Attorney General Pam Bondi promised punishment for people who launched Molotov cocktails at a Tesla car dealership and set Tesla charging stations ablaze to protest Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration, acts that she called terrorism.
“Let this be a warning,” Bondi said in March, “if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”
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When Luigi Mangione was arrested in the shooting death of United Healthcare’s CEO, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced he would be charged not only with murder, but also with terrorism.
And after a Michigan man allegedly wounded 11 people during a knife attack at a Walmart store last Saturday, July 26, authorities said that he, too, would face domestic terrorism charges.
These incidents may seem to have no connecting threads. But all three reflect a growing trend of prosecutors describing seemingly isolated crimes with a label that implies mass attacks on the American homeland.
The cases beg the question: What exactly is domestic terrorism?
Is domestic terrorism a legal term?
In the 20th century, few crimes committed by Americans against Americans were considered terrorism. Exceptions include Ku Klux Klan lynchings in the Jim Crow era and the 1995 bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City. Otherwise, the idea of terrorism itself was mainly reserved for violent acts committed by foreign actors.
Domestic terrorism wasn’t codified into law until after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The following month, Congress enacted the landmark Patriot Act, which increased penalties for acts of terrorism and expanded the surveillance capabilities of law enforcement agencies. The legislation contained the first statutory definition of domestic terrorism in section 802 of the act.
“Before 2001, domestic terrorism was understood only by reference to international terrorism,” the Harvard Law Review wrote in 2023. “The distinction likely arose in response to a 1972 Supreme Court case distinguishing between the government’s power to surveil in response to domestic versus international threats.”
According to the FBI, domestic terrorism consists of “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”
In a 2024 report, the National Institute of Justice noted that the Department of Homeland Security had concluded that “domestic violent extremists are an acute threat,” exacerbated by stress over the COVID-19 pandemic, “ideological grievances” concerning immigration and narrative around election fraud. All “will continue to serve as a justification for violent actions,” according to the institute, the research arm of the Department of Justice.
“Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States,” the report said. “In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
Since 1990, the institute said, this style of violence was committed more often by the people with right-leaning ideologies than those on the left.
In those 34 years, the report said, “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
Can someone be charged with domestic terrorism?
While the attorney general threatened to file domestic terrorism charges, it’s important to note that no such federal offense exists.
Although it is defined in federal law, “no federal criminal provision expressly prohibits ‘domestic terrorism,’” according to a 2023 report to Congress.
Instead, alleged domestic terrorists are prosecuted under charges that are formally and legally recognized, such as hate crimes or conspiracy.
Because there is no official federal crime of “domestic terrorism,” it leaves open-ended how to categorize these acts, and what constitutes domestic terrorism.
“How the federal government defines and conceptualizes [domestic terrorism] shapes the nation’s understanding of it as criminal conduct and as a policy issue,” the 2023 report to Congress said.
How states treat domestic terrorism
Since the federal government did not create a national standard, states have come up with their own, often divergent definitions of domestic terrorism.
For instance, after 9/11, New York made domestic terrorism motivated by hate a Class A-1 felony. Georgia and Nevada have also adopted domestic terrorism laws, although Nevada applied the term only to certain acts that meet certain criteria.
“In the last few years, authorities in Oklahoma, New York, Louisiana, and Florida have all used domestic terrorism laws in the context of protests or activism,” Nick Robinson wrote in the digital journal Just Security. “Meanwhile, three states – Texas, North Dakota, and Oregon – adopted domestic terrorism laws for the first time in 2023, signaling new interest in these laws. And in the 2024 legislative session, at least 15 states have considered changes to their domestic terrorism laws, many in response to pro-Palestine protests.”
After last weekend’s knife attack at the Walmart in Traverse City, Michigan, the local prosecutor, Noelle Moeggenberg, told reporters that the incident could justify a terrorism charge.
“It’s something that is done not to individual people, not to those individual victims — obviously they are most affected — but it is, we believe, in some ways done to affect the entire community, to put fear in the entire community and to change how maybe we operate on a daily basis,” Moeggenberg said. “So that is why we are looking at that terrorism charge.”
Controversy
Some see civil liberties trade-offs in state domestic terrorism laws.
“In recent years, the use and content of these state terrorism laws have witnessed a significant shift, raising new threats to First Amendment rights,” Robinson wrote.
Some critics claim the definition can be vague or overarching, used to wield power by certain parties.
In Georgia, for instance, the ACLU and other civil rights groups said the state overstepped when it charged protesters of a massive public safety training facility in Atlanta, nicknamed “Cop City” by opponents, with domestic terrorism.
“The excessively punitive, overreaching charges should be dropped and must not set a precedent,” the ACLU’s Christopher Bruce and Hina Shamsi wrote.
