Miles Taylor, the prominent former Trump Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, is warning that his former agency has never been less prepared for a terror attack on U.S. soil.
“I oversaw counterterrorism at DHS for two years in the first Trump administration,” Taylor writes. “I’ve never seen DHS less prepared to defend the U.S. against a terrorist attack. And Trump took us to war five days ago — with a country that is hellbent on retaliating.”
Taylor says that “the Trump administration has left us vulnerable to an Iran-backed terrorist attack,” and he warns that “the way I’ve watched the White House and DHS fumble the preparation for war is beyond a dereliction of duty. It’s borderline criminal.”
On Substack, Taylor outlines five reasons — and “foolish mistakes” — he says have left America vulnerable to a terrorist attack “that could get Americans killed.”
“The administration appears to have done no ‘defensive’ prep for war,” he says. “And it’s spent a year shifting counterterrorism personnel to domestic immigration enforcement.”
“Anyone who has partial cognition knows that a U.S. war with Iran — whether airstrikes, naval confrontations, or targeted assassinations of its leadership — carries an immediate and predictable consequence,” Taylor says. “You hit someone, they hit back. In this case, we should be expecting Iranian-directed or Iranian-inspired attacks on American soil.”
Serving up a “serious warning,” Taylor says: “Wars do not stay overseas. They come back to haunt you at home. And if you’re not ready, then you’re tempting fate to take the lives of your own people.”
He also says it appears DHS was not even consulted before Trump ordered U.S. Armed Forces to attack Iran.
“There is no public evidence of any meaningful interagency preparations. No indication that DHS, the FBI, or the intelligence community were brought in to war-game the domestic security consequences of military escalation,” he writes. “What’s worse, the people whose job it is to answer the question ‘what happens here at home if we do this?’ were apparently not in the room at all when the bombs started flying.”
Another reason America is not prepared, Taylor says, is that Trump has moved thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts, and officials to “immigration” enforcement — “and away from other missions, including foreign terror threats.”
For example, “Border Patrol Tactical Units (BORTAC) — the elite DHS counterterrorism teams — have been conspicuous on U.S. city streets going after citizens, rather than hunting down Iranian operatives.”
All the time these counterterrorism agents spend away from their core duties is time they cannot spend chasing down tips or “locating and removing potential assassins, bombers, and plotters here within our borders.”
Another reason the U.S. is unprepared for a terror attack is that the Trump administration claims the top terror threat to America is Antifa.
“DHS Secretary Noem and an FBI leader testified under oath in front of the House Homeland Security Committee that their biggest terrorist worry inside the U.S. Homeland was ‘Antifa.’ That’s right. Not Iranian IRGC operatives. Not ISIS or al Qaeda agents infiltrating the country. But left-leaning Americans they’ve deemed to be ‘Antifa,’ even though Trump’s lieutenants couldn’t even figure out how to describe the danger when they were pressed.”
Also, the Trump administration has been firing FBI agents who were specifically tasked with monitoring Iranian threats — reportedly because they also had been involved in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s alleged removal, retention, and refusal to return classified documents that were stored at Mar-a-Lago.
And the final reason the U.S. is unprepared for a terror attack: Trump took America to war before getting DHS funded.
“Perhaps most damning of all is that the president of the United States launched a war before making sure his Department of Homeland Security was back up and running.”
He says that “if Trump knew he was going to launch strikes against Iran, he should have made damn sure he found a way to cut a deal on Capitol Hill to get DHS funded.”
Taylor laments that “that clearly wasn’t a priority.”