The Daily Beast reports that the Trump administration’s bogus report, a clear attempt to weaponize the Republican administration’s racist and Islamophobic immigration propaganda, does not seem to have been analyzed by anyone not named Jeff Sessions.
Working off the 549 federal international-terrorism convictions tallied by the Justice Department, the document stated: “An analysis conducted by DHS determined that approximately 73 percent (402 of these 549 individuals) were foreign-born.”
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According to a government source familiar with the episode, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ office took charge of the report’s assemblage of statistics—which some terrorism analysts consider highly misleading—and sent it to DHS Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen for her imprimatur after it was all but finalized.
The report which paints the country’s terrorism threats as an entirely immigrant, and foreign born related problem, has been justifiably criticized and dissected, also seems to have missed the mountains of evidence of white male domestic terrorism. As Mother Jones tallied, some 54 percent of mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and 2017 were perpetrated by white males—American born. As Talking Points Memo explains, the Trump/Sessions report cooked their books in a a concerted effort to mislead the American public.
The report, released last week, was presented as a joint project of DHS and the Department of Justice. It found that 73 percent of international terrorism convictions since 9/11 involved “foreign-born” suspects. But that included foreign nationals extradited to the US after committing crimes abroad — an approach that was widely criticized as misleading.
According to the Beast, citing a government source familiar with the episode, DHS analysts didn’t contribute to the report at all. In fact, “[A]ttorney General Jeff Sessions’s office took charge of the report’s assemblage of statistics — which some terrorism analysts consider highly misleading—and sent it to DHS Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen for her imprimatur after it was all but finalized.”
The Trump administration’s racism is not unique to Trump. This Islamaphobia has been a conservative and centrist view for a long time now. It’s tied closely to the entrenched white supremacist culture and systems that pervade our country. And this racism and ignorance is not simply degrading and dangerous rhetoric, it’s led to policy decisions that make our country less safe.