In a new report, the country's largest civil rights organization says the Biden administration's strategy to counter rising domestic extremism is too dependent on methods that could potentially target and profile minority communities.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which is comprised of more than 200 groups, on Thursday urged the administration to curb the use of federal terrorist watch lists, stop widespread surveillance of social media accounts, establish greater safeguards on information gathering and oppose new domestic terrorism laws.
The coalition's recommendations come almost 18 months after President Joe Biden released the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism — the federal government's first coordinated public plan to monitor and thwart extremism in the United States.
According to Leadership Conference officials, the focus on combating domestic extremism is underscored by rising white supremacist violence and an increase in hate crimes. They repeated concerns that the administration is relying too heavily on strategies from 20 years of fighting foreign terrorism that, in their view, have excessively targeted minority communities.
"One of the things we're trying to highlight, without necessarily saying it, is that we do not need a new war on terror," Nadia Aziz, senior director of the Leadership Conference's Fighting Hate & Bias initiative, told The Washington Post. "We should not use the same framework, the same rules, that were used in post-9/11 framework, in which we saw tremendous harm in some communities."
In June 2021, the Biden administration released the 32-page strategy, which sought to coordinate governmental efforts in law enforcement and prevention. It called for greater information-sharing between the federal government and state and local authorities, as well as tech companies; increased funding to hire analysts, investigators and prosecutors at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI; and addressing contributing factors, such as systemic racism.
The Leadership Conference's report states that the federal government relied on threat-assessment strategies that granted law enforcement agencies "immense discretion regarding whom or what to look into" and "enabled law enforcement to baselessly tar entire communities with suspicion."
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, who heads the DOJ's national security division, announced the creation of a new domestic terrorism unit in January, noting that the number of FBI investigations of alleged domestic extremists had more than doubled since spring 2020.
In its report, the Leadership Conference said it was "concerning" that the unit is housed in the Justice Department's national security division, and said clarification over how that division will coordinate with the department's civil rights division to "prevent abuse of broad counterterrorism authorities" is needed.
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