Homeland Insecurity: Unraveling DHS Funding of Terror-Linked and Extremist Groups

America faces an internal threat that is far more insidious than we care to admit. Homeland Insecurity: Unraveling DHS Funding of Terror-Linked and Extremist Groups, by Benjamin Baird and Anna Stanley, reveals how Department of Homeland Security funds—your tax dollars—flow directly to organizations with documented connections to foreign terrorist entities and radical ideologies.

The evidence in this report speaks with brutal clarity. DHS has allocated over $25 million to groups associated with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mosques that hosted 9/11 hijackers received federal grants, institutions promoting antisemitic views secured government largesse, and organizations under the influence of foreign regimes have enjoyed American financial support.

This unprecedented funding continues unabated. Morning comes and the bureaucratic machinery whirs on, issuing checks to ideological extremists while claiming to protect our homeland. Washington’s left hand fortifies the very threats its right hand aims to neutralize.

A river of federal money winds through America’s Islamic institutions, watering a landscape of extremism that grows unchecked. Security grants are used to fortify radical compounds, counter-terrorism dollars empower those who denounce our values, and disaster relief enriches organizations with troubling histories.

Solutions demand political courage. We must reform vetting procedures, enhance transparency, and acknowledge ideological motivations behind violent extremism. The pages that follow offer a roadmap toward funding programs that protect rather than imperil American security.

This investigation transcends partisan divides. Congressional oversight committees must examine these findings with clear eyes. Taxpayers deserve assurance that federal funds strengthen America rather than organizations that undermine our fundamental interests. The evidence stands before you, unadorned yet devastating.

Gregg Roman
Executive Director
Middle East Forum

Executive Summary
This Middle East Forum (MEF) report analyzes Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants awarded to terror-linked and extremist organizations. According to this study, DHS authorized over $25 million between 2013 and 2023 to radical groups, many with documented links to foreign terrorist organizations. The funding was distributed through three DHS spending programs, with the majority originating from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Based on this review, DHS grant beneficiaries seemingly share a common ideological heritage with groups like the Taliban, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The DHS grants that are the focus of this study were intended for nonprofit security, disaster relief, and countering violent extremism programs. These grants were awarded to mosques, Islamic schools, charities, civil rights nonprofits, and political advocacy groups. According to this study, an alarming number of these Islamic institutions display signs of religious extremism, with many linked to international terrorist groups, Islamist regimes, and foreign extremist movements.

Key Findings:

• Between 2013 and 2023, DHS allocated a total of $25,070,511.74 was allocated to organizations identified as having ideological links to Islamist sects and foreign extremist movements.
• Grants were issued to groups connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Jamaat-e-Islami, the Nation of Islam, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. DHS grants funded organizations whose leaders have expressed antisemitic views, support for terrorist groups, and calls for violence against the West and Israel. Several recipients, such as Dar al-Hijrah and the Islamic Center of San Diego, have documented histories of hosting terrorists, including 9/11 hijackers.
• DHS allocated $750,000 to mosques suspected of operating on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran or its proxies, including the Islamic Center of America and the Islamic House of Wisdom near Detroit, Michigan, and the Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association in Austin, Texas. Iran faces strict sanctions as a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism, raising serious concerns over the funding of potential foreign-controlled religious institutions.
• The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Relief received the largest appropriations, totaling $10,346,248 in disaster relief funding despite its ties to Jamaat-e-Islami, a South Asian Islamist movement involved in a 1971 genocide against secular intellectuals in Bangladesh that killed up to 3 million people. Jamaat-e-Islami’s militant wing, Hizbul Mujahideen, is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
• A significant portion of DHS spending is allocated through FEMA under the Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), which grants money to religious nonprofits for physical security improvements. These funds are not just available to houses of worship, which are historically vulnerable to mass shootings and hate crimes, but to extremist political advocacy groups and charities.
• DHS has allocated $3,375,266 in Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) funding to radical organizations. Islamist groups that instigate political violence through dehumanizing or supremacist rhetoric have not only received millions of dollars in DHS funding to help fight extremism; these groups helped establish and shape the government’s deradicalization program.

This study highlights serious concerns regarding the allocation of federal Homeland Security funds to terror-linked groups and extremists. While these grants were authorized for seemingly benign purposes—security, counter-extremism, and disaster relief—the beneficiaries’ ties to designated terrorist entities and violent Islamist movements raise urgent questions about oversight and accountability in DHS funding programs.

DHS distributes billions of dollars through its 22 incorporated agencies specializing in public security, disaster management, immigration, customs, and domestic counterterrorism. Tasked with “keeping America safe,” DHS employs over 250,000 workers and controls an annual budget in excess of $100 billion.

Since February 2025, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of DHS personnel across several agencies as part of efforts to slash government spending and dramatically reduce the size of the federal workforce. The Department of Government Efficiency was recently established to evaluate federal spending programs by identifying waste, fraud, and abuse with assistance from congressional oversight committees and caucuses.

This study builds on previous MEF investigations that have exposed reckless and negligent spending from DHS agencies that partner with and fund radical organizations. It explores three DHS grant programs: the Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), and disaster relief spending. In total, the report shows that over $25 million was allocated to terror-connected groups and extremists whose access to federal funds could make the U.S. more vulnerable to hate crimes, violent extremism, and acts of terrorism.

After outlining each DHS grant program, this report examines individual nonprofits within each funding category and provides insights into their histories, senior leadership, and involvement in extremist activities. It proposes critical reforms to DHS funding programs that strengthen vetting processes and enhance public transparency. These changes are essential to prevent taxpayer funds from reaching organizations with ties to terrorism or extremism, while ensuring public safety and trust in federal programs. MEF’s findings and conclusions are intended to assist policymakers in implementing these reforms.

The table below includes a complete list of DHS-funded organizations that form the basis of this study. Please note that the dollar amounts listed in the spending table and throughout this report are only appropriation figures—not confirmed amounts outlaid to each group. Publicly-available government spending data is often outdated and unreliable due to inconsistent updates and questionable accuracy. Therefore, this report confirms only that the U.S. government earmarked listed grants in a specific year; it does not certify that grant funds were ultimately paid.

FEMA’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) remains the greatest source of DHS funding to extremist groups. Established in 2005, the NSGP provides target hardening and physical security enhancements to religious nonprofits facing an elevated risk of experiencing terrorist attacks.

Thanks in part to an aggressive interfaith lobby effort from groups including the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations—an umbrella organization featuring America’s most radical Islamist nonprofits—NGSP funding skyrocketed from around $10 million in 2012 to $454 million in 2024. An overwhelming majority of NSGP funding goes to churches, mosques, and synagogues facing legitimate threats of hate-based violence, and recent history demonstrates the need for federal assistance. However, these needs do not outweigh the government’s responsibility to ensure that extremist groups are denied access to taxpayer funding.

Under President Joe Biden, DHS established the Faith-Based Security Advisory Council that informs the secretary of Homeland Security about matters dealing with the security and preparedness of religious institutions. The council was “reinvigorated” to reflect Biden’s “priorities on diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Appointees include Mohamed Magid, the director and imam of a mosque raided in 2002 for its alleged role in a suspected terror finance scheme, and Salam al-Marayati, who blamed 9/11 on Israel and referred to the War on Terror as a “War on Islam.”

To encourage greater participation in the NSGP program by Muslim groups, FEMA holds educational seminars with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an NSGP beneficiary that was accused in federal court of maintaining ties to Hamas. However, CAIR protested the program in 2020 after FEMA began urging NSGP recipients to engage in voluntary “information and intelligence sharing” with local and federal law enforcement. Although the agency was interested only in gathering data about the threats facing the Muslim community, CAIR accused FEMA of working to cultivate informants through the funding program. In response, FEMA removed the language from future public notices.

CAIR consistently discourages Muslim Americans from cooperating with federal law enforcement, and the nonprofit has dragged DHS through multiple lawsuits, often representing suspected terrorist supporters in cases dealing with immigration or the government’s “terrorist watchlist.” Yet, these serious conflicts of interest have not stopped FEMA and other DHS agencies from partnering with CAIR and even honoring the serial plaintiff in September 2024 with a prestigious multiculturalism award.

DHS officials must be more discerning. Under FEMA’s latest NSGP guidelines, grantees may use security grants to install bulletproof glass and security fencing, or even to hired armed security guards. Should an insular, fundamentalist commune that expresses loyalty to Al Shabaab or Al-Qaeda receive funding for these purposes? What if the grantee is not a house of worship, but a radical political lobby organization? As this study demonstrates, millions of dollars in nonprofit security funds intended to protect vulnerable communities from extremist groups are going to organizations that actually promote bigotry and extremism.

The Al Furqaan Foundation “was established in 2003 with the mission to deliver the message of the Quran to every individual in America.” Based in Illinois, Al Furqaan operates a conglomerate of mosques, education initiatives, bookstores, missionary programs, and even a private K-12 school. In 2022, the foundation was allocated $247,013 in a pair of DHS security grants.

In addition to the federal government, Al Furqaan collects money from at least one foreign government source: Qatar, a gas-rich Gulf emirate known for propagating Islamism around the world. In March 2022, a Focus on Western Islamism report from MEF revealed how the RAF Foundation in Doha granted Al Furqaan a shipment of Qurans valued at $1.6 million. These Islamic texts may have been intended for distribution in U.S. prisons, where Al Furqaan runs a sophisticated missionary and chaplaincy program. Al Furqaan’s goal is to distribute “the Message of the Quran” to “every non-Muslim man, woman, and child in America” and “to reach every prison in America.”

Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family runs the RAF Foundation, an Al-Qaeda-linked charity whose “members,” according to the Counter-Extremism Project, are connected to “internationally sanctioned individuals” accused of funneling money to U.S.-designated terrorist groups in Somalia and Syria, despite the Qatari government denying such aid.

Sheikh Omar Baloch, once listed as a scholar-in-residence at Al Furqaan Foundation, has a history of promoting conspiratorial and inflammatory rhetoric. He has falsely claimed that ISIS operates in regions “running a Zionist agenda for Greater Israel,” echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories that blame Jews for global instability. Baloch has also suggested that Jews were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a claim frequently used by extremists to deflect blame from Islamist terrorists. Delivering a Friday sermon in 2024 at the affiliated Masjid Al Furqaan in Chicago, Baloch said that “whatever Israel is doing today must also involve the bankers.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presents itself as a Muslim civil rights organization, but its track record tells a different story. Founded by individuals linked to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), a known propaganda arm of Hamas, CAIR has long been dogged by allegations of extremist connections. Federal prosecutors named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history. That same year, the FBI severed ties with the group, citing concerns over its relationship with Hamas.

Despite this, CAIR has continued to receive substantial government funding. Records show that the organization was appropriated a total of $245,324 in DHS security grants to its national office in Washington, D.C., as well as CAIR branches in Florida and Los Angeles.

In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored an anti-Israel protest outside the Israeli Consulate in Miami, where demonstrators repeatedly chanted, “We are Hamas,” “Let’s go Hamas,” and “Hamas kicked your ass.” Hussam Ayloush, the director of CAIR-Los Angeles, is known for his antisemitic screeds, such as comparing Israel to “Nazi Germany” and claiming that the country “does not have the right to defend itself.”

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In recent months, these federally-funded CAIR chapters have found themselves increasingly shut out from government partnerships. In December 2023, the White House publicly disavowed CAIR after the group’s founder and longtime director Nihad Awad was recorded saying that he “was happy to see” the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. Two months later, the Florida House passed a resolution urging all state and local agencies to suspend contact with CAIR, joining legislatures in Arkansas and Louisiana that passed similar measures. In California, CAIR went unlisted for the first time from an annual resolution commemorating Muslim American achievements, reflecting mounting disillusionment with the group’s extremist rhetoric and terrorism links.

CAIR’s notoriety extends to the international community. In 2014, the United Arab Emirates formally designated CAIR as a terrorist organization, grouping it alongside Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. At least seven CAIR officials have been arrested, convicted, or deported for terrorism-related crimes. Ghassan Elashi, a former CAIR-Texas board member, is serving out a 65-year sentence for funneling $12 million to Hamas.

Most recently, the nonpartisan Intelligent Advocacy Network filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging that CAIR-California misappropriated $7.2 million in taxpayer funds intended for refugee resettlement. Weeks earlier, CAIR settled a lawsuit brought by a former employee after a judge ruled that the nonprofit must reveal its sources of foreign funding.

Located in Falls Church, Virginia, Dar al-Hijrah is arguably one of the most prominent outposts for radical Islam in North America. Reports obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism through a Freedom of Information Act request and found on DHS’s own confidential databases stated that Dar Al-Hijrah was “operating as a front for Hamas operatives in [the] U.S.” and was connected to “numerous individuals linked to terrorism financing.” Nevertheless, the Virginia mosque was granted $100,000 in 2019 from FEMA’s nonprofit security program.

Dar al-Hijrah has maintained a revolving door of resident sheikhs and imams known to promote jihad and extremism. From Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam who later became one of Al-Qaeda’s most prolific recruiters before his death in a 2011 U.S. drone strike, to Mohammed Adam El-Sheikh, the regional director for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which was later listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group for financing Osama Bin Laden.

Two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour, worshipped at Dar al-Hijrah in 2001 as disciples of Al-Awlaki. Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist who would go on to murder 13 Americans at a combat stress center in Fort Hood, Texas, was also a congregant at the Falls Church mosque.

Mosque officials have also been linked to Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group responsible for the October 7 massacres in Israel. Abdulhaleem al-Ashqar was indicted in 2004 and later acquitted of charges alleging his involvement in a racketeering scheme that benefited Hamas. He was eventually sentenced to 11 years for refusing to testify against suspected Hamas financiers. Ismail Elbarasse, who helped found Dar al-Hijrah, was an assistant to Hamas Political Bureau chairman Musa Abu Marzouk, who once led the terrorist group’s foreign operations in exile from Northern Virginia.

The Islamic center’s imams have included Mohammed al-Hanooti, who called on his congregation “to be ready for the jihad” and stated that “the curse of Allah will become true on the Jews.” In 2001, the imam was the above-mentioned Anwar al-Awlaki, who later became one of Al-Qaeda’s most senior leaders. Other imams and officials included Mohammed Adam El-Sheikh, who also served as an official at an Al-Qaeda front charity, and Johari Abdulmalik, who once encouraged attacks against Israel.

Dar al-Hijrah’s spiritual leaders even export their hate sermons beyond the walls of the mosque compound. Speaking to a Virginia high school in 2014, Imam Sheik Shaker Elsayed told an audience of young Muslims that real “Muslim men” should be “first in line” to collect “arms for jihad.” Elsayed is an advocate of the brutal practice of female genital mutilation, or FGM, without which he claims “hypersexuality takes over the entire society and a woman is not satisfied with one person or two or three.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran, a designated state sponsor of terrorism, promotes its radical brand of revolutionary Shi’a Islam abroad through state-controlled media, unregistered lobbying, and proxy nonprofits. This influence nexus to American communities is through Iranian regime mosques. In July 2023, members of Congress sent a letter to the Biden administration that cited MEF reporting and called for an investigation of “regime-sponsored mosques acting as agents of a foreign adversity.” The letter referred to at least one mosque listed as a DHS grantee.

Located in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, the Islamic House of Wisdom is a pro-regime mosque and community center where clerics appear to show gratitude for the Islamic Revolution and sympathize with Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy and U.S.-designated terrorist entity. The House of Wisdom is a listed awardee of a DHS grant from 2023 worth more than $330,000.

Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi, a propagandist for the Iranian regime who routinely spreads its political messaging in the media, is founder and spiritual leader at the House of Wisdom. The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini appointed Elahi as head of the “ideological and political department in the Iranian Navy,” which was “directly involved in purging, arresting, and indoctrinating Navy personnel.”

Elahi has access to some of the most senior figures in Iran’s regime, including multiple presidents. An undated photo once appearing on his personal webpage showed the cleric meeting with Hezbollah’s top spiritual adviser Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, whom Elahi mourned upon his death in 2010. Fadlallah was an early advocate for suicide bombings that have become a trademark of jihadist violence, and he “reportedly blessed the bombers” responsible for killing 258 Americans in attacks on the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut.

During the mid-1990s, Ali Elahi also served as the lead imam at the Islamic Center of America (ICA), the largest mosque in North America and the oldest Shi’a mosque in the U.S. Located in Dearborn, Michigan, a Detroit suburb that the Wall Street Journal dubbed “America’s Jihad Capital,” ICA caters to a community hailing largely from southern Lebanon, the birthplace of the terrorist Hezbollah organization. Locals regularly express support for the Shi’a jihadist group, even gathering at the Dearborn mosque on December 30, 2023, to memorialize a slain Hezbollah “jihad fighter.”

Between 2013 and 2016, ICA was granted more than $146,000 in nonprofit security funds. During most of this period of government funding, ICA was under the spiritual guidance of Hassan al-Qazwini, a firebrand preacher who comes from a prominent family of Iraqi clerics linked to Iran’s regime. As with Elahi, Al-Qazwini was close to Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, whom Al-Qazwini claimed “considered me his son.” Upon Fadlallah’s death, ICA held a memorial in his honor, and the mosque continues to hold the same ceremony every year to remember the late Hezbollah leader.

Al-Qazwini once called Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) an “honorable man, even though he is a Jew.” He claimed that ISIS is “connected to Israel,” which he complained uses the U.S. as a “cash cow.” In other speeches, Al-Qazwini has echoed Iranian regime talking points, denouncing its rivals and praying that Yemen’s Houthis “will occupy Saudi Arabia tomorrow.” He was eventually ousted from ICA amidst allegations that he embezzled mosque funds to support his father’s charity in Iraq.

The Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association (IABA) in Austin, Texas, is a religious center that focuses on promoting the teachings of Shi’a Islam. In 2021, DHS allocated nearly $150,000 to IABA.

In The Shi’i Islamist Regime’s Footprints in North America, sociologist Majid Mohammadi declared that IABA maintains “very close ties to [the Islamic Republic of Iran],” pointing to the mosque’s access to resources. Jafar Muhibullah, IABA’s resident scholar, studied at the regime’s seminary in Qom and received a doctorate from the University of Tehran. His sermons show deference to the Islamic Republic, including a speech in which Muhibullah recited a letter from Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, Iran’s supreme leader.

Muhibullah is affiliated with Iran’s top propagandists in the U.S., and has led a Shi’a youth retreat with two of the regime’s outspoken defenders, Usama Abdulghani and Hamza Sodegar. In a series of recorded ceremonies last summer, Abdulghani praised the “piety and knowledge” of slain Hezbollah commander Hassan Nasrallah, quoted Ayatollah Khamenei, and accused Israel of “skinning Palestinians and harvesting their organs.” Sodegar has been called an “ambassador-at-large for the Iranian regime.” He advocates murdering homosexuals and is plain about his support for terrorists: “We need to support Hamas … not just chant slogans,” he said in April 2023.

In January, IABA appears to have hosted Muzammil Zaidi, a pro-regime cleric who pleaded guilty months earlier to collecting “payments,” or religious taxes, from U.S. donors and transferring tens of thousands of dollars to Ayatollah Khamenei. A recording of Zaidi’s sermon was removed from IABA’s YouTube channel.

The same YouTube channel features a presentation about civic engagement, along with a list of “the causes that matter to us most,” which included “Palestine protest[s],” “Al Quds Day,” and the imprisonment of “Sheikh Zakzaky.” Established by Iran’s regime, Al Quds Day is a global event promoting the destruction of Israel and death to Israeli Jews. IABA also held protests on behalf of Ibrahim al-Zakzaky, the head of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, a Shi’a revolutionary Islamist group loyal to Iran that preaches that the West seeks to “dominate minds and resources” of Muslims by converting them to Christianity, and that Jews are the “lowest creatures on earth” and the “children of monkeys and pigs.”

The Institute of Knowledge is an Islamic seminary influenced by Deobandi teachings—a fundamentalist reform sect within Sunni Islam. Located in Diamond Bar, California, the seminary was one of three Islamic organizations removed from a 2023 California state resolution honoring American Muslim achievements after locals objected, pointing to the institute’s instructors who “endorsed slavery and called for Israeli Jews to be ‘exterminated.’”

In 2020, the Institute of Knowledge was appropriated $98,000 in nonprofit security funds.

Furhan Zubairi, the seminary’s dean of academics, justified slavery at a 2019 conference, arguing that Islam has “regulated but not banned slavery,” while Westerners are “cultured to think that freedom is one of the greatest ideals of human life.” Ahmed Billoo, another Institute of Knowledge instructor with a history of extremist statements, has endorsed suicide bombings and prayed for the massacre of Israeli Jews. “Oh God, reduce their numbers, exterminate them, and don’t leave a single one alive,” he wrote in 2019, adding the hashtag “#Zionists.”

The Institute of Knowledge annually hosts an “ILMspiration Conference” that features some of the leading voices behind America’s Sunni revivalist movement. Deobandi cleric Abdul Nasir Jangda, who has defended female sex slavery and the death penalty for apostates, regularly headlines the conference along with Omar Suleiman, a mainstream Salafi preacher who once called “homosexuality” a “disease” and “a repugnant shameless sin.”

The Islamic Society of Baltimore (ISB) sits on an eight-acre lot in Woodlawn, Maryland, that includes a mosque, health clinic, housing complex, and Islamic school. Under FBI surveillance for several years beginning in 2010, the mosque was “a breeding ground for terrorists,” according to Investor’s Business Daily.

Between 2017 and 2023, DHS allotted $374,290 in nonprofit security grants to the Islamic Society of Baltimore.

Mohammad Adam Elsheikh was the mosque’s first official imam, serving off and on from 1983 to 2003. Elsheikh was a member of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood during the 1970s before emigrating to the U.S. and establishing an American branch of the Sunni Islamist movement called the Muslim American Society (profiled below). He reportedly worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, a branch of the larger Islamic African Relief Agency, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization that supported Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. Elsheikh later went on to found Dar Al-Hijrah, a terror-linked mosque appearing in this report.

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“If certain Muslims are to be cornered where they cannot defend themselves, except through these kinds of means [suicide bombings], and their local religious leaders issued fatwas to permit that, then it becomes acceptable as an exceptional rule, but should not be taken as a principle,” Elsheikh told the Washington Post in 2004.

Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain, worshipped at the Islamic Society of Baltimore before plotting to blow up a nearby U.S. Army recruiting station, which earned the young Muslim man a 25-year prison sentence. He told undercover agents that he wanted to join the ‘“mujahideen’ in Pakistan or Afghanistan,” and he knew “brothers” who could supply him with weapons and explosives. Two months after 9/11, the Baltimore mosque also hosted Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Al-Qaeda hate preacher whose online sermons inspired jihadists around the world.

An archived version of the Islamic Society of Baltimore’s website contained links to extremist content., including a portal to Azzam Publications, a website affiliated with Al-Qaeda through Abdullah Azzam, the late mentor to Osama Bin Laden who advocated for global jihad. Another link took visitors to the now archived website of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader who once issued a religious edict sanctifying the killing of Americans in Iraq as “heroic martyrdom operations.”

Islamic Center of San Diego

The Islamic Center of San Diego (ICSD) is located in the heart of Clairmont, California, and is the largest mosque in San Diego. Between 2015 and 2023, DHS appropriated over $370,000 to ICSD in NSGP grants, including funds to help prepare for and respond to acts of terrorism. However, the San Diego mosque has a history of promoting the same extreme ideas the nonprofit security program was designed to prevent.

A 2005 study from the Center for Religious Freedom determined that ICSD was one of a handful of mosques in America found in possession of “Saudi hate ideology” materials, or a list of books and other publications identified as extremist Wahhabi literature. A congressional inquiry into the September 11 attacks found that the FBI believed the San Diego mosque was responsible for laundering millions of dollars in cash from Saudi Arabia to the Al Barakat Trading Company and other businesses affiliated with Osama Bin Laden.

Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the 9/11 hijackers who would crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, attended ICSD and received assistance from fellow worshipers in obtaining Social Security cards and drivers licenses, purchasing a car, and finding local housing. The pair even accessed funds from the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through a bank account belonging to an administrator at ICSD.

Jehad Serwan Mostafa, the most wanted American terrorist in the world, attended ICSD before joining Al Shabaab, where he serves as a senior official in the upper echelons of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Imam Taha Hassane, the head imam at ICSD since shortly after 9/11, said he was “shocked” to learn of Mostafa’s extremism.

The day after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel, Hassane wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post: “Resistance is the only option for a people under occupation.” In an October 20 sermon, he reinforced this stance, stating, “Resistance is justified, resistance when people are occupied becomes a human right.” Speaking at ICSD in December 2023, Taher Herzallah of the Hamas-linked American Muslims for Palestine called on the congregation to make Zionists feel “very uncomfortable on campus.” He implored his audience to follow the example of Gazans on October 7.

The Diyanet Center of America is the operating name of the Turkish American Community Center, a $110 million mosque and Turkish cultural hub located in Lanham, Maryland. The 17-acre sprawling compound includes a massive Ottoman-style mosque complex, residential homes, a luxury hotel, Turkish bath house, sports center, swimming pool, and cultural center built in the Seljuk architectural style. A branch of the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet Center serves as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s high court in North America, where Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP, after its Turkish initials) hosts public officials, foreign dignitaries, and Muslim-American proxies.

Despite the Diyanet Center’s great wealth and foreign funding, it was allocated $150,000 in a nonprofit security grant in 2023. These figures are particularly appalling when considering that Erdoğan’s bodyguards assaulted American protestors in 2017 outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C., raising question about whether U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to subsidize the same security services.

The Directorate of Religious Affairs was originally established to monopolize political control over Sunni Islam in secularist Turkey. The institution exercised little influence over Ankara until the rise of Turkey’s Islamist AKP, which quadrupled the ministry’s budget and granted sweeping powers to its religious officers. From its headquarters in Ankara, the Diyanet publishes extremely partisan sermons that are read word-for-word every week at thousands of Turkish mosques around the world. The Diyanet’s imams serving abroad in 38 countries have engaged in espionage on behalf of the state, spying on Erdoğan’s critics from the Turkish diaspora and reporting back to authorities, as well as working to indoctrinate foreign national Muslims. These clandestine activities, carried about by Diyanet imams who often possess diplomatic immunity, has prompted France, Germany, and Austria to implement policies to shut down Turkish mosques, expel Turkish imams, and bar them from entry.

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In the U.S., the Diyanet Center of America controls the affairs of 28 Diyanet facilities across the country. The Maryland mosque complex is “closely interwoven” with other Turkish NGOs that have been investigated by authorities for engaging in unregistered lobbying on behalf of the AKP. In addition, the Diyanet Center of America is a meeting place for some of the most prominent Islamist institutions in the country, including groups like CAIR and the Muslim American Society, which are profiled separately in this report.

In fact, the Diyanet’s American hub has been used to train Islamists to lobby U.S. Congress members. At the 2022 Muslim Advocacy Day, an annual event from the pro-AKP U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), attendees were promised free room and board at the Diyanet’s lavish facilities in Maryland. Among the issues that Diyanet-sponsored lobbyists discussed with members of Congress that year was “holding CVE accountable,” a reference to reforming the government Countering Violent Extremism initiative, another DHS grant program.

Last year, the Diyanet Center of America openly sponsored the same USCMO lobby day event in the nation’s capital. In 2023, it held lobby “training sessions” involving lobbyists from Justice For All, a group aligned with the violent South Asian Jamaat-e-Islami franchise, and the Diyanet repeated this training cycle in 2024. Ghulam Nabi Fai, an activist and writer associated with Justice For All, was arrested in 2011 and convicted of using $3.5 million provided through Pakistani intelligence services to influence American policymakers through unregistered lobbying.

DHS does not just pay radical groups to install alarm systems and hire armed guards; the agency also worked with Islamists in developing a Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program. The government’s flawed approach to CVE appears to be built around the poorly conceived belief that pumping money into Muslim communities, primarily through the Islamist institutions that claim to represent them, promotes moderation.

In fact, some of the most extreme Islamist organizations in the country were involved in developing CVE, the government’s holistic approach to fighting radicalization and extremism in the public sphere. Under the misguided belief that embracing outwardly non-violent Islamists would create fewer violent ones, DHS has appropriated millions of dollars in CVE grants to groups that perpetuate extremist views. The agency has tapped beneficiaries like Masjid Muhammad in Washington, D.C., a mosque with roots in the supremacist Nation of Islam movement, and Leaders Advancing and Helping Communities, a Dearborn, Michigan, nonprofit whose leaders appear to sympathize with Hezbollah.

Shortly after assuming office in 2017, President Trump canceled CVE grants to 11 groups that received appropriations in the final days of the Barack Obama administration. Trump renamed the program Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention. In the aftermath of these cancellations, American Islamists have largely rejected the government’s CVE efforts. A boycott among Muslim and Islamist groups ensued, with critics maintaining that the counter-extremism program amounted to a “government surveillance program.” Even as the Biden-Harris administration rebranded CVE under the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) and focused on white supremacist violence, leftist Muslim groups and Islamists continued attacking the program as “anti-Muslim.”

What do American taxpayers receive in exchange for the government’s CVE program? A Government Accountability Office study from 2017 found that it “was not able to determine if the United States is better off today than it was in 2011 as a result” of CVE programs.

In March 2025, Trump cut around 20 percent of the staff working at the Biden-era CP3 program.

Bayan Claremont is America’s first Islamic graduate school, with campuses in Chicago, Illinois, and Orange, California. In 2017, DHS awarded the seminary an $800,000 CVE grant. However, it was one of several Islamist institutions to cancel the grant in response to Trump administration reforms to the government’s deradicalization program.

Jihad Turk is the founding president of Bayan Claremont. He previously served on the executive council of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an influential Islamist group with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. After ISNA protested its inclusion on a list of unindicted co-conspirators in a 2008 terror finance trial, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors demonstrated “ample evidence” of the organization’s links to Hamas.

The Islamic graduate school’s teachings are influenced by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which established a consortium with Bayan Claremont and other Islamist schools to share resources and “design standardized curriculum.” A Muslim Brotherhood creation, IIIT’s “Islamization of Knowledge” subordinates genuine scientific inquiry to the teachings of the Quran and hadiths.

Bayan Claremont faculty have included Ihsan Bagby and Suhaib Webb. Bagby was a co-founder of the Muslim Alliance of North America, an African American Islamist organization that treats convicted cop-killer Jamil al-Amin as its “ameer,” or ruler. Meanwhile, Webb is a former preacher at the alleged terror-connected Islamic Society of Boston who has decried the “evil inclination” of homosexuality and said he “understands … animosity” towards Jews. A third faculty member, Edina Lekovic, was a spokesperson for the Muslim Public Affairs Council—yet another Muslim Brotherhood institution. Lekovic was managing editor of Al-Talib, a radical Muslim student newspaper at UCLA, when the July 1999 “Spirit of Jihad” issue was published with references to Osama Bin Laden as a “freedom fighter” amid pleas to “defend our brother.”

A visiting faculty member from Georgetown University, Jonathan A.C. Brown is known for his extremist statements and Islamist connections. Brown came under fire in 2017 for delivering a speech that defended sex slavery, arguing that “the Sharia understanding of slavery” is “not comparable at all” to slavery as it existed in America. He is married to Laila al-Arian, the daughter of convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad supporter Sami al-Arian, and has appeared at events hosted by a support group for convicted terrorists founded by his father-in-law.

Leaders Advancing and Helping Communities (LAHC) is a prominent Lebanese Shi’a community organization and charity located in the heart of Dearborn, Michigan. Formerly known as the Lebanese American Heritage Club, LAHC operates on a $9 million annual budget and offers a wide range of social welfare services, from mental health to employment and educational assistance. Senior LAHC leadership and board members, including its founder, have histories of pro-Hezbollah statements and appearances at rallies in support of the terror group.

In February 2017, LAHC declined $500,000 in CVE funding awarded in the final month of the Obama administration, citing President Trump’s plans to refocus the DHS program on countering radical Islamic extremism (plans that ultimately went unfulfilled).

Ali Jawad, the founder of LAHC and owner of Armada Oil, is allegedly connected to Hezbollah figures and openly sympathizes with the Iranian-backed terrorist group. Back in 2008, he was kicked off of John McCain’s presidential campaign after allegations surfaced that he was a “key agent” of Hezbollah. The accusations, which Jawad’s supporters called “unsubstantiated,” originated from counter-Islamist blogger Debbie Schlussel, who alleged without providing sources that Jawad visited the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil, Lebanon, on a fundraising trip with then-Dearborn Mayor Michael Guido and Talal Chahine, Jawad’s associate who later fled to Lebanon as a fugitive and was subsequently indicted for conducting “unlawful transactions with a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”

Schlussel claimed that Jawad maintained family and business ties to senior Hezbollah leadership. He took a separate trip to Lebanon in May 2003, Schlussel alleged, this time with Muthanna al-Hanooti, who used his Michigan charity to evade sanctions and fund Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Imad Hamad, who once had an FBI award rescinded due to his alleged terrorist connections. During the trip, Jawad apparently met with Nabih Berry, a Hezbollah hostage negotiator and leader of the Hezbollah-aligned Amal militia who today serves as Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker.

Jawad has rejected evidence that Hezbollah kills “innocent people.” His organization has publicly advocated to allow Lebanese expatriates to vote for Hezbollah-backed candidates in their country of origin without fear of violating material support for terrorism laws.

(MEMRI)

Wayne County Commissioner Sam Baydoun, an LAHC board member, spoke at a September 25, 2024, rally in Dearborn where locals chanted “Death to Israel” and cheered for Hezbollah’s terrorist leaders. Osama Siblani, another speaker who is close to Jawad and Baydoun, called for Israelis to go “back to Poland” rather than reclaim their homes in northern Israel that were abandoned following Hezbollah rocket attacks.

Established in the 1930s under Elijah Muhammad, Masjid Muhammad was a Nation of Islam institution originally called “Muhammad’s Mosque #4.” The Nation of Islam is a militant, quasi-Islamic folk religion steeped in anti-white and antisemitic prejudices. Although Masjid Muhammad would eventually adopt the normative Sunni Islamic practices of Warith Deen Mohammad, congregants at the “Nation’s Mosque” continue proudly associating with the extremist Nation of Islam.

Masjid Muhammad has been allocated nearly $1 million in CVE grants going back to 2016.

In an interview with the Final Call, a Nation of Islam publication, Masjid Muhammad’s first elected imam, Talib Shareef, attributed the mosque’s “success” to “the seniors who came before me.” At an event marking 75 years since Masjid Muhammad was established, leaders from the Nation of Islam and W. Deen Mohammad reflected on their “collective destiny.”

“You see the love the Minister [Farrakhan] has for the imam [W.D. Mohammed],” Sharif said. “He’s bringing the scholarship of Imam W.D. Mohammed to the Nation of Islam.” Farrakhan has unashamedly denounced “Satanic Jews” who “control everything” and “run the world, own the banks, own the means of communication.”

Shareef spoke with the highest praise for Ava Muhammad, a national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, upon the occasion of her death in 2022, calling her a “pioneer” and “inspiration.” Ava Muhammad once railed against “the godless Jews,” whom she called “blood-sucking parasite[s] … keeping us from the hereafter.”

Shareef is affiliated with the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the American branch of the violent South Asian Islamist franchise Jamaat-e-Islami. ICNA called on Congress to recognize Shareef’s achievements in a House resolution introduced to combat the “false narrative of terroristic Muslims.” The imam is a regular speaker at ICNA’s annual conferences, where he told an audience in 2019 that the Nation of Islam believers represented true “Muslims,” despite lacking a complete picture of Islam.

Mosque Cares, the 501(c)3 charitable wing of the W. Deen Mohammad ministry, helped found the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, an umbrella lobby group representing a list of America’s most radical Islamist institutions, many of which are featured in this report. Moreover, Majid Muhammad works “in partnership” with and reportedly accepts grant money from Islamic Relief USA, which the U.S. State Department has condemned for its leaders’ “well-documented record of anti-Semitic attitudes and remarks.”

Muflehun is a self-described “resource center for preventing and countering hate, extremism, and violence.” Yet, the nonprofit’s radical leadership and embrace of Islamist extremism should have disqualified it from receiving over $1.2 million in CVE appropriations from 2020-2022.

Muflehun co-founder Mohamed Magid is imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) and former head of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which federal prosecutors have warned is among the “individuals/entities who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.” In 2002, while Magid was on-site, federal authorities raided ADAMS because of its alleged involvement in a terror-financing network.

(YouTube)

Magid’s supporters refer to him as a moderate and point to his outreach with law enforcement and counter-extremism work. However, the Virginia imam works closely with Islamists such as Siraj Wahhaj, the imam of the terror-connected at-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn who has denounced homosexuals and infidels and has advocated jihad and killing adulterers. Moreover, Magid has raised funds for the release of cop-killer Jamil Al-Amin at an event that included Al-Amin’s protégé, Luqman Abdullah, a criminal Islamist who was subsequently killed in a shootout after the FBI sought to bring him to justice for weapons charges.

Magid claimed in 2015 to have persuaded six Muslim youth against joining ISIS. He pointed to a 22-year-old computer programmer who eventually abandoned plans to join the overseas terrorist group after Magid reminded him of “passages in the Quran that forbid killing other Muslims.”

Adnan Ansari, another Muflehun co-founder, is a former senior official of Islamic Relief USA, a branch of the terror-connected Islamic Relief Worldwide charitable franchise, which is designated as a terrorist organization by Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Multiple countries around the world—Bangladesh, Germany, Sweden, and Tunisia—have investigated Islamic Relief charities over their promotion of extremist clerics and ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In December 2020, the State Department’s Office of the U.S. Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism denounced the “consistent pattern of spreading the most vile anti-Semitic vitriol by [Islamic Relief Worldwide’s] leadership.”

In an interview with PBS Newshour examining why Americans were joining the Islamic State, Muflehun executive director Humera Khan denied any religious link with terrorism, arguing that Muslims radicalized to violence “haven’t had much exposure to the traditional or classical [Islamic] teachings” and may have “committed criminal acts” in the past.

“There are no patterns, and that’s making it harder for everyone,” Khan told the New York Times, once again ignoring the ideological roots behind Islamist radicalization.

As part of a CVE grant application in 2020, Muflehun promised to hold deradicalization training “sessions” with leaders from the Muslim Jewish Advisory Council (MJAC), an interfaith partnership between the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ISNA. However, it’s not clear that such a partnership existed throughout the grant’s term. ISNA, which was implicated in 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to fund Hamas, formally left MJAC in June 2021, ultimately holding its American Jewish partners responsible for “Israeli aggression in Gaza.” The decision to exit the AJC-ISNA alliance came after Islamist hardliners organized a bitter pressure campaign and public anti-ISNA boycott. It is unclear how Muflehun fulfilled its grant obligations without Muslim participation in the MJAC program.

DHS also disburses millions of dollars in disaster relief assistance, paying humanitarian groups to assist FEMA in bringing food, medicine, and other emergency supplies to communities affected by natural disasters. Despite the moral imperative to provide this life-saving assistance, Islamist groups historically use social welfare programs as a source of legitimacy and power. Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood exploit this model around the world to recruit, radicalize, and indoctrinate new members—all while claiming to advance the public good.

On September 12, 2023, FEMA held a disaster preparedness seminar with representatives from ICNA Relief (profiled below) and Islamic Relief USA. Three years earlier, as noted above, the U.S. State Department issued a press release condemning the Islamic Relief franchise for spreading “the most vile anti-Semitic vitriol.” Charity officials from Islamic Relief’s global headquarters have openly praised Hamas, slandered Jews, and referred to Yazidis as “devil worshippers,” according to the official statement.

ICNA Relief serves as the domestic humanitarian branch of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), an Islamist organization that provides disaster relief, refugee assistance, and other community services. ICNA’s many institutional and ideological links to Jamaat-e-Islami have been extensively catalogued. Based on the teachings of Abul Ala Maududi, who sought the complete Islamization of society in the Indian subcontinent and beyond, Jamaat-e-Islami is a violent Islamist movement prevalent throughout South Asia. Its militant Kashmiri wing, Hizbul Mujahideen, is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

ICNA’s overseas humanitarian wing, Helping Hand for Relief and Development, is the subject of an inspector general review and has received congressional scrutiny over its ties to Pakistan’s Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

Between 2016 and 2018, FEMA awarded $10.3 million in federal grants to ICNA Relief for Hurricane Harvey relief and disaster case management.

Jamaat-e-Islami leaders have been executed on charges of genocide stemming from Bangladesh’s 1972 war for independence. Ashrafuzzaman Khan, who helped establish ICNA and served as its vice president, was convicted in absentia in Bangladesh of torturing and murdering 18 intellectuals as part of a Jamaati execution squad. In 2010, Pakistani authorities convicted five members of an ICNA youth program for working with Al-Qaeda to plot terrorist attacks. Other terrorists have histories of attending mosques or studying under clerics that are part of ICNA’s network. Erick Jamal Hendricks, who is serving a fifteen year sentence for conspiring to support the Islamic State, is a former ICNA “youth coordinator.”

(Wikimedia Commons)

In addition to its Jamaat-e-Islami origins, ICNA has faced scrutiny over its connections to global extremist groups. According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, ICNA’s websites previously contained links to Hamas, Hezbollah, and militant organizations operating in Afghanistan and Kashmir. ICNA even endorsed the Islamic Society in Gaza, an entity that radicalized young children to support Hamas. An ICNA conference in 1990 featured speeches from senior Hamas commander Muhammad Siyam.

The Message, ICNA’s in-house magazine, includes interviews and articles promoting violent jihad. From a 1997 interview with a Hizbul Mujahideen commander, to articles discussing the religious obligation to participate in “armed combat” and provide weapons to jihadists, ICNA’s magazine is a clearinghouse for pro-terrorist ideologies.

Additionally, ICNA conferences have featured figures with connections to terrorist organizations. For example, one such speaker was Muhammad Siyam, a senior Hamas leader who addressed ICNA’s 1990 conference alongside Khurshid Ahmed, the deputy head of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan. In 1995, Siyam appeared at another Islamist gathering in the U.S., where he urged his audience to “finish off the Israelis. Kill them all. Exterminate them. No peace ever.”

In 2023, ICNA Relief was removed from a California resolution honoring “American Muslim Appreciation and Awareness Month” after locals and counter-extremism watchdogs objected. Critics of the resolution pointed to ICNA Relief’s radical history, including a June 2022 speech during which ICNA president and former ICNA Relief chairman Mohsin Ansari promised his organization would not “justify LGBT issues,” and would say, “‘No’ to those perverted attitudes which the world has accepted.”

Located in Houston, Texas, the Muslim American Society (MAS) Katy Center, or Masjid al-Rahman, is a part of the nationwide MAS organization, which is known as the American branch of Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, or the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamist scholar Hassan al-Banna established the pan-Islamic Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the 1920s in response to rising secularism and colonialism, and it soon grew into an international socio-political movement that inspired organizations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza to violent militias in Libya and Sudan. The Muslim Brotherhood is designated as a terrorist organization and consequentially banned in multiple countries around the world, including Russia, Austria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

Planning documents seized from a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood member in a 2004 FBI raid detailed the organization’s goals in Europe and North America. Written in 1991, the “explanatory memorandum” promised to bring about a “grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

In 2004, the Chicago Tribune published an investigative report that found that MAS members voted early on to hide their links to the Muslim Brotherhood, fearing that their support for Ikhwani offshoots like Hamas would attract undue attention. Nevertheless, U.S. prosecutors charged in 2008 that “MAS was founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” The United Arab Emirates, a close U.S. ally, designated MAS in 2014 as a terrorist organization.

In response to Hurricane Harvey, the MAS Katy Center was appropriated grants exceeding $90,000 to provide disaster assistance to communities affected by the storm. Around the world, the Muslim Brotherhood thrives on providing social welfare services in areas where the government’s reach is limited, using the legitimacy afforded through its public projects to penetrate communities and spread its radical message.

The Katy mosque has its own links to the international Muslim Brotherhood and history of extremism. Main Alqudah, a founder of the MAS Katy Center, challenged his deportation proceedings in 2013 by arguing that he faced “past and future harm” if he returned to his homeland, because he “advocated [for the] imposition of Islamic law instead of secular law in Jordan.” Alqudah admitted during testimony that his family members were part of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, and that he attended Ikhwani events and donated to the organization.

In one of several “Beautiful Recitations” demonizing non-Muslims on the mosque’s social media page, Sheikh Ahmad Elhadad said: “O Believers! Take neither Jews nor Christians as guardians[,] they are guardians of each other. Whoever does so will be counted as one of them. Surely Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people … with sickness in their hearts.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, MAS Katy Center was one of a handful of mosques around the U.S. to ban women and children from attending services. The mosque is also known for hosting radical guest speakers like Waleed Basyouni from the Salafist Al-Maghrib Institute, who has defended Hamas and criticized former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for “ruling Egypt with secularism that came from the West.”

DHS’s three distinct funding programs—Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), and disaster relief—require improvements to vetting and public transparency to ensure that terror-linked and extremist groups are denied access to taxpayer funds. While general improvements to vetting procedures and transparency may be applied to all DHS grants, each program is subsequently evaluated on its own merits.

FEMA partners with state agencies to administer NSGP funds with little government oversight or public transparency. However, the security program is known to favor “disadvantaged” communities. Applicants are expected to submit a “vulnerability assessment” and “investment justification,” and DHS Intelligence and Analysis screens applicants for “derogatory information,” using only the organization’s name and physical address for review against “U.S. intelligence community reporting.” All final funding decisions are at the discretion of the secretary of Homeland Security.

Much more is known about the CVE program’s vetting procedures. Initially, DHS’s CVE pre-award security review was based off of a process “informally established for another grant program.” However, the Trump administration (2017-2021) determined that this review process “was not rigorous enough.” This may explain the administration’s decision to cancel grants to several organizations that were allocated funding under the Obama White House.

Under current security review standards, FEMA and the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) conducts grantee background checks through DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis “to assess the likelihood of an applicant’s involvement or association with terrorism or any of the other activities relevant to an applicant’s suitability for receiving a grant award.” Using basic information, such as the organization’s name, and applying the names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers of the individuals involved, DHS intelligence will check the Terrorist Screening Database and the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment for derogatory evidence. The agency also reviews open source data, social media posts, and “foreign holdings.”

Additional scrutiny is only warranted in the event that the CP3 director raises concerns over an applicant’s background and convenes a working group composed of representatives from various DHS offices. Upon this group’s recommendation, DHS intelligence will expand its research of the applicant to encompass the grantee’s “officers, employees, and any associates.”

FEMA’s vetting of private nonprofit organizations receiving disaster relief grants is even less stringent. Applicant background checks focus on organizational legitimacy, financial accountability, and compliance with federal regulations rather than mandatory security checks for personnel and associates. While background checks may be required in limited cases based on state-imposed rules, they are not a standard condition of FEMA disaster relief grants.

Key Policy Principles

1. All DHS funding programs should require basic vetting of an organization’s senior officers, boards of directors, key staff, and associates. As demonstrated from this study, a simple open-source review of many DHS funding recipients should have disqualified dozens of organizations from consideration. Presently, a security review of key staff and associates only occurs in the case of CVE funding after the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships director and a working group request additional scrutiny of an applicant. These reviews do not appear to occur under any condition as part of NSGP or disaster relief grants.
2. Applicants must supply more than the basic information currently required for security reviews (the organization and applying individuals’ name, address, and email/phone). Nonprofits should provide an organizational hierarchy, a list of sponsored conferences and events, sources of foreign funding, and social media handles.
3. Organizations found to be under the influence or control of a foreign entity, including foreign governments, political parties, and extreme religious movements, should be disqualified from DHS funding. Due to limited resources at the Justice Department and uneven application of the law, registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, should not be the minimum standard for disqualification. DHS should conduct an independent analysis based on facts such as sourcing of funding, and material support of foreign adversaries.
4. DHS should critically assess the circumstances surrounding grant appropriations to serial plaintiffs, or organizations that repeatedly sue DHS agencies, exploring conflicts of interests and ethical concerns that undermine public trusts and compromise accountability.

Private researchers and watchdog groups must be able to monitor and evaluate public grants. Without the most basic oversight mechanisms in place, DHS funding will remain subject to abuse. Funding programs like NSGP and CVE are particularly sensitive to exploitation.

Key Policy Principles

1. All DHS programs, and in particular FEMA’s nonprofit security and disaster relief grants, should publish vetting standards in Privacy Impact Assessments and Notice of Funding Opportunities.
2. Public databases such as “USASpending.gov” must be reformed and improved to more accurately reflect government appropriations and outlaid grants. Currently, these databases are hindered by incomplete and inaccurate data.

FEMA’s NSGP provides hundreds of millions of dollars annually to religious nonprofits that demonstrate a compelling need for security funding. Certainly, houses of worship—mosques, synagogues, and churches—have been repeatedly targeted in crimes ranging from vandalism to mass shootings. Yet, a significant portion of NSGP funding is allocated to non-worship-centers. This includes political advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, and Islamist seminaries like the Institute of Knowledge.

Key Policy Principles

1. Organizations with documented links to terrorist entities and groups that consistently promote extremism should not receive DHS/FEMA security funding because it is possible that such grants could be used for defense training, surveillance, target hardening, and even for hiring armed security guards. These assets represent a threat to public safety in the hands of unassimilated extremists who reject American social norms and customs.
2. Non-worship-centers, or any organization that is required to file an annual IRS Form 990, should be subject to additional scrutiny during NSGP security reviews. Vulnerability assessments and investment justifications for these institutions should account for historical differences between the threats that political advocacy groups or religious seminaries face compared to houses of worship. The government should also consider an organization’s educational purpose and whether it serves the greater public good when dispensing security funding.
3. FEMA must terminate its partnership with extremist groups like CAIR, which operates as a liaison between the Muslim American community and FEMA, effectively creating a radical middleman for NSGP funds.

Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) grants, formerly known as the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program, have historically funded Islamist organizations, as documented in this report. As a result, DHS has partnered with extremists in the name of fighting extremism. Published in 2020, the MEF white paper Rethinking Counter-Extremism provides a detailed roadmap for policymakers considering CVE reform.

Key Policy Principles

1. The refusal to acknowledge the role of ideology in fomenting ideological violence has crippled CVE efforts. DHS’s latest CVE iteration, Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, must acknowledge that seemingly non-violent Islamists contribute to violent extremism. Poverty, isolation, so-called Islamophobia, lack of education, and mental health concerns do not adequately explain Islamist radicalization.
2. DHS must discard the notion that seemingly lawful Islamists can be used as a bulwark against violent jihadists. The government cannot moderate Islamist institutions by funding them. Government support of Islamist groups only serves to legitimize their purported status as spokespersons for the Muslim community.
3. Without confronting Islamist ideology, attempts at deprogramming or deradicalization will continue to fail. Deradicalization is expensive, ineffective, and impossible to evaluate for success.

FEMA has disbursed massive grants to assist in disaster management programs. These funds provide power and legitimacy to Islamist groups that use social welfare as a means for exercising religious control over their faith communities.

Key Policy Principles

1. FEMA officials should avoid partnering with organizations like the Islamic Circle of North America Relief or Islamic Relief USA. These groups have been flagged by government offices for ties to extremism and should not serve as intermediaries between the Muslim American community and federal grant programs.
2. FEMA officials must be discerning when considering grant applications for emergency or disaster relief services. Groups with a track record of extremism and radical indoctrination should be blacklisted from DHS funding programs.
3. The DHS Office of the Inspector General should conduct post-award monitoring and grant audits of extremist groups that received disaster relief grants to check proper expenditure reports, program performances, and adherence to guidelines.