We must defund the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism programs that target Black Muslim communities, writes Nabihah Maqbool for The Intercept.
The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, the ensuing uprisings, and the work of Black women abolitionists like Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Angela Davis have sparked a global conversation with demands to defund the police.
The movement has focused primarily on state and local governments, which spend over $100 billion on policing every year, but has also set in its sights on federal funding of law enforcement, most prominently a community policing program known as COPS.
But there are less direct ways the federal government helps perpetuate dangerous policing programs, among them controversial Countering Violent Extremism grant programs that unnecessarily expose immigrant, Black Muslim communities, including Minneapolis’s Somali community, to law enforcement scrutiny.
To defund the police, CVE programs must also come to an end.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security allocated a combined $20 million in 2016 and 2020 toward so-called Countering Violent Extremism programs that operate on the false assumption that Muslims are uniquely predisposed to commit violence and merit specialized government interventions.
Under CVE models, First Amendment-protected activities like vocalizing opposition to U.S. foreign policy or attending a mosque are deemed “risk factors” and “indicators” of future acts of violence and are categorized as behaviors that the state must monitor.
Under the guise of stopping violence, CVE programs insidiously target Muslim communities for police interactions and surveillance by local and federal law enforcement.
Posing as a “community-partnership,” CVE programs have paired vulnerable Black Muslim youth with police officers, while simultaneously training police officers to pathologize dissent and criminalize mental health issues.
CVE programs in the United States have their roots in a long history of FBI investigations of Muslim communities and Black liberation movements. According to declassified FBI records revealed in a report entitled Community Outreach or Intelligence Gathering? by Michael Price for the Brennan Center of Justice revealed that a “Specialized Community Outreach Team” was formed in 2008 to make contacts with the Somali community in Minneapolis.
One goal of the program was “[t]o develop a baseline profile of Somali individuals that are vulnerable to being radicalized or participating in extremist activities in order to establish a more focused outreach effort.”
This FBI outreach was a precursor to the CVE program established by the Obama administration. In 2011, DHS launched CVE pilot programs in Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis. Despite using ostensibly neutral language, the target demographic was Muslim youth — and in Boston and Minneapolis, Somali youth in particular.
In 2016, CVE was formalized as a $10 million grant program reaching 19 cities and 25 grantees. Nearly $5 million was awarded to law enforcement, emergency response, and criminal legal agencies.
Some nongovernmental grantees, like Crisis Intervention of Houston and the Global Peace Center, allocated portions of their CVE funds toward the training of law enforcement.
In its CVE grant application, Boston’s Police Foundation focused on Somali boys between the ages of 13 and 17, claiming that their “risk for violent extremism” increases due to “unaccountable times and unobserved spaces,” and that “[t]hey are enticed by their capacity to carry weapons, their loyalty, and almost gang-like dress code.”
This profiling fractured local communities. Public records obtained by Boston’s Muslim Justice League revealed a Somali liaison withdrew from the program, known as the Youth and Police Initiative Plus (YPIP), due to concerns that “focusing on efforts on one subgroup will ultimately create deeper divisions in our fractured society, doing more harm than good.”
Following the implementation of CVE programming in Minneapolis and Boston, Somali youth lost trust in community spaces like mosques and community associations that accepted CVE grants and collaborated with local police.
Read the full article on The Intercept.
