Leaked Doc: Homeland Security's Domestic Terror Obsession

The annual assessment, which has been prepared since 2020, purports to offer a holistic assessment to threats to the Western Hemisphere. These assessments have consistently focused on what you imagine: southern border security, the drug trade, immigration, and critical infrastructure protection in the United States.

But this year’s assessment, marked “For Official Use Only” and not yet released to the public, identifies violent extremism on the part of American citizens as the priority and greatest threat.

One phrase in particular stands out to me as new: potential terrorism based upon “class-based or economic grievances.” (The term has not appeared in any previous assessment.)

The assessment doesn’t define what it means by “class-based or economic grievances.” The phrase could as much refer to an angry MAGA Midwesterner as it could any Mamdani-supporting urban dweller. But the focus is clear: the main threat to the “homeland,” DHS thinks, is the American people.