Antifa's planned blacklisting by the White House comes amid the ongoing riots across the US to protest the death of African-American man George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody on 25 May.
President Donald Trump has signalled the US government's readiness to designate the Antifa movement as a terrorist organisation in a move that makes the group illegal on US territory.
Here's a closer look at what POTUS described as an anarchist-led movement that he said was “quickly shut down” by the US National Guard amid the ongoing protests in major American cities over the death of 46-year-old black man George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police last week.
The history of Antifa, which is short for anti-fascist, dates back to the 1980s, when a group called Anti-Racist Action confronted neo-Nazi skinheads at punk gigs in the US Midwest and beyond, according to Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
Apart from neo-Nazis and neo-fascism, the movement, which doesn't have an official leader or headquarters, is opposed to white supremacists and racism and it was reportedly mostly dormant until Donald Trump became the US president in 2016.
Unnamed representatives of Antifa groups in Oregon were cited by the BBC as saying that they are seeking to build “a movement that really insulates us from” POTUS' policies.
Antifa Tactics
The movement's tactics include chanting and forming human chains during protest actions to block right-wing demonstrators,…
