Face of Nation : Two mass shootings within just 24 hours have called into question the amount of resources that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have devoted to spotting and thwarting the threat of domestic terrorismin the United States.
The top two members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Monday, renewing their request for information on how the Justice Department is carrying out its mission to protect Americans from domestic terrorism. Meanwhile, a DHS official who spoke to NBC News on Monday, after a day of scrambling to arrange meetings and phone calls with local partners, said the feeling at DHS is “uh oh, we have a problem.” The official said that there’s an effort to demonstrate what DHS can do to confront the rising threat of domestic terrorists, like the shooter who killed 22 in El Paso on Saturday after posting an anti-immigrant diatribe online.
Over the past two years, DHS, which has a mission to coordinate and share information about threats posed to the United States among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, has made cuts to personnel and resources that were previously devoted to fighting domestic terrorism.
The government defines domestic terrorism as acts motivated not by foreign ideologies, like Islamic extremism, but U.S.-based ideologies, like white supremacy.
In June, Brette Steele, the former regional director of strategic engagement in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Terrorism and Prevention Partnerships, testified before Congress about the drastic cuts she has witnessed since 2017.
Two years ago, the DHS office handling domestic terrorism — as well as the prevention of other terror threats to the U.S. homeland — “managed $10 million in grant funding, 16 full-time employees, 25 contractors, and a total budget of approximately $21 million,” Steele said.
Today, the office’s mission has broadened to include “an incident where a known or knowable attacker selects a particular target prior to their violent attack,” but its resources have dwindled down to “no contractors, and no other means of supporting existing programs beyond a team of eight dedicated, full time employees and an operating budget of $2.6 million,” she said in her testimony before the House Oversight Committee on June 4.
At the FBI, a Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell was launched earlier this year. Composed of subject matter experts from both the Criminal Investigative and Counterterrorism Divisions, the fusion cell offers program coordination from FBI Headquarters. It “helps ensure seamless information sharing across divisions, and augments investigative resources,” the bureau says, and is active on the El Paso case.
Yet there is still a resource disparity at the FBI. Michael McGarrity, the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, told Congress in May that 80 percent of FBI field agents and analysts are devoted to working on matters of international terrorism, including home-grown jihadist extremists. Twenty percent are working on domestic terrorism, including white supremacists. “Individuals affiliated with racially motivated violent extremism are responsible for the most lethal and violent activity,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the recent changes. The Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the letter to Attorney General Barr or criticisms of its domestic terror program.
President Donald Trump addressed the country in the wake of the shootings in Texas and Dayton, Ohio on Monday, saying, “First, we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs. I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partnership with local, state and federal agencies as well as social media companies to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.”
