The State Department on Wednesday designated three groups based in Europe, including two that advocate Palestinian rights, as transnational terrorist organizations.

The move is part of the Trump administration’s fight against what it calls a “resurgence of far-left political terrorism” worldwide, a focus that many security experts say is disproportionate.

In a statement, the department said that it would impose sanctions on Palestine Action, which is based in Britain and organizes acts of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies; Masar Badil, another pro-Palestinian group with branches in Western Europe and Canada; and Autistici/Inventati, known as A/I Collective, which is based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world.

Even as many Western leaders and analysts raise alarms about the growing strength of far right-wing movements with violent tendencies, the Trump administration has mainly targeted what it calls an even more dangerous alternative on the left. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted an international summit on the subject, which the State Department billed as a response to “a deliberate, ideologically motivated strategy to destabilize free societies by violently targeting our political and economic systems” on the part of far-left groups.

That threat has long been “a blind spot in the international community’s counterterrorism focus,” the department said in a statement at the time.

Many conservatives have been galvanized by the issue by recent events such as pro-Palestinian demonstrations seen by critics as sympathetic to Hamas and hostile to Israel, anti-Trump protests in U.S. cities that have sometimes turned violent and the assassination of the pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk in September 2025.

But experts say that talk of a broad, coordinated left-wing menace exaggerates the threat to America.

Liberal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union also warn that it could have a chilling effect on legitimate speech and give a pretext for intimidating or even prosecuting critics of the Trump administration.

The State Department accused the newly designated groups of having terrorist ties, though its announcement focused on A/I Collective, which it said tailors digital services to help left-wing radical groups organize, communicate and plan violent attacks. That help includes sharing “target information” and tactical guidance to “many of the most active and violent antifa groups in the United States,” according to the department.

The A/I Collective’s website says that it offers a secure platform for activists to communicate anonymously, free from government surveillance. It defines its core principles as “anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism.”

Founded in 2020, Palestine Action opposes Britain’s support for what it calls Israel’s “genocidal policies” toward the Palestinians. The group organized several pro-Palestinian protests in London before the British government banned it last year when five of its members were charged with breaking into a Royal Air Force base and spraying red paint on two aircraft.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said the ban raised “serious concerns that counterterrorism laws are being applied to conduct that is not terrorist in nature and risks hindering the legitimate exercise of fundamental freedoms across the U.K.”

Masar Badil is a pro-Palestinian group that has published statements that “glorify violence” against Israel and has hosted webinars featuring members of Hamas and the Houthis, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The State Department said its action was based on the group’s close ties to Samidoun, a pro-Palestinian group that has been banned in Germany and declared a terrorist group by Israel and Canada.

The U.S. terrorist designations mean that any U.S. controlled assets of the groups, and two specifically named Masar Badil leaders, will be frozen and anyone transacting with them — including by providing money or services — can be subject to civil or criminal action.

The State Department said in a fact sheet on political terrorism last month that “far-left terrorist plots and attacks have sharply increased in the United States and Europe” since 2016, and that such terrorism “now accounts for more attacks and plots in the United States than any other ideological category.”

Last year, the Trump administration declared the amorphous left-wing group antifa as a terrorist organization, offering little evidence of its threat.

A September 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan research center, found that left-wing terrorist attacks and plots have risen in recent years and that left-wing attacks were on track to outnumber ones from the far right for the first time in 30 years.

But left-wing violence has “risen from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers,” the report found.

It added that the global leftist movement is disorganized and that its attacks “are remarkably less lethal overall than jihadist or right-wing attacks.”