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terrorist attacks before they occurred.
Agents were granted sweeping authori-
ties by Congress to surveil and investigate
any terror suspects with even tenuous
links to foreign organizations. Mean-
while, the homegrown threat grew. The
number of right-wing extremist groups
jumped more than 250% in the first year
of Barack Obama’s presidency, accord-
ing to a report by the Southern Poverty
Law Center. In an internal 2009 report,
DHS analysts warned that the election of
the first Black President, combined with
the economic downturn, “could create a
fertile recruiting environment for right-
wing extremists.” After it leaked, a back-
lash from conservatives—who objected
to the term right-wing extremism —led
DHS leaders to retract the document.
That blowback, former DHS analysts say,
offers a preview of the political challenge
facing Biden.
Trump’s election was a watershed for
extremist groups, who until his 2016 cam-
paign had been disavowed in no uncertain
terms by national candidates. As Presi-
dent, Trump retweeted fringe followers
and infamously called those gathered at
a 2017 white- nationalist rally in Char-
lottesville “very fine people.” Before the
2020 election, he asked the Proud Boys to
“stand back and stand by” during a pres-
idential debate, raising their profile and
generating a rallying cry on the right.
At the same time, the Trump Admin-
istration dismantled many of the govern-
ment’s already limited tools to counter
such groups. The DHS office that focused
on domestic extremism was disbanded.
Dozens of grants meant to go to programs
that counter extremist ideologies at the
grassroots level were pulled, including a
$400,000 grant to the only one focused
on rehabilitating right-wing radicals, Life
After Hate, co-founded by Picciolini.
The combination of Trump’s sym-
pathetic rhetoric and federal neglect
had clear consequences. In Michigan,
COVID-19 lockdown measures drove
up membership in antigovernment mili-
tia groups. Last April, armed protesters
tried to force their way into the legislative
chambers of the state capitol in Lansing.
The Proud Boys became a fixture at dem-
onstrations across the state, wearing their
distinctive black polos with yellow stripes
as they provided “security” at local GOP
events. In October, the FBI foiled a plot by
more than a dozen men with ties to right-
wing militias, like the Wolverine Watch-
men, to kidnap and kill the state’s Demo-
cratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
These groups “were sort of weaving
themselves into local GOP activity,”
says U.S. Representative Elissa Slotkin,
a Michigan Democrat whose district in-
cludes Lansing. “It’s normalized in a way
that I don’t think people realized until
recently.” A former CIA and Pentagon of-
ficial, Slotkin felt a sense of fore boding
as she and her husband walked to the
Capitol on the morning of Jan. 6, passing
demonstrators gathering to protest the
certification of the 2020 election. Antic-
ipating violence, she directed her staff not
to come in to work that day. “We recog-
nized lots of different groups that we had
seen in my own community. It felt very
familiar,” says Slotkin, who plans to focus
on domestic extremism as chairwoman
of the House Intelligence and Counter-
terrorism Subcommittee. “We had seen
this movie before.”Law enforcement has pLenty of
tools to investigate and prosecute violent
domestic extremism. Yet it often chooses
not to use them, former national- security
officials say. When someone spray-paints
a swastika on a synagogue, local cops are
more likely to classify the crime as van-
dalism than to probe whether the per-
petrator has ties to hate groups. Only
14% of nearly 15,600 state and local po-
lice agencies involved in the FBI’s Uni-
form Crime Reporting program even
report hate crimes. Most of them report
zero. Without accurate data catalogingthe threat, it’s impossible to allocate re-
sources to fight it. “Right now, they’re
fighting blind,” says German, “if they’re
even fighting at all.”
State and local law enforcement are
often ill-equipped or unwilling to re-
spond to extremist crimes in ways that
generate leads and investigations. (Nor
does DOJ evaluate whether hate-crime
perpetrators are part of a larger domes-
tic extremist group when it defers an in-
vestigation to local law enforcement. And
in 2019, the FBI said 80% of its counter-
terrorism agents in the field were as-
signed to international terrorism cases,
while just 20% worked on domestic ones.)
Even when local officials flag a pos-
sible far-right plot, the feds rarely make
the case. In 2019, Syracuse University’s
Transactional Records Access Clearing-
house, or TRAC, released a study show-
ing that hate-crime cases were referred to
federal authorities for prosecution almost
2,000 times over the past decade. Only
15% of those referrals led to prosecutions.
Faced with this dilemma, many in
Congress have renewed calls for new leg-
islation to formally criminalize domestic
terrorism, a move Biden supported dur-
ing his campaign. But civil- liberties ad-
vocates reject the idea, fearing that more
power for a broken system would only
make matters worse. In a Jan. 19 letter
to Congress, the American Civil Liber-
ties Union and 150 other groups warned
a domestic- counterterrorism law could
undermine Americans’ First Amendment
rights and be used to target people of color
and other marginalized communities.
At DHS, officials are expanding pro-
grams that focus on keeping those who
flirt with extremist views from joining
militant groups or committing violent
acts. Biden’s newly confirmed Secretary
Alejandro Mayorkas said the task will be to
“identify where the line between hateful
rhetoric and hateful action takes place, to
be well ahead of the action before it occurs
and to stop it.” The agency announced it
will provide at least $77 million in federal
grants to state and local governments to
combat domestic violent extremism, in-
cluding training beat officers to spot the
signs of far-right violence early on.
Mayorkas has acknowledged that
these programs will have to focus on
fighting extremists’ recruitment on so-
cial media platforms. But any efforts toNation