The FBI is reportedly tracking border activist groups. That's not new.

The FBI is monitoring activist groups who are protesting U.S. immigration policy at the southern border, Yahoo News reports. That sounds extreme, considering most of the evidence cited in a report by the Phoenix FBI office reportedly described nonviolent protest activity.

Activists and civil rights advocates are reportedly worried by the news. They think the government is trying to stifle legitimate civil disobedience and government opposition by labeling it violent extremism or domestic terrorism. But Mike German, a former FBI special agent and fellow at New York University who has written about surveillance of activists, said that while the report appears to be evidence of the bureau's overreach, the FBI has long zeroed in on nonviolent activists.

"It's been a feature of the post-9/11 counterterrorism effort by the FBI to focus on nonviolent civil disobedience and to prioritize it," German said. "For several years after 9/11, the FBI called environmental activists the no. 1 domestic terror threat, even though there's not a single homicide related to environmental 'terrorists' in the United States." German cited a 2010 report from the FBI's inspector general which criticized the bureau for classifying nonviolent claims related to protests by groups like PETA and Greenpeace as "terrorism."

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The FBI, for its part, said the report out of the Phoenix office was "intended to be informative in nature" and contains "appropriate caveats to describe the confidence in the sourcing of information and the likelihood of the assessment." Read more at Yahoo News.