Internal security

Homeland Security’ Ignores White Terror, DHS Veterans Say
Five veterans of the Department of Homeland Security told The Daily Beast that DHS, created in the wake of al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, has long considered far-right radicalism to be the FBI’s purview. But the FBI has competing priorities. Four bureau veterans interviewed by The Daily Beast gave a range of responses, spanning from either considering it important but less so than fighting jihadist terror to, in the words of one retiree, “the lowest priority.” (The FBI, for its part, insisted to The Daily Beast that its “top priority remains protecting the United States from terrorist attacks, both international and domestic.”)
Under Donald Trump’s presidency, experts say the threat has only grown–and without commensurate efforts to mitigate it. DHS gutted an interagency task force that represents the only federal effort at preventing radicalization for any form of terrorism. White supremacy was among its targets. “What we’ve lost here is the creation of infrastructure to prevent the threats of the future,” said George Selim, a senior Department of Homeland Security official who ran the task force before his retirement in summer 2017.