The Minneapolis City Council on Thursday sent a federal extremism prevention grant back to committee after nearly half of the council expressed concerns about its lack of scope and potential for reigniting fears of surveillance.

Several of the council members, including the three Muslim members, likened the grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to past federal dollars used to fund the Countering Violent Extremism program. The divisive federal program received widespread criticism and fueled concerns that it was getting used to surveil the Twin Cities’ Muslim communities.

The proposed grant

The grant would supply nearly $300,000 over two years to make use of public health methods to create programs geared toward stopping violent extremism. The Community Partnership to Discover and Prevent Violent Extremism in Minneapolis program, housed throughout the city’s health department, would use a community-focused awareness campaign to “decrease risk aspects for radicalization and violent extremism to maintain communities secure.” 

This system would host trainings and events to gauge community members’ specific concerns about violent extremism and facilitate prevention through community involvement. In keeping with the Racial Equity Impact Evaluation conducted by city staff, the community events can be a combination of educational sessions, programming and activities meant to lift awareness. 

The programming funded by the grant would happen within the East Phillips, Ventura Village, Near North, Central and Bryant neighborhoods, that are all areas with significant numbers of individuals from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, including immigrant and Muslim communities. 

Through the Public Health and Safety Committee last week where the proposed grant was being presented, Ward 2 council member Robin Wonsley asked why the programs can be directed at those neighborhoods featuring distinguished non-white and immigrant communities. Wonsley also asked whether right-wing extremism can be a spotlight of the grant, citing the recent surge in attacks on mosques. 

Toni Hauser, supervisor of the health department’s Emergency Preparedness and Response, told council members the goal of the grant just isn’t to make use of past methods of targeting specific demographics, but to forestall extremism and radicalization through social cohesion and community involvement. 

“Our goal isn’t to show people the best way to discover if someone is perhaps a threat, it’s to support communities, to create more programs and grow to be more involved,” she said. “We do know that people who find themselves connected of their community are less more likely to go surfing and begin reading things and begin believing things that is perhaps more extremist.”

Surveillance concerns, limited scope

Several council members raised concerns that the grant program would open old wounds, likening it to a different federal counterterrorism program from nearly a decade ago that raised widespread concerns among the many city’s Muslim communities. 

Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) was a program launched in Minneapolis by the Department of Justice in 2015 that had a stated goal of using community-based outreach, oftentimes targeted at youth, to forestall radicalization. Led by U.S. Attorney Andy Luger, this system’s counterterrorism efforts were geared toward Minnesota’s Somali community.

This system was began after nine Somali men were arrested and charged with conspiring to travel to Syria to affix ISIS following an FBI probe. Six of them pleaded guilty while three of them went to trial, were convicted by a federal jury and at the moment are serving decades-long sentences. 

But this system was divisive, and was seen by many as an effort to make use of the guise of community outreach to spy on Muslim youth and the Twin Cities’ Somali community at large. Fears of surveillance caused paranoia and divided the community as mosques and community groups that received the federal funding were viewed with suspicion. 

“We should always not relive what happened to our community many times and again,” said Ward 10 council member Aisha Chughtai. “We should always learn our lesson from what happened with CVE and the best way wherein it destroyed our community, the best way wherein it surveilled our kids and tore them aside from their families, and the best way wherein it was harmful to the perception of safety inside our own neighborhoods.”

A number of the council members also pointed to the shortage of attention paid to white supremacist extremism throughout the scope of the grant. Ward 9 council member Jason Chavez, who represents among the neighborhoods chosen for the proposed programs, said lots of his Muslim constituents have told him that on top of being targeted by the Justice Department, the programs show a definite pattern of omitting far-right extremism as a spotlight from its scope.

Ward 1 council member Elliott Payne echoed those concerns, sharing his experience through the unrest in 2020 in the times after George Floyd’s murder as one in every of the few Black folks that lives in his northeast Minneapolis neighborhood.

“I used to be fearful about being a recognizable Black man in a white neighborhood, and I used to be fearful about white supremacists coming and finding me,” Payne said. “So I vigilantly stayed up all night, every night, terrified. I used to be terrified. That’s terror, and this grant doesn’t address that style of terrorism in any respect.”

No council members spoke in favor of this system through the meeting. On account of the variety of members who spoke out against the grant, the council referred the proposal back to the Public Health and Safety Committee for further discussion.