‘Exactly the type of threat we were talking about’

2009 report about domestic dangers was rebuked at the time

In April 2009, Daryl Johnson was caught in a firestorm because of a report he wrote at the Department of Homeland Security.

It warned of a surge in activity by right-wing groups, including militias, white supremacists, antigovernment activists and others motivated by racial grievances toward the nation’s first black president and the consequences of a faltering economy.

Republicans in Congress called the report an attack on conservatives. Janet Napolitano, then the secretary of homeland security, apologized for the report and it was withdrawn. Johnson’s unit was disbanded.

Nearly eight years later, Johnson’s warnings have proved prescient in a string of incidents including the killings of a Kansas abortion doctor and a security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and mass shootings at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and an African-American church in South Carolina.

Last week, a foiled alleged plot by three men to attack an apartment complex inhabited by Muslim Somali immigrants in western Kansas further demonstrated that it isn’t just foreign terrorists or those sympathetic to them that Americans have to worry about.

“This is exactly the type of threat we were talking about,” said Johnson, who is now a homeland security consultant. “It’s continued to grow over the past eight years.”

Three Kansas men — Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright and Patrick Stein — were indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday on one count of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. The three are accused of plotting to detonate truck bombs around the complex in Garden City, Kansas, where 120 people live and worship.

The FBI arrested the men last Friday in Liberal, Kan., after an undercover investigation.

According to a complaint filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kansas, the men belonged to a militia group called the Crusaders, known for its anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-government views. The group referred to the Somali immigrants, who work at a local meatpacking plant, as “cockroaches,” the complaint said.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of extremist groups, the number of anti-Muslim hate groups has increased 42 percent since 2014.

“This is just symptomatic of the really unprecedented rise in anti-Muslim bigotry in our society,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Hooper and others say the federal government’s focus on terrorism from abroad, or domestic terrorism carried out by people sympathetic to foreign terrorist groups, diverts attention from threats against Muslims.

“The attitude seems to be it cannot be terrorism unless a Muslim commits an act of violence,” he said.