When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system.

Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters. In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.

“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten. “They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”

One woman’s voice shook as she asked, “What kind of police go around without license plates?”

And then this from another: “Should we just run from them?”

During a tense public meeting days later, Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents — even if only to ban the use of masks. The answer was a resounding no. Plus, filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security was likely to go nowhere because the office that once handled them had been dismantled. There was little chance of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because, among other hurdles, there was no way to reliably learn their identities.

Since then, Amezcua, 58, said she has reluctantly accepted the reality: There are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations. Santa Ana has proven to be a template for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in Chicago and elsewhere. “It’s almost like he tries it out in this county and says, ‘It worked there, so now let me send them there,’” Amezcua said.

Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails, encouraged agents to wear masks, threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way, and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.

And although they are reluctant to predict the future, the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.

One former senior DHS official who was involved in oversight said that what is happening on American streets today “gives me goosebumps.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: “Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.”

The former official paused. “We’re at an inflection point in history right now and it’s frightening.”

Although ICE is conducting itself out in the open, even inviting conservative social media influencers to accompany its agents on high-profile raids, the agency operates in darkness. The identities of DHS officers, their salaries and their operations have long been withheld for security reasons and generally exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. However, there were offices within DHS created to hold agents and their supervisors accountable for their actions on the job. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, created by Congress and led largely by lawyers, investigated allegations of rape and unlawful searches from both the public and within DHS ranks, for instance. Egregious conduct was referred to the Justice Department.

The CRCL office had limited powers; former staffers say their job was to protect DHS by ensuring personnel followed the law and addressed civil rights concerns. Still, it was effective in stalling rushed deportations or ensuring detainees had access to phones and lawyers. And even when its investigations didn’t fix problems, CRCL provided an accounting of allegations and a measure of transparency for Congress and the public.

The office processed thousands of complaints — 3,000 in fiscal year 2023 alone — ranging from allegations of lack of access to medical treatment to reports of sexual assault at detention centers. Former staffers said around 600 complaints were open when work was suspended.

The administration has gutted most of the office. What’s left of it was led, at least for a while, by a 29-year-old White House appointee who helped craft Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint that broadly calls for the curtailment of civil rights enforcement.

Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a windfall in resources. On top of its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting and retention alone. As part of its hiring blitz, the agency has dropped age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $50,000.

“Supercharging this law enforcement agency and at the same time you have oversight being eliminated?” said the former DHS official. “This is very scary.”

Michelle Brané, a longtime human rights attorney who directed DHS’ ombudsman office during the Biden administration, said Trump’s adherence to “the authoritarian playbook is not even subtle.”

“ICE, their secret police, is their tool,” Brané said. “Once they have that power, which they have now, there’s nothing stopping them from using it against citizens.”

Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, refuted descriptions of ICE as a secret police force. She called such comparisons the kind of “smears and demonization” that led to the recent attack on an ICE facility in Texas, in which a gunman targeted an ICE transport van and shot three detained migrants, two of them fatally, before killing himself.

In a written response to ProPublica, McLaughlin dismissed the current and former national security officials and scholars interviewed by ProPublica as “far-left champagne socialists” who haven’t seen ICE enforcement up close.

“If they had,” she wrote, “they would know when our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs” and other criminals.

McLaughlin said the recruiting blitz is not compromising standards. She wrote that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is ready for 11,000 new hires by the beginning of next year and that training has been streamlined and boosted by technology. “Our workforce never stops learning,” McLaughlin wrote.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also praised ICE conduct and accused Democrats of making “dangerous, untrue smears.”

“ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism,” Jackson said. “Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens and fueling false narratives that lead to violence.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Trump pick who fired nearly the entire civil rights oversight staff, said the move was in response to CRCL functioning “as internal adversaries that slow down operations,” according to a DHS spokesperson.

Trump also eliminated the department’s Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which was charged with flagging inhumane conditions at ICE detention facilities where many of the apprehended immigrants are held. The office was resurrected after a lawsuit and court order, though it’s sparsely staffed.

The hobbling of the office comes as the White House embarks on an aggressive expansion of detention sites with an eye toward repurposing old jails or building new ones with names that telegraph harsh conditions: “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, built by the state and operated in partnership with DHS, or the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.

“It is a shocking situation to be in that I don’t think anybody anticipated a year ago,” said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. “We might’ve thought that we were going to see a slide, but I don’t think anybody anticipated how quickly it would transpire, and now people at all levels are scrambling to figure out how to push back.”

“Authoritarian Playbook”

Frantz and other scholars who study anti-democratic political systems in other countries said there are numerous examples in which ICE’s activities appear cut from an authoritarian playbook. Among them was the detention of Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was apprehended after co-writing an op-ed for the campus paper that criticized the school’s response to the war in Gaza. ICE held her incommunicado for 24 hours and then shuffled her through three states before jailing her in Louisiana.

“The thing that got me into the topic of ‘maybe ICE is a secret police force’?” said Lee Morgenbesser, an Australian political science professor who studies authoritarianism. “It was that daylight snatching of the Tufts student.”

Morgenbesser was also struck by the high-profile instances of ICE detaining elected officials who attempted to stand in their way. Among them, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was detained for demanding a judicial warrant from ICE, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a DHS press conference.

And David Sklansky, a Stanford Law School professor who researches policing and democracy, said it appears that ICE’s agents are allowed to operate with complete anonymity. “It’s not just that people can’t see faces of the officers,” Sklansky said. “The officers aren’t wearing shoulder insignia or name tags.”

U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, recently pointed out that use of masked law enforcement officers had long been considered anathema to American ideals. In a blistering ruling against the administration’s arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, he wrote, “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.” The Trump administration has said it will appeal that ruling.

Where the Fallout is Felt

The fallout is being felt in places like Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin, where ICE apprehended 47 people, including nine children, during a birthday celebration in the early morning of April 1.

The agency’s only disclosure about the raid in Dripping Springs describes the operation as part of a yearlong investigation targeting “members and associates believed to be part of the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.”

Six months later, the county’s top elected official told ProPublica the federal government has ignored his attempts to get answers.

“We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them,” said County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat. “By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”

In the raid, a Texas trooper secured a search warrant that allowed law enforcement officers to breach the home, an Airbnb rental on a vast stretch of land in the Hill Country. Becerra told ProPublica he believes the suspicion of drugs at the party was a pretense to pull people out of the house so ICE officers who lacked a warrant could take them into custody. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has yet to produce evidence supporting claims of gang involvement, said Karen Muñoz, a civil rights attorney helping families track down their relatives who were jailed or deported. While some court documents are sealed, nothing in the public record verifies the gang affiliation DHS cited as the cause for the birthday party raid.

“There’s no evidence released at all that any person kidnapped at that party was a member of any organized criminal group,” Muñoz said.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, did not respond to questions about Hays County and other raids where families and attorneys allege a lack of transparency and due process.

In Plain Sight

Months after ICE’s widely publicized raids, fear continues to envelop Santa Ana, a majority-Hispanic city with a large immigrant population. Amezcua, the mayor, said the raids have complicated local policing and rendered parents afraid to pick up their children from school. The city manager, a California-born citizen and Latino, carries with him three government IDs, including a passport.

Raids of car washes and apartment buildings continue, but the community has started to “push back,” Amezcua said. “Like many other communities, the neighbors come out. People stop in the middle of traffic.”

With so few institutional checks on ICE’s powers, citizens are increasingly relying on themselves. On at least one occasion in nearby Downey, a citizen’s intervention had some effect.

On June 12, Melyssa Rivas had just started her workday when a colleague burst into her office with urgent news: “ICE is here.”

The commotion was around the corner in Rivas’ hometown, a Los Angeles suburb locals call “Mexican Beverly Hills” for its stately houses and affluent Hispanic families. Rivas, 31, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, belongs to Facebook groups where residents share updates about cultural festivals, church programs and, these days, the presence of Trump’s deportation foot soldiers.

Rivas had seen posts about ICE officers sweeping through LA and figured Downey’s turn had come. She and her co-worker rushed toward the sound of screaming at a nearby intersection. Rivas hit “record” on her phone as a semicircle of trucks and vans came into view. She filmed at least half a dozen masked men in camouflage vests encircling a Hispanic man on his knees.

Her unease deepened as she registered details that “didn’t seem right,” Rivas recalled in an interview. She said the parked vans had out-of-state plates or no tags. The armed men wore only generic “police” patches, and most were in street clothes. No visible insignia identified them as state or federal — or even legal authorities at all.

“When is it that we just decided to do things a different way? There’s due process, there’s a legal way, and it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore,” Rivas said. “Where are human rights?”

Video footage shows Rivas and others berating the officers for complicity in what they called a “kidnapping.” Local news channels later reported that the vehicles had chased the man after a raid at a nearby car wash.

“I know half of you guys know this is fucked up,” Rivas was recorded telling the officers.

Moments later, the scene took a turn. As suddenly as they’d arrived, the officers returned to their vehicles and left, with no apology and no explanation to the distraught man they left on the sidewalk.

Through a mask, one of them said, “Have a good day.”

In the weeks leading up to July 9, Ayman Soliman told friends he was terrified of losing the sanctuary he’d found after fleeing Egypt in 2014 and building a new life as a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

Soliman, 51, was to show up at 9 a.m. on that date for his first check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since losing his asylum status. He’d been granted the protections in 2018 under the first Trump administration. Then, in the last month of the Biden presidency, immigration authorities moved to revoke them based on sharply disputed claims of fraud and aid to a terrorist group. Once President Donald Trump returned to office weeks later, court records show, immigration officials bumped up the terrorism claims and formalized the asylum termination June 3.

By the time of Soliman’s ICE appointment, friends said, he was distraught over the prospect of being returned to the regime that had jailed him for documenting protests as a journalist. He arrived at the agency’s field office in Blue Ash, Ohio, accompanied by fellow clergy and a couple of Democratic state lawmakers.

“I didn’t come to America seeking a better life. I was escaping death,” he said in a video filmed just before he entered.

Inside, Soliman’s attorneys said, he was shocked to find FBI agents waiting for him. They interrogated him for three hours about his charity work more than a decade ago in Egypt, the basis for the Department of Homeland Security accusations of illegal aid, or “material support,” to Islamist militants.

His lawyer eventually emerged from the ICE office holding a belt and a wallet. Soliman had been swept into custody, joining a record 61,000 people now in ICE detention. As he awaits an immigration court trial Sept. 25, he is being held in a county jail run by a sheriff who posted a sign outside reading, “Illegal Aliens Here.”

Legal observers are watching the chaplain’s case as a bellwether of the Trump administration’s ability to merge the vast federal powers of immigration and counterterrorism. The case is also a reminder, they say, of sweeping post-9/11 statutes that both Republican and Democratic administrations have been accused of abusing, especially in cases involving Muslims.

Material support laws ban almost any type of aid to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups, extending far beyond the basics of weapons, personnel and money. Prosecutors describe the laws as an invaluable tool against would-be attackers, but civil liberties groups have long complained of overreach.

Over the years, successive administrations have faced legal challenges over how they wield the power; a milestone Supreme Court decision during the Obama administration upheld the laws as constitutional. Now, however, there are particular fears about the material support “sledgehammer,” as one legal scholar put it, in the hands of Trump, who has been openly hostile toward Muslims and determined to deport a million people who are in the United States without permission.

“These statutes are written extraordinarily broadly with the unstated premise that discretion will be exercised responsibly. And one thing this administration has shown is that it doesn’t understand what it means to exercise discretion responsibly,” said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who argued high-profile material support cases and served as national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

At issue are DHS allegations that Soliman’s involvement with an Islamic charity provided material support to the Muslim Brotherhood. But neither the charity nor the Brotherhood is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and an Egyptian court found no official ties between the groups.

The Biden-era DHS, which first flagged the issue, said it would revoke Soliman’s asylum if “a preponderance of the evidence supports termination” after a hearing, according to the December notice. At the time, court records show, the material support allegation was listed as a secondary concern after more common asylum questions about the veracity of official documents and his claims of persecution in Egypt.

Once Trump came to power weeks later, Soliman’s attorneys said, the material support claims metastasized, with U.S. authorities declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a Tier III, or undesignated, terrorist group and adding new arguments about ties to Hamas. The Brotherhood, a nearly century-old Islamist political movement, renounced violence in the 1970s, though Hamas and other spinoffs are on the U.S. blacklist. In addition to the Egypt-related concerns, DHS filings about Soliman had noted warrants for “murder and terrorism” in Iraq — a country Soliman says he’s never visited.

By elevating the national security argument, Soliman’s lawyers said, DHS was able to bypass an immigration judge and order the chaplain held without bond as “potentially dangerous.” An established terrorism nexus means less transparency for immigrants — and more power for the authorities.

“DHS is judge, jury and executioner,” said Robert Ratliff, one of Soliman’s attorneys.

The idea of Soliman as a secret militant has outraged residents who know him locally as “the interfaith imam” and the first Muslim on the pastoral care team at Cincinnati Children’s, a top-ranked pediatric hospital. Colleagues described a popular chaplain with nicknames for the tiny patients and soothing words for their bleary-eyed parents.

Judy Ragsdale, the former pastoral care director who hired Soliman in 2021 shortly before retiring, said she wrote a letter to hospital leaders imploring them to speak out against the allegations that could return him to certain persecution in Egypt. He lost authorization to work in June, when his asylum was terminated.

“This is a ‘Schindler’s List’ moment,” Ragsdale said she told hospital leaders. “And if you don’t stand up for Ayman, you’re complicit in what’s happening to him.”

Some fear DHS is parlaying the scope and secrecy of counterterrorism laws into a weapon to boost the president’s mass-deportation mission.

Immigrant rights groups say a sped-up campaign with fewer guardrails for due process is already leading to removals based on evidence that hasn’t been fully vetted. If DHS is successful in test cases like Soliman’s, they say, material support claims could be more easily applied to immigration cases with even tenuous links to militant factions, including newly designated cartels.

The White House referred questions to Homeland Security, which routed a request for comment to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; a spokesperson there said in a statement that the agency generally “does not discuss the details of individual immigration cases and adjudication decisions.”

“An alien — even with a pending application or lawful status — is not shielded from immigration enforcement action,” the statement said. The FBI declined to comment.

Jeffrey Breinholt, an architect of the material support statutes who spent three decades as a federal terrorism prosecutor, defends the laws as crucial to closing loopholes that were exploited by foreign militant groups and their domestic sympathizers.

Breinholt, who retired in 2024, said he has no concerns about the widening scope as it converges with Trump’s deportation push. The designation of cartels, he said, “is a natural outgrowth of the success we have had with ‘material support’ crime.”

To Cole and other critics, however, the Soliman case could be “the canary in the coal mine.”

More Than a Chaplain

Within a few hours of Soliman’s detention, dozens showed up for an impromptu rally and news conference in the ICE center parking lot. That backup has since grown into a hundreds-strong campaign to refute the DHS allegations, which supporters call a resurgence of anti-Muslim fearmongering that has persisted across party lines since the 9/11 attacks 24 years ago this month.

“Any time you have a brown man or a Muslim man and you use the words ‘FBI’ and ‘red flag,’ you don’t have to say any more,” said Tala Ali, a friend of Soliman’s who heads the board of a Cincinnati mosque where he sometimes led prayers.

Voices calling for Soliman’s release include parents who met him in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. The families are in disbelief that the chaplain they’d grown close to is now jailed in a high-stakes international case. They knew he’d fled Egypt but said they were learning details of his ordeal through the campaign to free him.

“It would be very easy to be resentful and be angry with the world when you have to live through that kind of trauma, and he’s not like that at all. He’s taking on other peoples’ trauma,” said Heather Barrow, whose infant daughter, Mya, died in the NICU last year.

She said Soliman stepped in to spare her grieving family the heartache of making funeral arrangements for a 5-month-old. He attended Mya’s celebration of life and, later, a butterfly release on June 7, which would’ve been her first birthday. A month later, he was in an ICE cell.

“I was like, how is this happening? He was just at our house,” Barrow said.

Another couple, Taylor and Bryan McClain, also came to rely on Soliman when their newborn, Violette, arrived at Cincinnati Children’s last year with life-threatening complications. The chaplain steadied them during their 271 days in the NICU, which Taylor said felt like “a roller coaster in a tornado and it’s on fire.” The McClains call him “family.”

“I say with full confidence: Violette is alive because of the advocacy that Ayman gave us,” Taylor said one recent afternoon as she held her daughter, now just over a year old.

Clergy members make up another bloc of support — so many that they built a spreadsheet to divide visiting hours among imams, rabbis and pastors. Immigration advocates and Ohio civil rights leaders have added their names to petitions. So have University of Cincinnati student groups including the Ornithology Club and the Harry Potter Appreciation Club.

More than a dozen people faced criminal charges stemming from a melee after a rally in Soliman’s support; demonstrators and police blame each other for the violence July 17.

Two of Soliman’s fellow chaplains at Cincinnati Children’s, Adam Allen and Elizabeth Diop, said they lost their jobs for refusing to keep quiet about their jailed colleague. Meanwhile, the hospital, a cherished local institution, is taking heat for its silence. Soliman’s supporters launched a letter-writing campaign demanding a response from the hospital, which has said it does not discuss personnel issues.

Signs appeared outside the hospital. “Missing Chaplain,” they said. “Abducted By ICE.”

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital did not return messages seeking comment. In an internal memo published by The Cincinnati Enquirer, hospital CEO Dr. Steve Davis told employees that the lack of response “should not be mistaken for a lack of caring or action.” As a nonprofit, Davis stressed, the hospital has strict rules about “activities that could be characterized as political.”

Soliman’s supporters press on. One recent Sunday evening, about 200 filled a Cincinnati church where preachers from several faith backgrounds urged them to demand his freedom.

“The trial that Imam Ayman is going through is our trial,” Abdulhakim Mohamed, head of the North American Imams Fellowship, told the crowd. “His justice is ours to own. The injustice is also ours to bear.”

Escape From Egypt

Soliman’s entanglement with the Egyptian security apparatus began in 2000 when he joined fellow college students to protest repressive laws, he said in asylum papers.

He was periodically locked up and intimidated after that, he said. The persecution worsened more than a decade ago during uprisings that remade the Middle East by toppling dictators — including Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak — but in some places spiraled into civil war.

Soliman worked as a freelance journalist covering pro-democracy revolts in Egypt and neighboring Libya. Friends say he was also studying to become an imam and served on the board of a local chapter of the Islamic charity Al-Gameya al-Shareya, which is known for its network of hospitals and orphan programs throughout Egypt.

The charity, whose name has multiple English spellings, launched in 1912 and is often described as “one of the most established national Islamic organizations.” Scholars have written that early leaders came from the Muslim Brotherhood, archenemy of Egypt’s current military leadership, but that ties ended around 1990 under government pressure.

In the years since, researchers found, the group maintained smooth relations with the government as its more than 1,000 chapters nationwide encompass Egyptians of all political leanings. That delicate balance faltered briefly in 2013 when a military-led counterrevolution quashed the nascent democratic movement and deposed elected leaders who were part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt’s military rulers declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization and shuttered any organization it suspected of ties. Al-Gameya Al-Shareya was among more than 1,000 civil society groups blacklisted in the crackdown, court filings say, and chapters suspected of helping the Brotherhood during elections were dissolved. The group resumed operations the next year, when an Egyptian court lifted the ban, ruling that the charity “has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to news reports.

Egypt’s return to zero tolerance for dissidents made Soliman’s activism dangerous, he said in court papers. As a journalist and Islamic scholar, he represented two fields the Egyptian government views as existential threats: a free press and religious organizing.

Soliman fled to the United States in 2014 on a visitor visa and later filed a petition for asylum, describing how security forces over the years had locked him up on false charges and tortured him with electrical shocks. In one incident, his attorney said, Egyptian forces with machine guns stormed into an apartment where Soliman was asleep with his wife and young child. (Through attorneys, Soliman asked to withhold details about his family because they remain in Egypt.)

“For me, it’s life or death,” Soliman later told a U.S. immigration officer of his need to escape.

Officials in Cairo referred questions to the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The asylum application asked whether Soliman had belonged to political parties or other associations in his home country. Ratliff, the attorney, said Soliman marked “yes” and attached a statement that mentioned Al-Gameya Al-Shareya and his role in fundraising for the local chapter.

Friends said Soliman rejoiced when he was granted asylum in 2018, under the first Trump administration, and sought permanent residency as the next step toward reuniting with his family. But the process stalled. “Bureaucratic hurdle after bureaucratic hurdle,” Ratliff said.

Then came a more serious snag. In 2021, Soliman learned he was on a federal watchlist when a background check for a chaplain job at an Oregon prison showed that the FBI had flagged him, court papers show.

His attorneys said they have no idea why. It could’ve been about a specific piece of intelligence. It could’ve been a misspelling or mistaken identity, simple errors that have landed ordinary Muslims on opaque “war on terror” watchlists that are nearly impossible to get off.

Soliman, friends say, insisted on trying to clear his name. With the help of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, he sued government agencies including the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration. That route led to open-ended legal battles that yielded no clear answers and no green card.

Instead, his place in the country became more vulnerable. In December, the final stretch of the Biden administration, Soliman received notice that the government intended to terminate his asylum based on “inconsistencies” in his claims of persecution and concern that his charity work made him inadmissible based on “possible membership in a terrorist organization.”

Some of his friends are convinced it was payback for the lawsuits, but attorneys say there’s no telling what triggered a review.

“What Ayman has experienced is something that, post-9/11, has been the reality of Muslims in this country,” said Ali, his friend and advocate. “All he did was try to get answers and accountability for what he’d been put through.”

Big Claims, Little Transparency

Contested asylum cases like Soliman’s were prime targets when Trump took office the next month and supercharged deportations, a top campaign pledge. Since his return to office, ICE arrests have doubled.

Soliman was called to an asylum hearing in February, a month into the new administration, for a last shot at defending his eligibility. A DHS officer asked about claims in the Biden-era notice alleging “discrepancies in date and number of times he suffered harm” and raising doubts about a handwritten Egyptian police report and letters authenticating his journalistic work.

A transcript shows Soliman explaining that he sometimes got confused when describing traumatic incidents from years ago in English, his second language. He said the police report was a rough translation included by mistake and submitted statements verifying his journalism.

Then the DHS officer’s questioning took a turn: “When did you start supporting Al-Jameya Al-Shareya?”

For the rest of the meeting, the transcript shows, the officer drilled down on Soliman’s knowledge of the charity: fundraising, chapter size, support for violence and whether he had been aware of a Brotherhood link.

Another of Soliman’s attorneys interrupted when the immigration officer said the Brotherhood had been a Tier III group since 2012. That’s not how it works, the attorney countered — only top-tier terrorist organizations like al-Qaida or the Islamic State are given dates of designation. Tier III, she said, is for undesignated groups and is determined on a case-by-case basis, with the burden of proof on the government.

“Counsel, I’ll give you an opportunity at the end to make a closing,” the DHS officer said.

“I understand,” the attorney replied, “but we’re talking about something factual.”

The next time Soliman heard from DHS was the official termination of his asylum, effective June 3. This time, there was no hedging in language that declared he was ineligible based on “evidence that indicated you provided material support to a Tier III terrorist organization.” A few weeks later, he was taken into custody and notified of his pending removal.

Soliman’s legal team sued, arguing that he was stripped of asylum on illegal grounds because the designations had been made “without proper findings” and based on no new evidence.

Court filings show DHS attorneys introducing, then withdrawing or amending, materials to build a case linking Soliman to the Brotherhood through the charity.

“It looked like, ‘What can we put here to get to there?’” said Ratliff, a former immigration judge.

Among the supporting evidence filed by the government are three academic reports by scholars with deep knowledge of Islamic charities in Egypt. Soliman’s legal team filed statements from all three balking at how DHS had cherry-picked their research.

Steven Brooke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison detailed “important mistakes of fact and interpretation.” Neil Russell, an academic in Scotland, called the U.S. conclusions “a mischaracterization of my findings.” Marie Vannetzel, a French scholar who has conducted field research with Al-Gameya Al-Shareya, rebutted what she called “a dishonest manipulation of my text and my work.”

Vannetzel wrote that she rejects the idea that Soliman, “simply by virtue of his activity in the association, could be accused of providing material support to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Observers of Cairo’s unsparing campaign to uproot Islamist opposition say the matter is clear-cut: If the charity survived the scrutiny of Egyptian intelligence, then it’s not Muslim Brotherhood. “It’s really striking that this group is not proscribed,” said Michael Hanna, an Egypt specialist and U.S. program director of the nonprofit International Crisis Group.

Soliman’s attorneys also criticized the government’s assertion in court filings that he, as a board member of one local branch, would’ve been aware of any Brotherhood affiliation of chapters nationwide. “If a Rotarian in Seattle commits murder, we don’t go charging Rotarians in Des Moines with conspiracy,” Ratliff said.

Separate from U.S. attempts to tie Soliman to the Brotherhood was a puzzling footnote about Iraq that appeared in a later filing. Without detail, DHS attorneys alluded to warrants for “murder and terrorism activities.” Ratliff said a DHS attorney later confirmed to him in a phone call that it wasn’t about Soliman, but didn’t explain why it was there.

The error remained uncorrected in filings until Sept. 3, when DHS attorney Cheryl Gutridge acknowledged in court that it was an “inadvertent” reference to another case, Ohio news outlets reported. The original wording suggesting that Soliman faced murder charges in Iraq had been included in the government’s successful argument for keeping him in custody.

DHS did not address questions about the Iraq reference.

A close friend, Ahmed Elkady, said Soliman told him on a jail visit he was stunned to be linked to Iraq, a place he’s never been: “He said, ‘How can I become a virtual terrorist?”

A Sheriff’s ICE Fiefdom

As he awaits trial in immigration court, Soliman is in custody at the Butler County Jail, about 30 miles outside of Cincinnati, past cornfields and a German social club and the Town and Country Mobile Home Park.

For more than 20 years, this outpost has been the domain of Sheriff Richard Jones, a cowboy hat-wearing firebrand who keeps a framed photo of Trump in his office. In the run-up to the 2024 election, Jones mused that a Trump victory might put him “back in the deportation business.”

From 2003 to 2021, the jail had been contracted to house immigration detainees until the arrangement dissolved in the Biden era. As predicted, the county entered into a new agreement with ICE in February, after Trump returned to power, to hold around 400 detainees: $68 a day per person, plus $36 an hour for the sheriff’s office toward transportation.

Jones celebrated the restored partnership by posting a fake image showing inflatable gators outside the jail, a nod to ICE’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida. A Black Lives Matter group in Dayton issued a statement calling the sheriff’s post an “egregious act of cruelty and historical mockery.”

As it returns to deportation work, the jail still faces a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in 2020 by two ICE prisoners who said they endured beatings and discrimination. One plaintiff, a Muslim, said a jailer called him a “fucking terrorist” and threatened to throw his prayer rug in the toilet. Jones has disputed the claims.

The sheriff is in the news again because of Soliman. In court filings, the Muslim chaplain says he was denied access to a space where he could lead communal prayers and then placed in “isolation” for nearly a week with only an hour of phone access between midnight and 1 a.m.

Soliman’s attorneys say in court papers that the episode was related to “targeted harassment” over his religion. The sheriff’s office told local outlets that it respects religious freedom and said Soliman was placed in isolation because he was “argumentative” and “threatening.”

After agreeing to an interview with ProPublica, Jones later decided he was “no longer interested,” the sheriff’s spokesperson, Deputy Kim Peters, wrote in a text message.

As he languishes in jail, Soliman’s empty apartment in Cincinnati has become a way station for an inner circle of supporters, who said they felt like “intruders” when they first gathered there. Soliman is known as an elegant dresser, but his apartment was in bachelor-pad disarray, a reflection of his long hours at the hospital and the abruptness of his detention, said his friends, also clerics. The imams laughed when one confessed that he first thought the FBI had ransacked the place.

Over water bottles and energy drinks scavenged from Soliman’s fridge, they talked about the deportation threat. In Egypt, pro-government news outlets already have trumpeted the case as proof that Soliman was leading a secret Brotherhood cell in America.

Despite Soliman’s predicament, they said, being in limbo here is preferable to the alternative.

“You think I’m afraid of being here in jail?” Soliman told fellow imam Ihab Alsaghier during a recent visit. “Every moment I’m alone, I imagine I’m on a flight back to Egypt.”

His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.

The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.

Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.

News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.

Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.

“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”

In the past seven weeks, at least five high-profile targeted attacks have unfolded across the U.S., including a car bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. Against this backdrop, current and former national security officials say, the Trump administration’s decision to shift counterterrorism resources to immigration and leave the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”

“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official said.

The fate of CP3 is one example of the fallout from deep cuts that have eliminated public health and violence-prevention initiatives across federal agencies.

The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.

The office’s mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The “terrorism” category that framed the agency’s work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.

ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugate’s position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the department’s prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.

“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”

ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate through DHS and the White House, but there was no response.

The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with law enforcement agencies and swift investigations of recent attacks. “The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, it’s ignorant,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email.

Through intermediaries, ProPublica sought to speak with CP3 employees but received no reply. Talking is risky; tales abound of Homeland Security personnel undergoing lie-detector tests in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.

Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from current and former Homeland Security personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work closely with the office and have at times been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.

In these circles, two main theories have emerged to explain Fugate’s unusual ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z campaign worker with a resume-boosting title that comes with little real power because the office is in shambles.

The other is that the White House installed Fugate to oversee a pivot away from traditional counterterrorism lanes and to steer resources toward MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border security projects before eventually shuttering operations. In this scenario, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”

DHS did not address a ProPublica question about this characterization.

Rising MAGA Star

The CP3 homepage boasts about the office’s experts in disciplines including emergency management, counterterrorism, public health and social work.

Fugate brings a different qualification prized by the White House: loyalty to the president.

On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”

Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin before graduating magna cum laude a year ago with a degree in politics and law from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photos and other public information from the past year chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.

Starting in May 2024, photos show a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first campaign, a bid for a delegate spot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy candy and a flier with a photo of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fugate won an alternate slot.

The next month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Club 47 fan group in West Palm Beach. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sunglasses.

Posts in the run-up to the election show Fugate spending several weeks in Washington, a time he called “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican convention, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in photos with MAGA luminaries such as former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

By late summer, Fugate was posting from the campaign trail as part of Trump’s advance team, pictured at one stop standing behind the candidate in a crowd of young supporters. When Trump won the election, Fugate marked the moment with an emotional post about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”

“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.

In February, the White House appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration office at Homeland Security. He assumed leadership of CP3 last month to fill a vacancy left by previous Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience who resigned in March when the administration began cutting his staff.

In his final weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the office’s achievements, noting the dispersal of nearly $90 million since 2020 to help communities combat extremist violence. According to the office’s 2024 report to Congress, in recent years CP3 grant money was used in more than 1,100 efforts to identify violent extremism at the community level and interrupt the radicalization process.

“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he announced his resignation.

In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate knows about the basics of his role and likened meetings with him to “career counseling.” DHS did not address questions about his level of experience.

One grant recipient called Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback in the move toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a field still reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.

“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee said. “Now that’s all gone.”

Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico enjoying a whirlwind entry to Washington. The problem, they say, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier treatment of an office that was funding work on urgent national security concerns.

“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Security official said. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”

Season of Attacks

Spring brought a burst of extremist violence, a trend analysts fear could extend into the summer given inflamed political tensions and the disarray of federal agencies tasked with monitoring threats.

In April, an arson attack targeted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” Four days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State University campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile picture for a gaming account.

Attacks continued in May with the apparent car bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the only fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs against life and procreation. A few days later, on May 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the war in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

June opened with a firebombing attack in Colorado that wounded 12, including a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s charges include a federal hate crime.

If attacks continue at that pace, warn current and former national security officials, cracks will begin to appear in the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.

“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.

Contradictory signals are coming out of Homeland Security about the future of CP3 work, especially the grant program. Staffers have told partners in the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out another funding cycle soon. The CP3 website still touts the program as the only federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” against terrorism and targeted violence.

But Homeland Security’s budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”

The former Homeland Security official said the decision “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”

Under the watchful gaze of security guards, dozens of people streamed through metal detectors to enter Temple Israel one evening this month for a town hall meeting on hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

The cavernous synagogue outside of Detroit, one of several houses of worship along a suburban strip nicknamed “God Row,” was on high alert. Police cars formed a zigzag in the driveway. Only registered guests were admitted; no purses or backpacks were allowed. Attendees had been informed of the location just 48 hours in advance.

The intense security brought to life the threat picture described onstage by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the recipient of vicious backlash as a gay Jewish Democrat who has led high-profile prosecutions of far-right militants, including the kidnapping plot targeting the governor. Nessel spoke as a slideshow detailed her office’s hate crimes unit, the first of its kind in the nation. She paused at a bullet point about working “with federal and local law enforcement partners.”

“The federal part, not so much anymore, sadly,” she said, adding that the wording should now mention only state and county partners, with help from Washington “TBD.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Nessel told the audience. “I don’t think that we’re going to get much in the way of cooperation anymore.”

Across the country, other state-level security officials and violence prevention advocates have reached the same conclusion. In interviews with ProPublica, they described the federal government as retreating from the fight against extremist violence, which for years the FBI has deemed the most lethal and active domestic concern. States say they are now largely on their own to confront the kind of hate-fueled threats that had turned Temple Israel into a fortress.

The White House is redirecting counterterrorism personnel and funds toward President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, saying the southern border is the greatest domestic security threat facing the country. Millions in budget cuts have gutted terrorism-related law enforcement training and shut down studies tracking the frequency of attacks. Trump and his deputies have signaled that the Justice Department’s focus on violent extremism is over, starting with the president’s clemency order for militants charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

On the ground, security officials and extremism researchers say, federal coordination for preventing terrorism and targeted violence is gone, leading to a state-level scramble to preserve efforts no longer supported by Washington, including hate-crime reporting hotlines and help with identifying threatening behavior to thwart violence.

This year, ProPublica has detailed how federal anti-extremism funding has helped local communities avert tragedy. In Texas, a rabbi credited training for his actions ending a hostage-taking standoff. In Massachusetts, specialists work with hospitals to identify young patients exhibiting disturbing behavior. In California, training helped thwart a potential school shooting.

Absent federal direction, the fight against violent extremism falls to a hodgepodge of state efforts, some of them robust and others fledgling. The result is a patchwork approach that counterterrorism experts say leaves many areas uncovered. Even in blue states where more political will exists, funding and programs are increasingly scarce.

“We are now going to ask every local community to try to stand up its own effort without any type of guidance,” said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of Safe States Alliance, an anti-violence advocacy group that works with state health departments.

Federal agencies have pushed back on the idea of a retreat from violent extremism, noting swift responses in recent domestic terrorism investigations such as an arson attack on Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in April and a car bombing this month outside a fertility clinic in California. FBI officials say they’re also investigating an attack that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members outside a Jewish museum in Washington in a likely “act of targeted violence.”

Federal officials say training and intelligence-sharing systems are in place to help state and local law enforcement “to identify and respond to hate-motivated threats, such as those targeting minority communities.”

The Justice Department “is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,” said a spokesperson. “Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation.” The DOJ is open to appeals, the spokesperson said, and to restoring funding “as appropriate.”

In an email response to questions about specific cuts to counterterrorism work, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is keeping promises to safeguard the nation, “whether it be maximizing the use of Federal resources to improve training or establishing task forces to advance Federal and local coordination.”

Michigan, long a hotbed of anti-government militia activity, was an early adopter of strategies to fight domestic extremism, making it a target of conservative pundits who accuse the state of criminalizing right-wing organizing. An anti-Muslim group is challenging the constitutionality of Nessel’s hate crimes unit in a federal suit that has dragged on for years.

In late December, after a protracted political battle, Michigan adopted a new hate crime statute that expands an old law with additions such as protections for LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities. Right-wing figures lobbed threatening slurs at the author, state Rep. Noah Arbit, a gay Jewish Democrat who spoke alongside Nessel at Temple Israel, which is in his district and where he celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Arbit acknowledged that his story of a hard-fought legislative triumph is dampened by the Trump administration’s backsliding. In this political climate, Arbit told the audience, “it is hard not to feel like we’re getting further and further away” from progress against hate-fueled violence.

The politicians were joined onstage by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University and is working with several states to update their strategies. She called Michigan a model.

“The federal government is gone on this issue,” Miller-Idriss told the crowd. “The future right now is in the states.”

“The Only Diner in Town”

Some 2,000 miles away in Washington state, this month’s meeting of the Domestic Extremism and Mass Violence Task Force featured a special guest: Bill Braniff, a recent casualty of the Trump administration’s about-face on counterterrorism.

Braniff spent the last two years leading the federal government’s main office dedicated to preventing “terrorism and targeted violence,” a term encompassing hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and political violence. Housed in the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships treated these acts as a pressing public health concern.

Part of Braniff’s job was overseeing a network of regional coordinators who helped state and local advocates connect with federal resources. Advocates credit federal efforts with averting attacks through funds that supported, for example, training that led a student to report a gun in a classmate’s backpack or programs that help families intervene before radicalization turns to violence.

Another project helped states develop their own prevention strategies tailored to local sensibilities; some focus on education and training, others on beefing up enforcement and intelligence sharing. By early this year, eight states had adopted strategies, eight others were in the drafting stage and 26 more had expressed interest.

Speaking via teleconference to the Seattle-based task force, Braniff said the office is now “being dismantled.” He resigned in March, when the Trump administration slashed 20% of his staff, froze much of the work and signaled deeper cuts were coming.

“The approach that we adopted and evangelized over the last two years has proven to be really effective at decreasing harm and violence,” Braniff told the task force. “I’m personally committed to keeping it going in Washington state and in the rest of the nation.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson did not address questions about the cuts but said in an email that “any suggestion that DHS is stepping away from addressing hate crimes or domestic terrorism is simply false.”

Since leaving government, Braniff has joined Miller-Idriss at the extremism research lab, where they and others aspire to build a national network that preserves an effort once led by federal coordinators. The freezing of prevention efforts, economic uncertainty and polarizing rhetoric in the run-up to the midterm elections create “a pressure cooker,” Braniff said.

Similar discussions are occurring in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, Illinois, California, New York, Minnesota and Colorado, according to interviews with organizers and recordings of the meetings. Overnight, grassroots efforts that once complemented federal work have taken on outsized urgency.

“When you’re the only diner in town, the food is much more needed,” said Brian Levin, a veteran extremism scholar who leads California’s Commission on the State of Hate.

Levin, speaking in a personal capacity and not for the state panel, said commissioners are “pedaling as fast as we can” to fill the gaps. Levin has tracked hate crimes since 1986 and this month released updated research showing incidents nationally hovering near record highs, with sharp increases last year in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim targeting.

The commission also unveiled results of a study conducted jointly with the state Civil Rights Department and UCLA researchers showing that more than half a million Californians — about 1.6% of the population — said they had experienced hate that was potentially criminal in nature, such as assault or property damage, in the last year.

Prevention workers say that’s the kind of data they can no longer rely on the federal government to track.

“For a commission like ours, it makes our particular mission no longer a luxury,” Levin said.

Hurdles Loom

Some state-level advocates wonder how effectively they can push back on hate when Trump and his allies have normalized dehumanizing language about marginalized groups. Trump and senior figures have invoked a conspiracy theory imagining the engineered “replacement” of white Americans, as the president refers to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Trump uses the “terrorist” label primarily for his political targets, lumping together leftist activists, drug cartels and student protesters. In March, he suggested that recent attacks on Tesla vehicles by “terrorists” have been more harmful than the storming of the Capitol.

“The actions of this administration foment hate,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, told a meeting last month of the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention. “I can’t say that it is solely responsible for hate activity, but it certainly seems to lift the lid and almost encourages this activity.”

A White House spokesperson rejected claims that the Trump administration fuels hate, saying the allegations come from “hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing organizations.”

Another hurdle is getting buy-in from red states, where many politicians have espoused the view that hate crimes and domestic terrorism concerns are exaggerated by liberals to police conservative thought. The starkest example is the embrace of a revisionist telling of the Capitol riots that plays down the violence that Biden-era Justice Department officials labeled as domestic terrorism.

The next year, citing First Amendment concerns, Republicans opposed a domestic terrorism-focused bill introduced after a mass shooting targeting Black people in Buffalo, N.Y.

The leader of one large prevention-focused nonprofit that has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations, speaking on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities, said it’s important not to write off red states. Some Republican governors have adopted strategies after devastating attacks in their states.

A white supremacist’s rampage through a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 — the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history — prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to create a domestic terrorism task force. And in 2020, responding to a string of high-profile attacks including the Parkland high school mass shooting, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a targeted violence prevention strategy.

The pitch is key, the nonprofit director said. Republican officials are more likely to be swayed by efforts focused on “violence prevention” than on combating extremist ideologies. “Use the language and the framing that works in the context you’re working in,” the advocate said.

Still, gaps will remain in areas such as hate crime reporting, services for victims of violence and training to help the FBI keep up with the latest threats, said Miller-Idriss, the American University scholar.

“What feels awful about it is that there’s just entire states and communities who are completely left out and where people are going to end up being more vulnerable,” she said.

Cautionary Tale From Michigan

On a summer night in 1982, Vincent Chin was enjoying his bachelor party when two white auto workers at a nightclub outside of Detroit targeted him for what was then called “Japan bashing,” hate speech stemming from anger over Japanese car companies edging out American competitors.

The men, apparently assuming the Chinese-born Chin was Japanese, taunted him with racist slurs in a confrontation that spiraled into a vicious attack outside the club. The men beat 27-year-old Chin with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. He died of his injuries four days later and was buried the day after his scheduled wedding date.

Asian Americans’ outrage over a judge’s leniency in the case — the assailants received $3,000 fines and no jail time — sparked a surge of activism seeking tougher hate crime laws nationwide.

In Michigan, Chin’s killing inspired the 1988 Ethnic Intimidation Act, which was sponsored by a Jewish state lawmaker, David Honigman from West Bloomfield Township. More than three decades later, Arbit — the Jewish lawmaker representing the same district — led the campaign to update the statute with legislation he introduced in 2023 and finally saw adopted in December.

“It felt like kismet,” Arbit told ProPublica in an interview a few days after the event at Temple Israel. “This is the legacy of my community.”

But there’s a notable difference. Honigman was a Republican. Arbit is a Democrat.

“It’s sort of telling,” Arbit said, “that in 1988 this was a Republican-sponsored bill and then in 2023 it only passed with three Republican votes.”

Some Republicans argued that the bill infringes on the First Amendment with “content-based speech regulation.” One conservative state lawmaker told a right-wing cable show that the goal is “to advance the radical transgender agenda.”

Arbit said it took “sheer brute force” to enact new hate crimes laws in this hyperpartisan era. He said state officials entering the fray should be prepared for social media attacks, doxing and death threats.

In the summer of 2023, Arbit was waylaid by a right-wing campaign that reduced his detailed proposal to “the pronoun bill” by spreading the debunked idea it would criminalize misgendering someone. Local outlets fact-checked the false claims and Arbit made some 50 press appearances correcting the portrayal — but they were drowned out, he said, by a “disinformation storm” that spread quickly via right-wing outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News. The bill languished for more than a year before he could revive it.

In December 2024, the legislation passed the Michigan House 57-52, with a single Republican vote. By contrast, Arbit said, the bill was endorsed by an association representing all 83 county prosecutors, the majority of them Republicans. Those who see the effects up close, he said, are less likely to view violent extremism through a partisan lens.

“These are real security threats,” Arbit said. “Shouldn’t we want a society in which you’re not allowed to target a group of people for violence?”

Soon after he was invited in for tea, the visitor pulled out a pistol and demanded the release of an al-Qaida-linked detainee from a nearby federal prison, seizing as hostages a rabbi and three worshipers. The standoff lasted 10 hours until the rabbi, drawing on extensive security training, hurled a chair at the assailant. The hostages escaped.

“We are alive today because of that education,” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker said after the attack.

The averted tragedy at Congregation Beth Israel is cited as a success story for the largely unseen prevention work federal authorities have relied on for years in the fight to stop terrorist attacks and mass shootings. The government weaves together partnerships with academic researchers and community groups across the country as part of a strategy for addressing violent extremism as a public health concern.

A specialized intervention team at Boston Children’s Hospital treats young patients — some referred by the FBI — who show signs of disturbing, violent behavior. Eradicate Hate, a national prevention umbrella group, says one of its trainees helped thwart a school shooting in California last year by reporting a gun in a fellow student’s backpack. In other programs, counselors guide neo-Nazis out of the white-power movement or help families of Islamist extremists undo the effects of violent propaganda.

The throughline for this work is federal funding — a reliance on grants that are rapidly disappearing as the Trump administration guts billions in spending.

Tens of millions of dollars slated for violence prevention have been cut or are frozen pending review as President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency steamrolls the national security sector. Barring action from Congress or the courts, counterterrorism professionals say, the White House appears poised to end the government’s backing of prevention work on urgent threats.

“This is the government getting out of the terrorism business,” said one federal grant recipient who was ordered this week to cease work on projects including a database used by law enforcement agencies to assess threats.

This account is drawn from interviews with nearly two dozen current and former national security personnel, federally funded researchers and nonprofit grant recipients. Except in a few cases, they spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

Dozens of academic and nonprofit programs that rely on grants from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other agencies are in crisis mode, mirroring the uncertainty of other parts of the government amid Trump’s seismic reorganization.

“We’re on a precipice,” said the leader of a large nonprofit that has received multiple federal grants and worked with Democratic and Republican administrations on prevention campaigns.

Program leaders describe a chilling new operating environment. Scholars of white supremacist violence — which the FBI for years has described as a main driver of domestic terrorism — wonder how they’ll be able to continue tracking the threat without running afoul of the administration’s ban on terms related to race and racism.

The training the rabbi credits with saving his Texas synagogue in 2022 came from a broader community initiative whose federal funding is in limbo. One imperiled effort, FEMA’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program, has helped Jewish institutions across the country install security cameras, train staff and add protective barriers, according to the nonprofit Secure Community Network, which gives security advice and monitors threats to Jewish communities nationwide.

In July 2023, access-control doors acquired through the grant program prevented a gunman from entering Margolin Hebrew Academy in Memphis. In 2021, when gunfire struck the Jewish Family Service offices in Denver, grant-funded protective window film stopped bullets from penetrating the building.

“These are not hypothetical scenarios, they are real examples of how NSGP funds prevent injuries and deaths,” Michael Masters, director of the Secure Community Network, wrote this month in an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post calling for continued funding of the program.

Now the security grants program has been shelved as authorities and Jewish groups warn of rising antisemitism. The generous reading, one Jewish program leader said, is that the funds were inadvertently swept up in DOGE cuts. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Jewish groups and, as one of his first acts in office, signed an executive order promising to tackle antisemitism.

Still, the freeze on grants for synagogue protections has revived talk of finding new, more independent funding streams.

Throughout Jewish history, the program director said, “we’ve learned you need a Plan B.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

“Tsunami” of Cuts

For more than two decades, the federal government has invested tens of millions of dollars in prevention work and academic research with the goal of intervening in the crucial window known as “left of boom” — before an attack occurs.

The projects are diffuse, spread across several agencies, but the government’s central clearinghouse is at Homeland Security in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, often called CP3. The office houses a grant program that since 2020 has awarded nearly $90 million to community groups and law enforcement agencies working at the local level to prevent terrorism and targeted violence such as mass shootings.

These days, CP3 is imploding. Nearly 20% of its workforce was cut through the dismissal of probationary employees March 3. CP3 Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran who had fiercely defended the office’s achievements in LinkedIn posts in recent weeks, resigned the same night.

“It is a small act of quiet protest, and an act of immense respect I have for them and for our team,” Braniff wrote in a departing message to staff that was obtained by ProPublica. In the note, he called the employees “wrongfully terminated.”

Some of this year’s CP3 grant recipients say they have no idea whether their funding will continue. One awardee said the team is looking at nightmare scenarios of laying off staff and paring operations to the bone.

“Everybody’s trying to survive,” the grantee said. “It feels like this is a tsunami and you don’t know how it’s going to hit you.”

Current and former DHS officials say they don’t expect the prevention mission to continue in any meaningful way, signaling the end to an effort that had endured through early missteps and criticism from the left and right.

The prevention mission evolved from the post-9/11 growth of a field known as countering violent extremism, or CVE. In early CVE efforts, serious scholars of militant movements jostled for funding alongside pseudo-scientists claiming to have discovered predictors of radicalization. CVE results typically weren’t measurable, allowing for inflated promises of success — “snake oil,” as one researcher put it.

Worse, some CVE programs billed as community partnerships to prevent extremism backfired and led to mistrust that persists today. Muslim advocacy groups were incensed by the government’s targeting of their communities for deradicalization programs, blaming CVE for stigmatizing law-abiding families and contributing to anti-Muslim hostility. Among the most influential Muslim advocacy groups, it is still taboo to accept funding from Homeland Security.

Defenders of CP3, which launched in 2021 from an earlier incarnation, insist that the old tactics based on profiling are gone. They also say there are now more stringent metrics to gauge effectiveness. CP3’s 2024 report to Congress listed more than 1,000 interventions since 2020, cases where prevention workers stepped in with services to dissuade individuals from violence.

The probationary employees who were dismissed this month represented the future of CP3’s public health approach to curbing violence, say current and former DHS officials. They were terminated by email in boilerplate language about poor performance, a detail that infuriated colleagues who viewed them as accomplished social workers and public health professionals.

There were no consultations with administration officials or DOGE — just the ax, said one DHS source with knowledge of the CP3 cuts. Promised exemptions for national security personnel apparently didn’t apply as Trump’s Homeland Security agenda shrinks to a single issue.

“The vibe is: How to use DHS to go after migrants, immigrants. That is the vibe, that is the only vibe, there is no other vibe,” the source said. “It’s wild — it’s as if the rest of the department doesn’t exist.”

This week, with scant warning, Homeland Security cut around $20 million for more than two dozen programs from another wing of DHS, including efforts aimed at stopping terrorist attacks and school shooters.

A Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed “sweeping cuts and reforms” aimed at eliminating waste but did not address questions about specific programs. DHS “remains focused on supporting law enforcement and public safety through funding, training, increased public awareness, and partnerships,” the statement said.

One grant recipient said they were told by a Homeland Security liaison that targeted programs were located in places named on a Fox News list of “sanctuary states” that have resisted or refused cooperation with the government’s deportation campaign. The grantee’s project was given less than an hour to submit outstanding expenses before the shutdown.

The orders were so sudden that even some officials within the government had trouble coming up with language to justify the termination notices. They said they were given no explanation for how the targeted programs were in violation of the president’s executive orders.

“I just don’t believe this is in any way legal,” said one official with knowledge of the cuts.

Threat Research in Limbo

Cuts are reshaping government across the board, but perhaps nowhere more jarringly than in the counterterrorism apparatus. The administration started dismantling it when the president granted clemency to nearly 1,600 defendants charged in connection with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The pardons overturned what the Justice Department had celebrated as a watershed victory in the fight against domestic terrorism.

Senior FBI officials with terrorism expertise have left or are being forced out in the purge of personnel involved in the Jan. 6 investigation. In other cases, agents working terrorism cases have been moved to Homeland Security to help with Trump’s mass deportation effort, a resource shift that runs counter to the government’s own threat assessments showing homegrown militants as the more urgent priority. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Without research backing up the enforcement arm of counterterrorism, analysts and officials say, the government lacks the capacity to evaluate rapidly evolving homegrown threats.

Researchers are getting whiplash as grant dollars are frozen and unfrozen. Even if they win temporary relief, the prospect of getting new federal funding in the next four years is minimal. They described pressure to self-censor or tailor research narrowly to MAGA interests in far-left extremism and Islamist militants.

“What happens when you’re self-silencing? What happens if people just stop thinking they should propose something because it’s ‘too risky?’” said one extremism scholar who has advised senior officials and received federal funding. “A lot of ideas that could be used to prevent all kinds of social harms, including terrorism, could get tossed.”

Among the projects at risk is a national compilation of threats to public officials, including assassination attempts against Trump; research on the violent misogyny that floods social media platforms; a long-term study of far-right extremists who are attempting to disengage from hate movements. The studies are underway at research centers and university labs that, in some cases, are funded almost entirely by Homeland Security. A stop-work order could disrupt sensitive projects midstream or remove findings from public view.

“There are both national security and public safety implications for not continuing to study these very complicated problems,” said Pete Simi, a criminologist at Chapman University in California who has federally funded projects that could be cut.

One project never got off the ground before work was suspended.

Six months ago, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, announced the Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism Research Center of Excellence as a new hub for “understanding the phenomenon” of extremist violence.

Work was scheduled to start in January. The website has since disappeared and the future of the center is in limbo.

Other prevention initiatives in jeopardy at the Justice Department include grant programs related to hate crimes training, which has been in demand with recent unrest on college campuses. In the first weeks of the Trump administration, grant recipients heard a freeze was coming and rushed to withdraw remaining funds. Grant officers suggested work should cease, too, until directives come from the new leadership.

Anne Speckhard, a researcher who has interviewed dozens of militants and works closely with federal counterterrorism agencies, pushed back. She had around 200 people signed up for a training that was scheduled for days after the first funding freeze. Slides for the presentation had been approved, but Speckhard said she wasn’t getting clear answers from the grant office about how to proceed. She decided to go for it.

“I think the expected response was, ‘You’ll just stop working, and you’ll wait and see,’ and that’s not me,” said Speckhard, whose International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism receives U.S. funding along with backing from Qatar and private donations.

As the virtual training began, Speckhard and her team addressed the murkiness of the Justice Department’s support in a moment that drew laughter from the crowd of law enforcement officers and university administrators.

“We said, ‘We think this is a DOJ-sponsored training, and we want to thank them for their sponsorship,’” Speckhard said. “‘But we’re not sure.’”

By the cold math of the justice system, Rhodes was not supposed to be there. He’d gone to sleep the night before in a Maryland prison cell, where he was serving 18 years as a convicted ringleader of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Yale-educated firebrand who once boasted a nationwide paramilitary network had seen his organization collapse under prosecution.

For the Justice Department, Rhodes’ seditious conspiracy conviction was bigger than crushing the Oath Keepers — it was a hard-won victory in the government’s efforts to reorient a creaky bureaucracy toward a rapidly evolving homegrown threat. On his first day in office, Trump erased that work by granting clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, declaring an end to “a grave national injustice.”

Rhodes, sporting a Trump 2020 cap, was back in Washington with fellow “J6ers” within hours of his release in the early hours of Jan. 21, 2025 . In the frigid air outside “the gulag,” as the D.C. Jail is known in this crowd, he was swarmed by TV cameras and supporters offering congratulations. Nearby, far-right Proud Boys members puffed cigars. A speaker blared Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

“It’s surreal,” Rhodes said, absorbing the scene.

The shock of the moment has continued to reverberate far beyond the jailhouse parking lot.

Trump’s pardons immediately upended the biggest single prosecution in U.S. history and signaled a broader reversal that threatens to create a more permissive climate in which extremists could regroup, weaken the FBI’s independence and revive old debates about who counts as a terrorist, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials and national security experts.

In the whirlwind of the last three weeks, the Trump administration has purged federal law enforcement agencies of prosecutors and investigators who’d been pursuing homegrown far-right groups that the FBI lists as among the most dangerous threats to national security. The Biden administration’s 2021 domestic terrorism strategy — the nation’s first — was removed from the White House website. And some government-funded extremism-prevention programs were ordered to stop work.

“There’s no indication that he engaged in any kind of assessment or has even stopped to think, ‘What did I just unleash on America?’” Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw domestic terrorism cases as a senior Justice Department official, said of Trump’s actions.

Colin Clarke, an analyst at the nonpartisan security-focused Soufan Center, said “far right” and “domestic terrorism” are now “kind of dirty words with the current administration.”

Far-right movements that openly promote violence have suddenly been invigorated, he said. “Does this become a four-year period where these groups can really use the time to strengthen their organization, their command and control, stockpile weapons?” he said.

A Sudden Departure

The changes are a departure even from the first Trump White House, which ramped up attention on domestic terrorism in 2019 after attacks including the deadly white supremacist rampage that August targeting Latino shoppers in El Paso, Texas.

The next month, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report that described domestic terrorism as a “growing threat,” that had “too frequently struck our houses of worship, our schools, our workplaces, our festivals, and our shopping spaces.”

Joe Biden made violent extremism a central theme of his 2020 presidential campaign, saying that he’d been inspired to run for office by a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent, leaving one person dead. His administration’s steps borrowed from previous campaigns to combat AIDS and framed radicalization as a public health priority. Biden also made efforts to address extremism in the ranks of the military and Department of Homeland Security.

Experts described the effort as modest, but the moves were welcomed among counterterrorism specialists as an overdue corrective to a disproportionate focus on Islamist militant groups whose threat to the United States has receded in the decades since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaida.

A failure of authorities to pivot to the homegrown threat was cited in the findings of a Senate panel that examined intelligence missteps ahead of the Capitol attack. The report called for a reevaluation of the government’s analysis of domestic threats, finding that, “Neither the FBI nor DHS deemed online posts calling for violence at the Capitol as credible.”

This Trump administration has shown no appetite for such measures. Instead, the White House pardons are nudging fringe movements deeper into the mainstream and closer to power, said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads an extremism research lab at American University and has testified before Congress about the threat.

“It creates immediate national security risks from people who are pledging revenge and retribution and who have now been valorized,” Miller-Idriss said.

Within 24 hours of his release, Rhodes had embarked on a comeback blitz. He visited the Capitol and stopped by a Dunkin’ Donuts in the House office building. Three days later, he was in a crowd standing behind Trump at a rally in Las Vegas.

Rhodes was among 14 defendants whose charges were commuted rather than being pardoned. Though he didn’t enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was convicted of orchestrating the Oath Keepers’ violent actions that day. At trial, prosecutors played a recording of him saying, “My only regret is they should have brought rifles.”

At the Capitol after his release, he told reporters he plans to seek a full pardon.

Extremists Reconnect, Rejoice on X

Emboldened by the pardons and Trump’s laser focus on mass deportations, which is redirecting authorities’ attention, far-right extremists rejoiced at the idea of having more space to organize.

Chat forums filled with would-be MAGA vigilantes who fantasize about rounding up Democratic politicians or acting as bounty hunters to corral undocumented migrants. Researchers noted one Proud Boys chat group where users had posted the LinkedIn pages of corrections officers who purportedly oversaw Jan. 6 detainees.

Newly freed prisoners, no longer subject to orders to stay away from extremists and co-defendants, gathered for a virtual reunion, hosted on Elon Musk’s X platform the weekend after their release. For hours, they talked about what led them to the Capitol, how they were taken into custody and the harsh jail conditions they faced — a vivid, albeit one-sided, oral history of life at the center of what the Justice Department had hailed as a landmark domestic terrorism investigation.

The reunion on X offered a glimpse of men juggling the thrill of their vindication with the mundane logistics of reintegrating to society. One former defendant called in from a Florida shopping mall where he was buying sneakers with his mom. A Montana man who embraces the QAnon conspiracy theory said he was experiencing the most exciting time of his life.

Some were too flustered to articulate their thoughts beyond a deep gratitude for God and Trump. Others sounded fired up, ready to run for office, join a class-action lawsuit over their prosecution or find others ways to, as one pardoned rioter put it, “fight the hell out of this thing.”

Outside the D.C. Jail, pardoned defendants described the whiplash of their sudden status change from alleged and convicted criminals to freed patriots.

William Sarsfield III, a tall, gray-bearded man in a camouflage cap printed with “Biden Sucks,” sipped coffee outside the jail. Before dawn that morning, he’d been released from a Philadelphia detention center where he was awaiting sentencing on felony and misdemeanor convictions.

Court papers, backed by video evidence, describe Sarsfield as joining other Capitol rioters in trying to push through a police line with such force that “one officer could be heard screaming in agonizing pain as he was smashed between a shield and a metal door frame.” Sarsfield insists the charges were inflated, noting that he also helped officers escape the mob that day.

In the runup to Trump’s inauguration, rumors had swirled about an imminent pardon, though details were fuzzy. Sarsfield said his girlfriend was so certain Trump would deliver that she hopped in a truck and raced from Gun Barrel City, an hour southeast of Dallas, to the jail in Philadelphia, a 22-hour drive.

“She drove all the way from Texas on faith,” he said. “Because we both knew it was going to be right. A man’s word is what his word is.”

After his release, Sarsfield said, he headed straight to the D.C. “gulag” to make sure others were getting out, too. He still wore his jail uniform of sweats and orange slippers. The miracle of his freedom was just beginning to sink in.

“I got pardoned by a felon,” Sarsfield said with an incredulous chuckle, referring to Trump’s distinction as the only U.S. president to serve after a felony conviction.

Sarsfield said he planned to show his appreciation by helping Trump “clean up in local communities,” which he said meant working at the grassroots level to expose prosecutors and politicians he believes have corrupted the justice system.

“When people decide not to use the rule of law, that becomes tyrannical,” Sarsfield said. “And in our Constitution I’m pretty sure it says when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”

An “Inflection Point” for Political Violence

The uncertainty of what comes next is nerve-wracking for longtime monitors of violent extremists. Even in their worst-case scenarios, they said, few foresaw the Trump administration sending hundreds of diehard election deniers back into their communities as aggrieved heroes.

“A lot of these people will have martyrdom or legendary status among extremist circles, and that is a very powerful recruiting tool,” said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group.

ACLED research shows extremist activity such as demonstrations and acts of political violence has declined since 2023, which saw a 35% reduction in mobilization compared to the previous year. Doyle and other monitors credit the drop in part to the chilling effect of the Justice Department’s post-Jan. 6 crackdown on anti-government and white supremacist movements.

Doyle cautioned that it’s too early to assess the ripple effect of Trump’s clemency on extremist activity. Their ability to regroup depends on several factors, including fear of FBI infiltration, which could subside now that hard-right Trump loyalists are overseeing the Justice Department.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Doyle said.

At the FBI, the Trump administration’s post-clemency vows of payback have sidelined a cohort of senior officials who oversaw the Jan. 6 portfolio of cases, resulting in the loss of some of the bureau’s most seasoned counterterrorism professionals.

Without that expertise, investigators run the risk of violating a suspect’s civil rights or, conversely, overlooking threats because they are assumed to be constitutionally protected, said a veteran FBI analyst who has worked on Jan. 6 cases.

“It has the potential to cut both ways,” the analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Many longtime monitors of extremist movements have themselves become targets of threats and violence from Jan. 6 defendants and their supporters, raising anxiety about their release from prison.

Megan Squire, a computer scientist who in 2017 was among the first academic researchers documenting the Proud Boys’ increasingly organized violence, said members are already “saber-rattling and reconstituting dead chapters.”

The group’s former leader, Enrique Tarrio, released from prison in Louisiana, told the far-right Infowars podcast: “Success is going to be retribution.”

All five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol attack were in Squire’s original dataset. Another member who was a Jan. 6 defendant had previously blasted Squire on social media and posted her private information on Telegram.

Squire, who has since joined the civil rights-focused Southern Poverty Law Center, said she finds herself wondering, “Are they going to come after me now?”