DHS Had a Program to Stop Political Violence. Trump Largely Abandoned It.

In July, the superintendent of the Franklin school district, Dan Legallo, received a surprise letter from the Ministry of Homeland Security.

Since the end of last year, Legallo had used a $ 486,386 DHS grant to finance three mental health, absenteeism and other student problems in its rural Hampshire rural district. The money from the grant came from a program launched during Trump’s first mandate aimed at preventing targeted acts of violence, including political violence. For the Franklin school district, this funding stopped with a Missive of July test: the subsidy was no longer aligned with the “essential mission of DHS to apply immigration laws, secure the border and fight against anti -Semitism”, wrote the ministry in a message obtained by TPM.

Previous subsidies continued the letter, “led to the financing of openly supporting and political organizations as well as the financing of projects in the courts of the sanctuary which have not taken into account the Federal Immigration Act”.

“It was a fairly overwhelming letter,” said Legallo.

Franklin’s school funds are an example of more than $ 15 million in targeted subsidies on the prevention of violence that the Trump administration has reduced to the national level, according to the TPM examination of federal spending files. Most of the cuts occurred in July and affected democratic states and localities, months before the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk dominated the news cycle.

Directed by a little -known DHS office called the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), the subsidies were designed to strengthen state efforts and local to trigger acts of public violence of various types. Certain subsidies have addressed domestic terrorism and the type of targeted political violence that the United States has seen several times this year, including in Minnesota, where a right-wing aggressor has targeted several legislators of the Democratic States, by killing one and, more recently, with the assassination of Kirk. In some cases, subsidies have provided start -up funding so that states across the country can constitute threat assessment teams, aimed at directing potential attackers to treatment.

He can also help finance other anti-violence strategies, as in Franklin: the same positions that provide social services are, under funding, also trained to identify potential warning panels.

Under Trump II, things have changed. The CP3 is now managed by a former intern of the Heritage Foundation, 22 years old; The administration announced the July cuts by calling the CP3 of “milk cow for radical activists under the Biden administration”.

Legallo, Franklin’s Superintendent, told TPM that he would be able to keep the three positions by leaving a post of deputy director of non -fulfilled high school. This means more work for the rest of the staff, but he added, last year demonstrated the value of the approach.

“We are not going to let the federal government dictate whether we have these jobs or not,” he said.

In response to TPM questions, DHS said in a statement that “any suggestion that the DHS is moving away from the fight against terrorism is simply false. Under President Trump, the Ministry of Internal Security will use all the tools and resources available to secure our border, protect the homeland and remove illegal criminal foreigners from our country. The security of American citizens comes first. ”

‘Not very sexy’

While the attacks and flow attacks, the researchers focused on the attempt to understand how to predict them.

It is an almost impossible game by nature, but which, according to experts, requires understanding some basic principles: that attackers generally have preexisting mental health problems, and often use various political ideologies as a means of “self-educational” while they are evolving towards violence, declared the former CP3 chief, Bill Braniff, in TPM last week.

The DHS has tried to implement a response which implies the use of subsidies, known as the targeted financing of violence and prevention of terrorism (TVTP), to revive the efforts of state agencies, local governments, schools and universities across the country using relatively low sums of money. The first set of awards, announced in 2020, has put only $ 10 million available.

None of these programs are silver balls, said experts at TPM. Recent suspects in high -level attacks, such as the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk Tyler Robinson, are often extremely isolated. Clues that they had planned an attack generally only retrospectively emerged, after the investigators were able to examine their internet habits and their dozens of parents and knowledge interviews.

“It is something that is difficult and frankly not very sexy,” Jackie Bray, commissioner of the Division of Internal Security and emergencies in New York, told TPM. “I don’t take pictures with the new technology; I sit in a conference room with school advisers on how to manage a child in difficulty. ”

New York, like other states, used TVTP Grant Money to help start prevention teams after an attack; In this case, the Buffalo supermarket massacre in 2022 in which a white nationalist shooter targeted the African-Americans, an attack he tried to broadcast live.

The Bray department has lost more than $ 400,000 in funding when the DHS canceled the subsidies. This money, she said, will have no impact on the threats assessment teams that the State built after Buffalo, but would leave local governments with fewer resources on the sidelines.

“It will undermine other states that are five or seven years behind us and want to start,” she added.

This is another story in the county of Pierce, Washington.

This county lost the vast majority of $ 706,000 intended to create threat assessment teams and a prevention plan for the region.

“For the moment, we simply do not have the resources to be able to do so regardless of the funding of grants,” said Arel Solie, director of emergency management of the county, at TPM.

“ It’s going to be armed ”

The Trump administration has left funding in place. The universities of Vermont, North Carolina and Colorado have their funding, as is the Sheriff’s Bureau of Palm Beach in Florida. The DHS organized this office, which covers Mar-A-Lago, as a model for the type of prevention that the approach can reach, noting that the program “has successfully provided” 17 people with mental health services.

Some of the cancellations have gone to apparently missing projects. The OnePulse Foundation, a dissolved non -profit organization, formed after the Orlando Nightclub massacre with history problems, lost a subsidy of more than $ 110,000 in August.

Several people involved in these efforts have stressed TPM that subsidies are part of a national strategy that collapsed under Trump. The DHS threat supervisory office, intelligence and analysis, has been emptied; Federal prosecutors and FBI agents assigned to domestic extremism have been placed on the application of immigration, said a former federal law enforcement.

At the same time, senior administration officials reacted to recent attacks by blaming them against the Democratic Party and various progressive non -profit organizations, paving the way to use domestic terrorism and political violence as a pretext to repress the opposition. President Trump has signed an executive decree labeling an antifa a domestic terrorist organization; Although it is not clear if this designation has a legal meaning when used against a group that does not officially exist, he demonstrates that the White House is trying to redirect efforts to fight terrorism at home for partisan purposes.

“It will get worse,” said former law enforcement official at TPM. “We will not have the means to look at it, prevent it and it will be armed.”