Eksklusif: Di dalam upaya pemerintahan Trump untuk mendiskualifikasi kelompok Muslim dari hibah keamanan | Politik berita

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Follow Top brass at the Department of Homeland Security approached the Federal Emergency Management Agency this spring with a proposal: What if the agency blocked millions of dollars in security grants awarded to Muslim organizations around the country?

The suggestion of a blanket ban left the FEMA leaders bewildered and deeply concerned, and they immediately pointed out such a proposal could be considered discriminatory and even illegal, according to three sources with knowledge of the episode who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal.

While the DHS officials didn’t give a reason for disqualifying Muslim groups when they floated the idea, the Trump administration at the time was in the throes of dramatically downsizing the federal government.

Ultimately, the idea was dropped.

But six months later, dozens of those Muslim organizations have been stripped of their eligibility for security funds that help protect against hate crimes and extremist attacks after DHS and the Department of Government Efficiency alleged that the groups have ties to terrorism.

Five FEMA insiders — including those with knowledge of the proposal to block the funds — describe those allegations as questionable, given the standard vetting the groups undergo and the unusual circumstances that led to their loss of funding.

Some suggested that the allegations of terror ties, which they said came with little evidence, may be a pretext to justify the cuts.

DHS, which oversees FEMA, denied to Berita that the department ever considered imposing a blanket ban on Muslim organizations receiving these security grants.

“DHS and FEMA do not make policy decisions on the basis of religion,” a DHS spokesperson wrote in a statement.

“Such claims are ludicrous and deeply unserious.” The spokesperson said FEMA has been conducting an internal review of its grant recipients for months and has terminated funding to select groups found to have links to “terrorism or terrorist activities.” But sources who spoke to Berita say the efforts to block funds from Muslim organizations raise questions about equal treatment in federal grant programs and demonstrate the disproportionate impacts that the sometimes-chaotic attempts to reshape the US government can have.

Several Muslim organizations contacted by Berita flatly denied any links to terrorist groups, suggesting they were singled out for political reasons.

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) said its FEMA security grant was abruptly rejected this summer with no explanation.

Sources and internal documents obtained by Berita reveal that, behind the scenes, DOGE spearheaded efforts to block funding from dozens of groups — including ISNA — citing ties to terrorism.

“We absolutely deny these allegations,” ISNA Executive Director Basharat Saleem told Berita.

“This type of baseless information is very detrimental for civil society and for organizations that are doing good work.” Controversy over grants At the center of the dispute is FEMA’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which provides funding for security upgrades such as surveillance cameras, bulletproof glass and security guards to thousands of nonprofit organizations, most of them religious institutions considered more vulnerable to hate crime attacks.

In 2024, Congress injected an additional $400 million into the program amid a surge in both antisemitism and Islamophobia fueled by division over the ongoing war in Gaza.

The funds were aimed at bolstering protections specifically for Jewish and Muslim institutions like synagogues, mosques, community groups and cultural centers.

After Trump took office, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ordered FEMA to pause almost all of the agency’s grants, including these security grants, for officials from DHS and DOGE to carry out a sweeping “manual review” of the spending.

FEMA grant funds totaling billions of dollars were effectively frozen as a result.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a hearing with the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, on Capitol Hill in May.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images/File By Spring, officials from DOGE and DHS were in discussions with FEMA leaders about unlocking the security grants, the three sources told Berita.

The administration was facing pressure from outside lobbying groups to expedite the release of funds to Jewish nonprofits, multiple sources said.

However, resuming the program would have potentially awarded money to Muslim organizations as well.

So, in April, senior officials at DHS asked FEMA leadership how Muslim groups could be disqualified from receiving the funds, the sources told Berita.

“I think they were worried about the optics of giving money to Muslim organizations,” one of the sources who heard the proposal firsthand told Berita, adding that a blanket ban would be “totally illegal and improper.” The FEMA leaders emphasized to DHS officials that the organizations had already been vetted and approved and should not lose their eligibility and potentially millions of dollars in funding.

The conversations seemed to fizzle as FEMA leaders pushed back, warning DHS officials that a blanket ban of Muslim groups could cause significant legal and public blowback, the sources said.

As the conversations were taking place and these grants were paused, thousands of nonprofits representing a wide range of faith groups – not just Muslim organizations – were waiting for the security funds to be approved, two of the sources told Berita.

Among them: the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, where a gunman killed a young Jewish couple in May in what authorities called an antisemitic attack.

In late Spring, some of the funds were unlocked.

DHS announced the first batch of nonprofit national security grants for 512 Jewish organizations in June, which included the Capital Jewish Museum, a source told Berita.

No Muslim nonprofits were included in the announcement.

Muslim groups lose funding Around this time, scores of Muslim organizations, at DOGE’s direction, were quietly disqualified from the program.

DOGE officials embedded inside DHS claimed to have intelligence indicating that more than 100 of these previously approved organizations had ties to terrorist groups, according to sources and documents reviewed by Berita.

The officials said the intel came from someone outside the agency but didn’t specify the origin.

The White House, which oversees DOGE, referred Berita’s request for comment to FEMA.

Again, officials inside FEMA were alarmed by the orders, saying they saw no clear evidence linking the nonprofits to terrorist entities.

One source, a long-time FEMA official, questioned the unspecified outside intelligence cited by DOGE.

“Everything about it seemed wrong,” the official said.

“This felt like a manufactured narrative designed to justify excluding Muslim organizations from funding.

What had always been an apolitical, risk-based grant process suddenly looked politicized in a way we’d never seen before.” The person said they had never witnessed government agencies taking “an overt action or effort to implement a blanket prohibition like we saw earlier this year” against Muslim groups — not even after 9/11, when they felt “‘Islamophobia’ was at an all-time high.” In a statement to Berita last week, DHS confirmed that it stripped funding from certain organizations, saying it did so after an internal review uncovered links to terrorism.

A spokesperson said FEMA used “resources including the Office of Intelligence and Analysis and law enforcement” to determine that “multiple grant subrecipients had supported or were affiliated with organizations or individuals associated with terrorism or terrorist activities.” DHS said the department has improved its vetting process but declined to provide a full list of groups that lost eligibility and did not specify what new information led to their disqualification.

The seal of the US Department of Homeland Security, outside the Nogales-Mariposa port of entry on the US-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona, in February.

Rebecca Noble/Bloomberg/Getty Images The department did not respond to questions about DOGE’s involvement.

The longtime FEMA official cast doubt on the validity of the department’s internal review given that previous administrations didn’t flag these organizations, some of which had received funds for years.

“How did they not catch this during the first Trump administration?” the official asked.

“The real question is, what has changed to prevent these types of organizations from being approved again?” An outside group and disputed ‘terror’ claims Around the time that Muslim nonprofits were stripped of their grants, an outside group – the right-wing think tank Middle East Forum – also raised allegations about terrorist ties.

The forum published a lengthy report claiming DHS and FEMA have been distributing millions of dollars each year to dozens of Muslim organizations with alleged ideological and monetary ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The pro-Israel Middle East Forum has been criticized by various groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and Center for American Progress.

Some have accused it of spreading anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian views, and of backing policies that unfairly target Muslim communities in the name of national security.

Defenders argue that its efforts are aimed at confronting extremist political Islam, not the religion.

After the report’s publication, DOGE circulated it to FEMA staff, instructing them to ensure that none of the nonprofits named would receive funding, according to two sources.

Once again, FEMA leaders were concerned, questioning the so-called evidence in the report.

“If you read the report, it’s rather shallow on facts,” a former high-ranking FEMA official said.

In July, a DHS spokesperson sent Berita a statement touting the department’s effort to withhold funding from “groups with questionable ties.” When Berita asked for specifics, the spokesperson pointed to the Middle East Forum report and a Fox News story that claimed DHS had cancelled dozens of grants in the wake of the think tank’s findings.

But now, DHS insists the think tank wasn’t involved in the department’s funding cuts.

In an email last week, a spokesperson said FEMA staff have “methodically reviewed” grant recipients for months – “well before” the forum published its report.

Muslim groups respond Several organizations named in the Middle East Forum report have been under scrutiny for years, said Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

“I’m not suggesting that these are terrorist supporting organizations, but if they have questionable views and ties, I think that’s fair to say, and I think the bar of what entities the government should be supporting should be set higher,” Vidino said.

“Some of the entities in the report are well-known, not just to the academic community, but to law enforcement, as being problematic.” Still, Vidino added that each case should be considered individually, and that funding should be withdrawn only if there is clear evidence.

More than half a dozen groups named in the Middle East Forum report contacted by Berita denied the think tank’s allegations, pointing to what they described as the forum’s long history of Islamophobic rhetoric.

The Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, which MEF claimed is “arguably one of the most prominent outposts for radical Islam in North America” said this was “a complete lie,” adding: “Whatever the hate that some people are spewing against Islam or the Muslim community, we cannot stop them.” A Quran and and an American flag are seen on a podium at Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, in March 2019, before the start of a vigil for victims of an attack on a mosque in New Zealand.

Sait Serkan Gurbuz/Reuters/File Criticisms of Dar Al-Hijrah date back more than a decade, when the Northern Virginia mosque was accused of hosting terrorists, including the 9/11 hijackers.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, labeled in the report as an “extremist group” with alleged ties to Hamas, pushed back forcefully against the report’s claims.

It also warned that if DHS is quietly blacklisting organizations without thoroughly vetting accusations — whether from DOGE, the Middle East Forum, or others — it marks a deeply troubling erosion of due process.

“The government cannot ban American Muslim nonprofit organizations from receiving federal grants because of their religious identity” or other political reasons, CAIR said in a statement to Berita.

“Doing so places American Muslim institutions at increased risk during a time of rising hate.” The Middle East Forum did not reply to Berita’s request for comment, but it has publicly stood by the details of its report, urging Congress to implement permanent vetting and transparency reforms.

In August, the group’s director warned: “MEF is watching — whether the money is intended for foreign aid, public education, or homeland security — and we will not rest until every last cent allocated to terrorist-aligned groups is returned to American taxpayers.” Jenna Monnin and Deja Oliver contributed to this report Federal agencies National security Terrorism DOGE See all topics Facebook Tweet Email Link Link Copied!

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