show up that day and make my voice heard that we don’t want fascists or Nazis in PB.”

Gaskins is torn now about that day’s events, saying he “wasn’t completely in the wrong” but acknowledging violence may not be the answer.

“That’s not the kind of man I want to be, violence is not what I stand for, I stand for justice and equality,” he said in a recent interview. “But for the 19-year-old version of me, seeing injustice made my blood boil.”

Gaskins, who got into the antifa protest movement in the summer of 2020, said antifa is “not an organization or group, but more of an idea.” He said antifa consists of people who are anti-Nazi and anti-Zionist. Many are also anarchists, he said, so there are “no masters and no leaders. There is no hierarchy — that’s kind of the point of it.”

He said it’s “quite laughable” to see the federal government paint antifa as a structured organization, much less a terrorist organization.

“It’s a witch hunt,” Gaskins said.

At Wednesday’s White House roundtable on antifa, Trump and his Cabinet repeatedly described it as an organized, structured and well-funded organization, though they provided little evidence of those claims.

“These are agitators, anarchists, and they’re paid,” Trump said, citing as evidence of their funding that protesters carry signs made of “very expensive paper with beautiful wood handles.”

Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, claimed antifa members “have built out their funding mechanisms … This network of antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as (Tren de Aragua), as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said his agents “are following the money. Money never lies. And that’s what it’s going to take to bring down this network of organized criminal thugs.”

In the Pacific Beach case, the only evidence of funding involved grassroots campaigns on social media, according to court documents and defense attorney Curtis Briggs, who represented one of two defendants who went to trial. Briggs said in an interview that “there was proof of them going to social media and requesting Venmo and Cash App donations so they could go buy medical supplies and probably some pepper spray.”

After their arrests, some of the defendants also sought money on GoFundMe for help with bail and legal costs. One of those campaigns raised $970. Another raised just $650.

“It was very, very grassroots,” Briggs said. “There was no substantial funding.”

As for organization and structure, the evidence in the Pacific Beach case showed the defendants coordinated their counter-protest on social media — both in public posts and private messages — and on encrypted but widely used messaging applications such as Signal. There was one group from San Diego and one from Los Angeles that coordinated a carpool to travel to the protest.

Those messages, including an 18-member Signal group chat nicknamed “SDFASHBASH,” were obtained by investigators through search warrants and proved to be the key trial evidence of a conspiracy.

In group chats and private messages, the defendants discussed acquiring bear spray and mace. They spoke of wanting to “shut down” and fight the Trump supporters. And they made a plan of where to meet near Crystal Pier.

Nine defendants pleaded guilty and two were convicted at trial, all of them on the charge of conspiracy to riot, according to prosecutors. There were also convictions for various assault charges stemming from specific incidents at the rally. One of the trial defendants is appealing his case.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Daniel Goldstein emphasized at a sentencing last year that all 11 defendants had admitted or been convicted of committing crimes “specifically for the benefit of antifa.”

A district attorney spokesperson declined to make Stephan or her deputies who prosecuted the Pacific Beach defendants available for an interview about how they built their conspiracy case.

“Part of our mission is to pursue equal and fair justice, and we strive for that with every prosecution, whether it is prosecuting antifa members with felony conspiracy to commit a riot and various assault charges, or whether it is prosecuting members of the Hells Angels for hate crimes and attempted murder,” spokesperson Tanya Sierra said in a statement. “When we can prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, we will file charges, which is our ethical standard.”

Whether the Department of Justice and U.S. attorneys across the country could put together a similar case remains to be seen, as federal law differs from state laws. However, the San Diego case could serve as a closer blueprint for local prosecutors across the country with the renewed focus on antifa and other left-leaning groups.

Briggs, on the other hand, argued the Pacific Beach case won’t be relevant nationally simply because of the nature of what happened. He said some of the Patriot March participants and the antifa counter-protesters “knew one another and didn’t like one another” from years of showing up and sometimes squaring off at the same protests.

His client and the other defendants “wanted to go beat up and stand up to people who they believed were hard-right troublemakers who were also going to cause violence,” Briggs said. “It was more like the equivalent of a barroom brawl than it is a terrorist organization.”

While there were several instances of documented violence that day by the Trump supporters, Stephan and her deputies said the violence was “overwhelmingly” perpetrated by the antifa counter-protesters.

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