NSPM-7: The Domestic Terrorism Memorandum Targeting Political Dissent
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NSPM-7: The Domestic Terrorism Memorandum Targeting Political Dissent

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NSPM-7: The Domestic Terrorism Memorandum Targeting Political Dissent

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Scope: This backgrounder covers National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), signed September 25, 2025 — its directives, the administration’s stated justifications, the evidentiary basis for those justifications, its implications for First Amendment rights, and documented enforcement actions carried out under its authority.

What Is NSPM-7?

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 — formally titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence — was signed by President Donald Trump on September 25, 2025. It is an executive directive that does not require congressional approval and carries the authority of presidential national security policy.

NSPM-7 directs multiple federal agencies to investigate, prosecute, and “disrupt” organizations and individuals the administration characterizes as engaged in political violence. The memorandum’s key operational mandates are:

  • FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) are directed to coordinate investigations and prosecutions of designated domestic threats
  • The Treasury Department and IRS are tasked with identifying and disrupting financial networks alleged to fund domestic terrorism — including monitoring tax-exempt organizations and referring cases to the Department of Justice
  • A Joint Task Force Vanguard was established to greenlight federal prosecutions across the country
  • The FBI established an NSPM-7 mission center to oversee investigations into left-wing political movements
  • A joint FBI-IRS investigative unit was created to scrutinize nonprofit organizations

The memorandum defines the target ideology broadly. It names “self-described ‘anti-fascism'” as a primary threat category, which it then defines to include:

“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

This definition — the subject of extensive legal criticism — encompasses ideological positions rather than specific criminal acts.

Source: White House — Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence (September 25, 2025)

How the Administration Justified It

The Trump administration justified NSPM-7 on two grounds: a claimed increase in organized political violence and a series of high-profile incidents.

Incidents Cited

The memorandum and White House communications cited the following events as establishing the need for a new domestic terrorism posture:

  • The 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive
  • The 2022 attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh
  • Two assassination attempts against President Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign
  • A claimed “more than 1,000 percent increase” in attacks on ICE officers since January 21, 2025, compared to the same period in the prior year
  • Riots in Los Angeles and Portland, characterized as “organized campaigns” of coordinated violence

Administration Messaging

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that his department would leverage investigative and financial tools to “follow the money” and map financial networks funding domestic terrorism. A November 2025 State Department press release characterized the initiative as supporting efforts “to disrupt self-described ‘anti-fascism’ networks, entities, and organizations that use political violence and terroristic acts to undermine democratic institutions.”

A senior DOJ official, on a conference call with federal prosecutors, instructed them to “Go big” and “go loud” — to pursue cases that would generate “headlines with the indictments.”

Source: TIME — White House Anti-Terror Order Targets ‘Anti-American’ Views (September 2025)

Evidence Presented — and Its Weaknesses

Legal analysts, civil liberties organizations, and courts have subjected the evidentiary basis of NSPM-7 to significant scrutiny. The assessment is that the evidence is weak, selectively assembled, and in several key respects legally irrelevant.

What Was Documented

Several of the incidents the memo cites as justification — the Kavanaugh assassination attempt, the Trump campaign assassination attempts, the executive assassination — are real events involving criminal actors. These are not in dispute.

The claimed 1,000-percent increase in attacks on ICE officers is a statistic that appeared in administration communications but was not independently verified at the time of NSPM-7’s signing. No granular data, methodology, or baseline definition was made public alongside the claim.

Key Evidentiary Deficiencies

1. The memo conflates protected speech and criminal conduct. NSPM-7 “lists a mix of incidents, some criminal and some protected by the First Amendment, including violence against public figures as well as anti-police protests,” according to analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. The incidents used to justify counterterrorism authority do not all constitute — or even resemble — domestic terrorism.

Source: Brennan Center — Trump’s Orders Targeting Anti-Fascism Aim to Criminalize Opposition (2025)

2. No ideological parity. Critics note that the examples cited “do not justify the stark lack of parity in NSPM-7’s treatment of supposedly dangerous ideologies.” The memorandum’s enforcement architecture is directed entirely at left-leaning and progressive organizations. No equivalent scrutiny is directed at documented right-wing domestic terrorism, which federal law enforcement has historically identified as the dominant domestic terrorism threat category.

3. Ideological breadth without factual predicate. The memorandum’s target definition is described by Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center as “breathtakingly broad,” covering “everyone from labor organizers, socialists, many libertarians, those who criticize Christianity, pro-immigration groups, anti-ICE protesters, and racial justice and transgender activists, to anyone who holds views that the administration considers to be ‘anti-American.'” No evidence is offered that these groups are, as a class, engaged in violence.

Source: Brennan Center — Trump’s Orders Targeting Anti-Fascism Aim to Criminalize Opposition (2025)

4. Courts are already dismissing cases. As of mid-2026, judges had dismissed roughly half of federal cases brought under NSPM-7’s enforcement framework for lack of evidence — a significant signal that the prosecutorial theory underlying the memorandum is legally fragile.

Source: Just Security — The Domestic Terrorist Label Endangers Rights and Drives Extremist Violence (2025)

5. No congressional mandate. Congress has explicitly declined to create a domestic terrorism designation equivalent to the foreign terrorist organization (FTO) framework precisely because of First Amendment risks. NSPM-7 circumvents that legislative judgment through executive action. The Conversation noted that “the Trump administration’s global campaign against ‘radical left terrorism’ is built on a national security memo without congressional approval.”

Source: The Conversation — The Trump administration’s global campaign against ‘radical left terrorism’ is built on a national security memo without congressional approval (2025)

First Amendment and Civil Liberties Implications

Constitutional scholars, civil liberties organizations, and members of Congress have raised serious First Amendment concerns about NSPM-7. These fall into five categories.

1. Targeting Ideology, Not Conduct

NSPM-7’s operative definition of domestic terrorism is not limited to acts of violence. It encompasses ideological positions — opposition to ICE enforcement, to capitalism, to Christianity as a political-cultural norm. Any law enforcement framework that uses ideology as a targeting criterion risks what constitutional scholars call viewpoint discrimination, which the First Amendment categorically prohibits.

The ACLU states that NSPM-7 violates:

  • First Amendment rights to freedom of belief, speech, and association
  • Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure
  • Fifth Amendment due process protections
  • Equal protection guarantees under federal law

Source: ACLU — How NSPM-7 Seeks to Use “Domestic Terrorism” to Target Nonprofits and Activists (2025)

2. Preemptive Enforcement Based on Belief

For the first time in modern U.S. law enforcement practice, NSPM-7 “appears to authorize preemptive law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.” This inverts the constitutional norm that law enforcement authority attaches to conduct, not to the viewpoints someone holds.

Source: Arnold & Porter — Turning Powerful Post 9/11 Counterterrorism Tools Onto Domestic Policy Targets (September 2025)

3. The Chilling Effect

By signaling that a broad range of ideological positions and lawful activities could draw federal counterterrorism scrutiny, NSPM-7 functions as a mechanism for chilling speech and political association. Nonprofits, protest organizers, labor unions, and advocacy organizations operating in areas the memo targets face a credible threat of IRS referrals, FBI investigation, and federal prosecution — whether or not any criminal conduct is alleged.

4. Post-9/11 Tools on Domestic Targets

NSPM-7 explicitly deploys the Joint Terrorism Task Force apparatus — built after 2001 to pursue foreign terrorist networks — against domestic political activity. These tools include surveillance authorities, asset tracking, and financial network mapping that were designed for foreign counterterrorism. Their domestic application, without the constraints Congress imposed in the domestic terrorism statute, creates a significant asymmetry between the investigative machinery available to the government and the constitutional protections available to targets.

Source: Arnold & Porter — Turning Powerful Post 9/11 Counterterrorism Tools Onto Domestic Policy Targets (September 2025)

5. Congressional Concern

Thirty-one members of Congress signed a letter raising “serious concerns” about NSPM-7, warning that it poses “serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest or ideological speech.” The signatories explicitly questioned whether the memo’s definitions could serve as a pretext for targeting communities based on political affiliation rather than criminal behavior.

Source: Charity & Security Network — Summary and Commentary: Presidential Memorandum on Countering Domestic Terrorism (2025)

The White House Declines to Rule Out Summary Executions

In December 2025, the White House refused to rule out the use of lethal force against individuals placed on its undisclosed domestic terrorist list. The Intercept reported that administration officials, when pressed, would not confirm that people on the list were entitled to judicial review before enforcement action.

Source: The Intercept — White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List (December 12, 2025)

Documented Administration Actions Under NSPM-7

Enforcement Infrastructure

The following operational architecture was established under NSPM-7’s authority:

Agency Action
DOJ Joint Task Force Vanguard created; counterterrorism prosecutors assigned to NSPM-7 cases
FBI NSPM-7 mission center established to oversee left-wing investigations
IRS Joint FBI-IRS unit created to investigate nonprofit organizations
Treasury Directed to map financial networks of targeted groups

Case 1: Minnesota Anti-ICE Protesters (June 2026)

Fifteen protesters were federally charged with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers for participating in protests against ICE’s mass deportation campaign in Minnesota. The defendants included at least one professor and several union leaders. Charges alleged that defendants surveilled federal agents, disrupted ICE operations, and trained others on how to delay or prevent arrests.

U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen explicitly invoked NSPM-7 when announcing the charges, characterizing the defendants as “violently opposed to the enforcement of federal law.” Civil liberties observers described the indictment as a “major escalation” in the use of terrorism-adjacent federal charges against people engaged in protest activity.

Sources:

Case 2: Stop Cop City Protesters (Atlanta, June 2026)

After Georgia state courts dismissed RICO charges against all 61 Stop Cop City defendants in 2026, federal prosecutors used NSPM-7 authority to charge two activists — Katie Kloth, 39, and Tyler Norman, 42 — with federal arson charges for damaging a building during a May 2022 protest. The charges came nearly four years after the underlying incident.

The use of federal charges after state-level RICO charges were dismissed in their entirety is viewed by legal analysts as emblematic of NSPM-7’s function as a prosecutorial backstop — a mechanism for re-prosecuting people whose cases have already failed in state court.

Sources:

Case 3: The Phone-Wipe Indictment

Activist Sam Tunick was indicted not for any protest activity but for wiping the data on his own phone when approached by a Customs and Border Protection “Tactical Terrorism Response Team” at an airport. The indictment represents an extension of NSPM-7’s reach into the pre-protest phase — penalizing individuals for exercising self-protective data hygiene when contacted by federal agents.

Source: Truthout — DOJ Charges Alleged Cop City Activist Over “Duress” Password That Wipes Phone (2026)

Evidentiary Assessment Summary

Claim Evidence Offered Assessment
Organized political violence is increasing Specific incidents cited (Kavanaugh, Trump assassination attempts, executive killing) Real incidents, but pre-date NSPM-7 and involve individual actors, not organized networks
1,000%+ increase in ICE officer attacks Administration statistic Unverified, no public methodology disclosed
“Anti-fascism” networks are financing violence Treasury/IRS directed to investigate No predicate evidence published; investigation precedes any findings
Targeted ideology constitutes domestic terrorism Definitional assertion Directly contradicted by settled First Amendment doctrine; courts already dismissing ~50% of cases

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