Kevin McAleenan, the acting homeland security secretary, was at a Coast Guard picnic in Virginia that day, and soon the urgent messages began arriving. A sinking feeling of horror set in as the magnitude of the attack became clear. “It was devastating,” he said.
Twenty-three people were killed in the worst attack on Hispanic Americans in modern U.S. history.
About 5,000 U.S. Customs and Border Protection employees live in El Paso, and six lost family members that day. “To have an individual attack us, at one of the home bases of our agency and specifically going after Hispanic Americans who make up a majority of our employees in that area, was very personal for us, and it galvanized an effort that was already underway,” McAleenan said.
For years leading up to El Paso, the Department of Homeland Security — created to prevent another 9/11 — had been under growing pressure to do more to address domestic extremism. Within seven weeks of the El Paso massacre, McAleenan released a plan for “countering terrorism and targeted violence” that amounted to a road map for the department’s pivot from foreign threats to homegrown ones. It was the first time DHS had identified the extent of the danger posed by domestic violent extremists and white supremacists.
The plan got little attention or support from the White House, and even though DHS began speaking more directly about domestic threats, the effort made little difference on Jan. 6, when the department was one of several federal agencies caught flat-footed. Since that day’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, calls have intensified for DHS to emphatically turn its attention inward and do more to protect Americans from other Americans.
The attack has left many lawmakers, and especially Democrats, insisting that domestic terrorism has eclipsed the threat from foreign actors such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. DHS and its agencies are responsible for securing the country’s borders, ports, transportation and cyber systems, generally leaving the monitoring of extremist groups and terrorism investigations to the FBI. But DHS and its agencies have nearly eight times as many employees as the FBI, and calls for the department to play a more muscular role in combating domestic extremism have policymakers looking at new ways to enlist its resources.
The proposals have revived some of the civil liberties concerns that arose after the creation of the department as a large, internal security bureaucracy with a broad mandate. And the possibility of the department scrutinizing Americans has added to the unease because providing homeland security is less controversial when the threats are foreign.
DHS used its National Terrorism Advisory System to warn the public about attacks by domestic groups for the first time last month, citing “a heightened threat environment across the United States” in a bulletin issued a week after President Biden’s inauguration.
“Ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence,” the warning stated.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has long insisted DHS should protect Americans from the gravest dangers they face, and he said that domestic extremists and white supremacists present the most urgent, lethal threat.
“A lot of them mask themselves under some guise of being patriots or some form of citizen, but the question is, what do they advocate? It’s violence. It’s overthrowing legitimately elected officials,” Thompson said in an interview.
“So in my mind, those types of individuals who want to exercise…
Read More: DHS was founded because of 9/11 but is shifting to face the threat of domestic terrorism