Community engagement was at the heart of the Obama administration’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program, which aimed to combat terrorism by building bridges.
But the initiative, which began in 2015 with pilot programs in Boston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, now appears to be hanging by a thread with several participants rejecting grants handed out through the program following reports that the Trump administration would tighten the focus specifically on radical Islamic extremism.
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security, which administers the CVE grants, declined comment Friday.
Earlier this month, a private Islamic graduate school in Claremont rejected $800,000 in funding from the Department of Homeland Security. In a couple of weeks, Bayan Claremont has gone from having more than half of its annual budgetary goal met to starting a GoFundMe account and other fundraising efforts, said president Jihad Turk. As of Friday, the account had about $18,600 out of the $800,000 that was needed.
The college’s board members had to make the “tough decision” because of pressure from the community, he said.
“Now, with Trump becoming president and creating a much more hostile environment for Muslims, the well has been poisoned,” Turk said. “Taking this money will damage our standing in the community. If we took it, we’d come across as working with the government to surveil the Muslim community. Obviously, that’s not our intent.”
Bayan Claremont had received the second-largest grant, among the first 31 federal grants for CVE awarded to organizations, schools and municipalities in the final days of the Obama administration.
Turk said the school had hoped to use the money to help create a new generation of Muslim community leaders, with $250,000 earmarked for about 20 local nonprofits doing social justice work.
“Building resilient communities is our goal,” he said. “We’re going to continue the work. We don’t need government money to do it. It’s not fruitful to work with a government that is hostile in its rhetoric to Islam and Muslims.”
Even under Obama, the CVE program created controversy and division within Muslim communities in Southern California and nationwide.
While officials said the initiative is a tool to reach out to Muslim groups through community events, mentoring and youth programs, its broader goal was to prevent radicalization and identify potential extremists.
Some groups, such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council, became partners in the initiative but others, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, backed away, suspecting the effort was just another way Muslims would be targeted and vilified.
The Associated Press reported that three other groups also rejected CVE funds.
Unity Products Foundations in Potomac Falls, Va., has declined a $396,585 grant to produce educational films challenging narratives supporting extremist ideologies.
In Dearborn, Mich., Leaders Advancing and Helping Communities said it is turning down $500,000 for youth development and public health programs. Also, Ka Joog, a leading Somali nonprofit organization in Minneapolis, rejected a $500,000 grant that would have benefited its youth programs.
All of the groups cited the current political climate and Trump’s approach to countering violent extremism for their decision.
Work done by these community organizations in terms of countering violent extremism is valuable, said the Los Angeles Police Department’s Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who also heads the city’s Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau.
“The work that law enforcement can do in this area is quite limited,” he said. “When you have stakeholders like Bayan Claremont who are invested in mitigating the risks, it has huge positive consequences. It’s a shame that these groups have pulled out.”
LAPD will continue with its “outreach and intervention efforts,” said Downing, who is set to retire at the end of February.
Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council has not yet declined the $393,800 it was awarded to create community resource teams with spiritual leaders, youth counselors and mental health specialists, and to build a website to counter Islamophobia, said Omar Noureldin, vice president of strategy and operations.
He said they’ve still not heard anything clear-cut regarding the program’s future from Trump administration officials.
“We’re flying in the dark,” he said. “And we’re supportive of other Muslim organizations that have turned down the funds because we see how this proposed change could be detrimental to the process of building strong communities.”
But the bigger problem, Noureldin said, is that targeting Muslim communities in the guise of a counter-extremism program is “un-American and unconstitutional.” If the Trump administration goes through with its plan for the CVE program by targeting Muslims and ignoring other extremist groups, his group will take the lead in mounting a legal challenge, he said.
“Our focus is to build healthy communities,” Noureldin said. “And the way to do that is to move away from the securitization of our communities.”