U.S. unveils visa policy targeting alleged far-left terrorists
by Darryl Coote · UPIJuly 16 (UPI) -- Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a new policy to impose visa restrictions on alleged far-left terrorists, as the Trump administration promotes far-left political violence as a growing threat not only to the United States but also to the world.
The visa-restriction policy, announced Thursday, targets members of far-left terrorist groups and other aligned organizations who have supported or incited acts of terrorism or violence, participated in economic sabotage or supported violent and other criminal actions.
Rubio announced the policy the same day he spoke at the opening of an international summit on political terrorism in Washington, D.C., where he said that for far too long the country's counterterrorism doctrine has had a "blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left."
The United States' top diplomat spoke as the Trump administration has turned the attention of the United States' counterterrorism apparatus toward far-left extremism. President Donald Trump has criticized local authorities' failure to prosecute violence during the 2020 racial-justice protests, while denouncing the Biden-era prosecutions of his supporters who stormed the Capitol and fought law enforcement on Jan. 6, 2021.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United States has seen an increase in the number of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots, particularly since Trump's political rise in 2016, and a decrease in right-wing violence, with 2025 being the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumbered those committed by the right.
The think tank said that the rise in left-wing violence began from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.
Rubio criticized those who would dismiss the idea that far-left terrorism could be as serious as the threat from the right as "dogma" and "ideological prejudice" embedded in the discourse surrounding political violence and extremism.
He said far-left violence is fueled by "a hatred for civilization itself."
"It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and cowardly against the strong and good," he said.
"It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. That is what radical leftism is."
In a broad swipe, he chastised those who call themselves anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, communists and Marxists, accusing them of using the language of equality, justice and liberation to disguise their "overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world."
He accused the far left of despising the Western world "because the West is great."
Moves the Trump administration has taken to target this violence include the State Department's November designation of four violent far-left groups as foreign terrorist organizations and its offering of rewards of up to $10 million for information that would disrupt their financing.
Rubio told those assembled that more designations would be coming soon.
"It is easy to destroy great things; it is far more difficult to make them," he said. "The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former."
This week in Washington
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is sworn in at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination to be attorney general at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. Blanche has served as acting attorney general since April, when former Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo