A senior Department of Homeland Security official discusses how the government is dealing with white supremacist and anti-Semitic attacks, continued threats from terrorist groups in the Middle East, and other challenges.
On March 2, DHS Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy Elizabeth Neumann addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. The following is an excerpt from her prepared remarks. Download the PDF to read the full version.
We contend with a domestic threat environment that is very different from the one we faced even five years ago. The threat from domestic terrorist movements has risen, and authorities are now treating them as co-equal to foreign terrorist organizations in priority. Last month, three different independent assessments re-emphasized the growing challenge that racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremists (what we now refer to by the acronym REMVE) pose. On February 5, FBI Director Christopher Wray noted that 2019 was domestic terrorists’ deadliest year since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He has elevated REMVE to a national priority equal to that of ISIS and al-Qaeda. On February 26, the Anti-Defamation League released a report concluding that 90% of the 42 deaths attributable to domestic terrorist movements in 2019 were associated with REMVE ideologies and movements. And the non-governmental organization Moonshot CVE reported last month that its tracking of online extremist content confirms that there is a global REMVE movement, with a robust presence on social media sites like Telegram...
The Policy Forum series is made possible through the generosity of the Florence and Robert Kaufman Family.
