ANDY NGO REPORTS: State Department links Antifa's lawyers to decades of Cuban communist influence

A new US State Department report identifies the Antifa legal nonprofit, the National Lawyers Guild, as a central support organization for Antifa militants and traces the radical lawyers’ group’s activities to a decades-long network of left-wing terrorist influence tied to the Cuban regime. The 100-page report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” released on Monday, details how Havana spent nearly seven decades cultivating left-wing American radicals, extremist organizations and sympathetic institutions to advance revolutionary leftism inside the United States.

It alleges that network stretches from the Weather Underground and Black Panthers to modern Antifa, anti-ICE organizations and socialist groups. Of particular significance in the report is how the NLG operates as “one of the most persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network.”

The State Department accuses the far-left 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation of helping defend and facilitate political terrorism, including the Weather Underground of the 1970s to the violent Black Lives Matter and Antifa militants today. Established in 1937, the NLG has long functioned as a communist front group aiding in anti-American foreign-linked interests.

NLG founder and former president Victor Rabinowitz headed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee before his law firm — co-founded with fellow NLG attorney Leonard Boudin — became the Cuban government’s official legal counsel in the United States in 1960, a relationship the report says has continued ever since. Leonard Boudin is the father of Katy Boudin, one of the convicted murderers in the Weather Underground terrorist group. His grandson, Chesa Boudin, was the radical leftist district attorney of San Francisco from 2020–22.

The report cites historical accounts alleging that NLG lawyers provided financing and logistical support to Weather Underground fugitives. The Weather Underground was a far-left American terrorist organization active from the late 60s and through the 70s. The group carried out a number of bombings and shootings resulting in multiple deaths. Their targets of violence included the US Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department, and multiple police stations and courthouses.

In the last decade, the NLG has become more openly aligned with the communist-anarchist militants of Antifa, as that movement exploded in growth and violence during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.


NLG members aiding Antifa in Portland, Ore.

The NLG has chapters at most universities with law programs. Its student members have led a number of direct actions to shut down invited campus speakers they want to silence.

NLG members, known for wearing green hats, regularly coordinate with self-described Antifa groups before street riots to discuss tactics on how to evade arrest and prosecution. This journalist has observed the role of the NLG in aiding Antifa in Portland and the Pacific Northwest, where its members misleadingly present themselves to the public as independent “legal observers.”

The Guild deploys its members, mostly made up of law students, at Antifa riots to give arrested militants rapid access to free attorneys, bail money, and assistance from allied radical nonprofits. The NLG says it coordinated legal support for more than 20,000 people arrested during the 2020 deadly George Floyd BLM-Antifa riots.

In 2017, leaders of the NLG’s San Francisco chapter wrote an essay titled, “We are all antifa,” while an NLG director pledged official support for violent Antifa “in the street and in the courts.” In 2023, Thomas Jurgens, an NLG member and SPLC staffer, was arrested at a violent Antifa terrorist attack near Atlanta with members of the “Stop Cop City” terror movement.


Trans militant Jamie Marsicano, an NLG member, was one of the suspects arrested in the Atlanta Antifa terrorist attack in 2023

Last year, the NLG pledged unconditional support for the terror defendants in the North Texas Antifa federal case. Federal jurors convicted nine members of the cell in March following an armed July 4, 2025 ambush attack on the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. A responding police officer was shot in the neck, and the cell’s ringleader evaded arrest for 11 days while he was taken to multiple Antifa safehouses in the Dallas area.

The NLG characterized the ambush as “a typical pro-immigrant protest” conducted by “community members” expressing solidarity with foreign national detainees. The organization condemned the resulting federal charges as “expansive and unchecked state repression.”

The report also states that generations of NLG leaders participated in delegations to Cuba hosted by regime-affiliated organizations and helped organize similar trips for other American radical leftists.

The NLG continues to lobby for the Cuban regime’s interests through its partnership with the National Network on Cuba. The report notes that the NLG adopted an emergency resolution in 2026 pledging to work with Cuba solidarity organizations against US policy toward the island, and cites a previous Guild resolution declaring that it has “supported the Cuban Revolution since its triumph on January 1, 1959.” The NLG also campaigned for the late terrorist and convicted murderer fugitive Assata Shakur, who was funded by Cuba and fled to the island in 1984 following a prison break.

The National Network on Cuba includes more than 60 US organizations, such as the NLG, Democratic Socialists of America, CodePink and the Communist Party USA. The report identifies the coalition as a coordination point between the Cuban regime and the American far left. Many of those organizations have close partnerships with Democrats. For example, DSA politicians run for office using Democrat Party infrastructure.

The State Department argues that Cuba’s greatest success has not been military or economic but ideological: building a revolutionary infrastructure capable of turning American institutions and activists against their own country. However, the report does not outline what steps it plans to take, if any, against the NLG.

Andy Ngo is the author of the forthcoming investigative true-crime book, The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult.