The U. S. Department of Homeland Security on Friday announced changes to a $10 million government grant program, narrowing its focus around efforts to combat Islamist extremism.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Friday announced changes to a $10 million government grant program, narrowing its focus around efforts to combat Islamist extremism.
In an update to awards announced in January by former President Barack Obama's administration, the department released a new list of grant recipients and amounts, shifting money to law enforcement offices and away from groups that combat U.S.-based extremism.
Reuters reported in February that President Donald Trump's administration wanted to revamp the program to focus solely on Islamist extremism.
A DHS spokeswoman said the department changed the grant criteria after the release of the initial list to consider whether applicants would partner with law enforcement, had experience implementing counter-extremism prevention programs, and would be able to continue after the awards were spent.
"Top-scoring applications that were consistent with these priorities remained as awardees, while others did not," said DHS spokeswoman Lucy Martinez.
Three local law enforcement offices in California, Washington state and Minnesota were among the new awardees, receiving grants totaling $1.2 million. None of the offices immediately responded to calls for comment on Friday about the grants.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council, a nonprofit group that works to improve public understanding and policies that affect American Muslims, said the Trump administration revoked its nearly $400,000 grant because the group "did not meet the criteria of working with law enforcement to counter violent extremism."
"While we have developed working relationships with law enforcement agencies in the past to improve officer training and the reporting of hate crimes, we have never conflated this work with community responses to issues of vulnerability and alienation," said MPAC in a statement.
The revised list also omitted several original awardees focused on U.S.-based extremism, such as Life After Hate, which conducts research and outreach to steer young people away from far-right extremism.
Christian Picciolini, a co-founder of Life After Hate, told Reuters his group was planning to use its $400,000 grant to scale up its counselor network of former extremists to "meet the highly increased requests for our services since election day."
"The current administration's lack of focus on domestic white extremist terrorism, let alone its denial to even acknowledge it exists, is highly troubling," Picciolini wrote in an email.
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
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