Activists wary of broader law enforcement after Capitol riot
CHICAGO» As federal officials grapple with how to confront the national security threat from domestic extremists after the deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol, civil rights groups and communities of color are watching warily for any moves to expand law enforcement power or authority.
They say their communities have felt the brunt of security scrutiny over the past two decades and fear new tools meant to target right-wing extremism or white nationalists risk harming Muslims, Black Americans and other groups, even if unintentionally. Their position underscores the complexity of the national debate surrounding how to balance First Amendment expression protections with law enforcement’s need to prevent extremist violence before it occurs.
In particular, many Muslim advocates oppose as unnecessary the creation of any new domestic terror statute, saying there are enough laws on the books to cover violent extremist conduct.
“The answer ought to be to sort of pause. Because the instinct to do something is something I’m really quite afraid of,” said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, one of more than 130 civil and human rights organizations that say the FBI already has the tools it needs.
“There’s an entire federal code in place that allows you to successfully go after this violence before you need to sort of say, ‘Oh, wait, you know, there’s this existing gap and we need more power,’ ” she added.
The debate over how to prevent extremist violence, and whether new domestic terrorism laws are required, has surfaced before, including after rampages that targeted Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue and Latinos in a Texas Walmart.
President Joe Biden moved swiftly to declare domestic extremism an urgent national security concern, tasking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate a threat assessment. The Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorism bulletin warning about possible additional violence. Even before the riot, FBI Director Chris Wray said domestic terrorism had been elevated as a priority to the same level as international terrorism, with violence by racially motivated and anti-government extremists accounting for significant lethal violence in recent years.
The debate now is how to address the rise of white supremacist violence while not targeting the same people white supremacists seek to harm. Not only that, law enforcement officials pressured to crack down more on domestic extremists have to do so while staying mindful of broad First Amendment protections that prevent the arrests of people for abhorrent or hateful speech short of threatening violence.
“White violence is consistently perpetuated and then used as justification for increased surveillance or increased state power against communities of color,” said 26-year-old Iranian-American activist Hoda Katebi, who is Muslim, wears a headscarf and grew up defending herself against harassment and being called a terrorist in the years after Sept. 11, 2001.
The Justice Department has not said publicly if it intends to seek any additional powers or whether it even needs new ones to deal with domestic extremism. Although there is no federal law that explicitly charges crimes as domestic terrorism, prosecutors have successfully used other statutes to cover conduct that might reasonably be seen as terrorism, including at the Capitol.
There are, however, additional legal tools available for combating international terrorism.
Federal law, for instance, makes it a crime to give support to designated foreign terror groups, affording law enforcement greater flexibility to arrest people who donate money or otherwise aid such an organization, even if they haven’t harmed anyone or threatened violence themselves. No comparable law exists for people aligned with U.S.-based extremist groups, which enjoy expansive free speech protections.