An Abridged History of America’s Terrorism Prevention Programs: Opposition Grows, Supporters Adapt

A night view of the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, used by judges in the Eastern District of New York (Douglas Palmer/https://flic.kr/p/gLNk13/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) The following is a modified excerpt from a new book, “ Homegrown: ISIS in America .” To read the first part of the excerpt, click here . While the Group of Four was attempting to coordinate programs in Washington, D.C., a more organized and sophisticated effort was building in advocacy and community groups around the country against countering violent extremism (CVE) programs. The organizations that opposed the initiatives of the pilot city programs did not view countering violent extremism as a good-faith effort by the federal government to find alternatives to “counterterrorism as usual,” but as an extension of typical counterterrorism efforts. As the CVE strategy was rolled out nationwide, concerns among civil rights activists and Muslim American organizations grew regarding the strategy’s implementation in local communities and over the direction of the strategy more broadly. Responses ranged from calls for greater institutional checks from civil society on government programs to ending CVE as a strategy altogether. One of the criticisms most commonly raised among counter-CVE activists was, and continues to be, that only Muslim communities are highlighted and stigmatized as suspect communities. Those concerns and criticisms continued to rise after the initial 2011 Strategic Implementation Plan release. By 2014, just as the Three-City Pilot in Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Los Angeles was beginning to take shape, protests quickly followed. Organizing under the hashtag #StopCVE , local activists and organizations in each of the three cities staged protests and raised awareness online. In addition to framing their protests as a struggle for human and civil rights, community organizers and legal advocates also tried to situate the post-2011 CVE wave within the context of the “war on terror.” By connecting the counter-CVE struggle to the longer history of America’s domestic counterterrorism efforts, activists tapped into the fears and lived experiences of Muslim Americans across the U.S. over a decade in the making. When the 2015 interagency CVE Task Force was announced, the FBI’s “Shared Responsibilities Committees,”—modeled on the U.K.’s “Prevent’s Channel Panels” for referrals of community members identified as susceptible to violent extremism and tailored intervention—received some of the greatest condemnation from activists. In Boston, the Muslim Justice League—formed in 2014 “in response to a pressing need for local Muslim-led defense of our communities’ human and civil rights against the ‘War on Terror’”—drew support from a number of members, individual donors, and foundations such as the Hyams Foundation, the Episcopal City Mission, the Barr Foundation and others. The Muslim Justice League went on to receive a seed grant from the Harvard Law School Public Service Venture Fund in 2015. In addition to organizing protests, the group also provided “Know Your Rights” workshops and pro bono legal representation to community members who had been approached by the FBI. A Muslim advocacy group called the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) soon took the lead in organizing resistance to CVE measures in Minneapolis, forming a coalition of more than 40 organizations of varying sizes based in the Minneapolis area or in Minnesota more broadly. These organizations co-signed a letter penned by CAIR to CVE-affiliated organizations addressing concerns over what they deemed the “stigmatizing, divisive, and ineffective CVE Pilot Program” being implemented in Minneapolis’s Somali American community. Perhaps the most sophisticated resistance to CVE, however, came from Los Angeles. Since April 2016, #StopCVE had been organizing opposition protests, but in June 2018, a petition was circulated criticizing the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Public Safety, Human Relations Commission, and Police Department for failing to release documents regarding the federal CVE grant to the city. This resulted in a lawsuit , filed on June 28, 2018, claiming that the City of Los Angeles had uncritically adopted CVE measures without community transparency. The lawsuit also aimed to publicize the funding stream of the city’s CVE efforts in order to analyze and assess the program’s impact on Los Angeles communities. By August of that year, responding to the pressure, the City of Los Angeles announced it would not accept CVE funding. Though not part of the Three-City Pilot, Chicago also witnessed significant counter-CVE resistance to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority’s (ICJIA’s) Targeted Violence Prevention Program (TVPP), a Homeland Security-funded initiative that in many ways rebranded CVE efforts in the city. The TVPP built on the ICJIA’s experience with gang prevention models in Chicago’s south and southwest neighborhoods, which alone drew significant backlash on the basis that the two issues are different and vary in scope. The relatively unsuccessful track records of gang prevention models certainly did not alleviate these concerns. In this environment, the #StopCVE coalition in Chicago was able to draw on a number of organizations, including CAIR, to organize and resist CVE locally. However, CAIR had its own internal disagreements on CVE. Its Florida chapter had applied for federal funding for CVE, and individual chapters had advocated for the same approach that the national office was campaigning against. In a 2017 article for Just Security, Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, summed up many of the sentiments expressed by advocacy and community leaders nationwide. Patel, a thought leader in the countering-CVE movement, identified three fundamental reasons why she believed countering violent extremism is bad policy. First, she stated that CVE programs are built on a behavioral science that, despite years of research, failed to deliver a concrete profile of an American terrorist or model of terrorist behavior, and that now uses overly broad indicators to identify individuals who are vulnerable to radicalization. Second, virtually all of the CVE programs with government funding are directed toward Muslim American communities. Third, the high proportion of funding dedicated to policing or adjacent services laid bare the central role of law enforcement to the CVE mission, deepening fears of surveillance in target communities. A number of the concerns raised by activists and other organizations and individuals involved in counter-CVE are valid. Among them was the criticism that CVE was an Islamist-focused initiative that turned a blind eye to other violent extremist threats facing the nation. Language in the national CVE strategy and the subsequent Strategic Implementation Plan made little to no mention of countering the surge in violence stemming from right-wing extremism, which had been rising steadily for years and continues to do so. The one CVE program purportedly aimed at right-wing extremism interventions, titled “Life After Hate,” had its funding rescinded in the 2016 Homeland Security CVE grant application round. For some counter-CVE activists and the public, the recall of the one grant focused on right-wing extremism seemed to confirm their suspicions that the government was interested only in focusing on Muslim communities. The public criticism of the government’s efforts also revealed that there was little organic grassroots support for CVE. Only a handful of government officials and family members of radicalized individuals seem truly committed to the cause of finding an alternative approach to homegrown terrorism besides arresting someone or doing nothing. Civil rights activists and community groups see the program as inherently flawed and thus not worthy of being saved. As one counter-CVE activist said in an author interview, “It’s not my job to fix CVE.” Right-wing opponents of CVE lambast the program as “trying to hug terrorists,” preferring traditional counterterrorism methods and decrying what they saw as the Obama administration’s efforts to separate jihadist extremism from its perceived religious foundations. The opponents of CVE have legitimate criticisms of the development of programming in the United States. But they are mistaken in believing that ending CVE altogether will fix their woes with the counterterrorism apparatus in the United States. Absent a robust CVE initiative, the U.S. security apparatus will be forced to rely solely on its counterterrorism and law enforcement approach, as it did prior to the rollout of CVE. Traditional counterterrorism without alternatives to prosecution may be more likely to engender civil rights co
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