The State Department designated Sweden's largest neo-Nazi group and its leader as terrorists on Friday, marking the second time it has applied the designation to a white supremacist group known for a long history of violence.
Officials said the decision came after the group, known as the Nordic Resistance Movement, has incited violence online and forged connections with like-minded organizations and people in the U.S. Such actions have raised concerns among federal law enforcement officials charged with preventing domestic terrorism.
“Members and leaders of this group have carried out violent attacks against political opponents, protesters, journalists, and others perceived to be enemies,” the State Department said in a statement.
The Biden administration said the designation was part of a broader effort to crack down on white extremism. In June 2021, the administration released a domestic terrorism strategy, saying addressing the threat required a “multi-pronged, whole-of-federal-and-across-government response.”
The designation gives the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control the power to seize U.S. property or assets belonging to the group, and makes it easier to prohibit U.S. citizens from conducting financial transactions with the group and to ban its members from traveling to the United States.
Still, Mary McCord, a former senior Justice Department official, said that while the designation was an important step, the US could have gone a step further and designated the group as a so-called foreign terrorist organisation.
“While this is an important and welcome step to counter transnational white supremacy, it does not invoke the Material Support Act, one of the government's most powerful tools against foreign terrorist organizations,” she said.
The Nordic Resistance Movement was founded in 1997 and has chapters in Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, but has been banned since 2020, the State Department said. The group's goal is to replace Nordic democracies with a “united Nordic nation-state.”
The Anti-Defamation League said the group set itself apart from others in the region and Europe largely because of its “fanatical Nazi ideology and declaration of revolution by any means necessary.”
The group's violent ideology was also on full display just hours earlier when a neo-Nazi believed to be linked to the group stabbed a 12-year-old boy, said to be of foreign origin, at a shopping centre in Finland, local media reported.
Finland banned the group in 2020 after its members assaulted a man during a demonstration in 2016. The man later died from his injuries.
Masked members of the group attacked a migrant camp north of Stockholm this year.
The State Department on Friday specifically criticized three members of the Nordic Resistance Movement: its leader, Tor Fredrik Weideland; Per Öberg, a member of the movement's national council who heads its parliamentary chapter; and Leif Robert Eklund, a member of the movement's national council who coordinates the Swedish chapters.
Former President Donald J. Trump has been accused of ignoring the threat of domestic terrorism, but his administration added it to the national counterterrorism strategy.
And in 2020, the Trump administration designated the ultranationalist group, Imperial Russian Movement, a terrorist organization, the first time the U.S. has done so against a white supremacist group.
The group has supported neo-Nazi organisations in Scandinavia, in line with the Russian government's broader policy of stoking internal divisions, including racial conflict, and sowing unrest in Western democracies.