Only a couple weeks after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, there were reports that he would rebrand the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program to focus solely on Muslim communities. Months later, however, the program remains untouched.
CVE partners agencies with community groups to prevent people from being radicalized into violent extremist groups. It was expanded to focus on white supremacists and other far-right extremists during the Obama administration.
The need to focus on white supremacist activity was particularly clear this week, when there were a rash of incidents in which white men attacked or intimidated Muslims and people of color, along with anyone else who attempted to shield the targeted people from violence. On Friday, Jeremy Joseph Christian, a known white supremacist, yelled racist and Islamophobic slurs at teenage girls and stabbed three men who came to their defense. Two of those men, Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky John Best, died after the stabbing.
A day later, in Clearlake, California, a white man, Anthony Robert Hammond, stabbed an African American man with a machete while shouting racial slurs. On the same day, two Native American men in Taholah, Washington were attacked by a man in a truck who was described as white and in his mid-30s. One of the attacked men, Jimmy Kramer, died at the hospital, and the other man, Harvey Anderson, has serious injuries.
Reuters reported in February that the Trump administration was considering renaming CVE as “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism” and changing the program so that it would no longer target white supremacist groups. According to the Reuters report, although CVE funding was already appropriated by Congress, a DHS official was concerned grant recipients wouldn’t receive their money.
But so far, none of this has come to pass. The program has not been renamed. The scope of the program has not changed. Grant recipients whose work focuses on violent far-right groups were sent letters in February that they would receive funding. Four Muslim nonprofits refused to accept the $2 million plus in federal funding for anti-extremism efforts, however, because of the president’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and the Muslim ban.
Jasmine El-Gamal, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said several officials at the Department of Homeland Security and State Department have privately expressed their concern about the future of funding for non-ISIS related extremist programs.
“Folks who are working on CVE issues at State and DHS were kind of worried about what that would mean for programming and public policy and diplomacy,” El-Gamal said. “But so far nothing has actually changed program-wise so far … There has been nothing proactive on part of the Trump administration so far.”
“I think there are enough voices inside the administration expressing concern on doing anything drastic or making any changes,” El -Gamal added. “But I don’t personally anticipate anything happening without a thorough review and input from the professionals at State and DHS, at least nothing we were afraid of, like a nefarious focus on Islamic extremism.”