One 12 months out of faculty and with no obvious nationwide safety experience, Thomas Fugate is the Division of Homeland Safety official tasked with overseeing the federal government’s important hub for combating violent extremism.
By Hannah Allam for ProPublica
When Thomas Fugate graduated from faculty final 12 months with a level in politics, he celebrated in a social media put up concerning the thrilling alternatives that lay past campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket capturing into area.
His profession blastoff got here shortly. A 12 months after commencement, the 22-year-old with no obvious nationwide safety experience is now a Division of Homeland Safety official overseeing the federal government’s important hub for terrorism prevention, together with an $18 million grant program supposed to assist communities fight violent extremism.
The White Home appointed Fugate, a former Trump marketing campaign employee who interned on the hard-right Heritage Basis, to a Homeland Safety function that was expanded to incorporate the Heart for Prevention Packages and Partnerships. Generally known as CP3, the workplace has led nationwide efforts to forestall hate-fueled assaults, faculty shootings and different types of focused violence.
Fugate’s profile image on LinkedIn.
Fugate’s appointment is the most recent shock for an workplace that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White Home and commenced remaking nationwide safety to provide it a laser give attention to immigration.
Sometimes, individuals acquainted with CP3 say, a candidate that inexperienced wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior place, a lot much less be employed to run operations. In response to LinkedIn, the majority of Fugate’s management expertise comes from having served as secretary normal of a Mannequin United Nations membership.
“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” mentioned one counterterrorism researcher who has labored with CP3 officers for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”
Up to now seven weeks, a minimum of 5 high-profile focused assaults have unfolded throughout the U.S., together with a automobile bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. In opposition to this backdrop, present and former nationwide safety officers say, the Trump administration’s determination to shift counterterrorism sources to immigration and go away the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”
“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official mentioned.
The destiny of CP3 is one instance of the fallout from deep cuts which have eradicated public well being and violence-prevention initiatives throughout federal businesses.
The workplace’s mission has modified in a single day, with a pivot away from specializing in home extremism, particularly far-right actions. The “terrorism” class that framed the company’s work for years was abruptly expanded to incorporate drug cartels, a part of what DHS staffers name an overarching message that border safety is the one mission that issues. In the meantime, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.
ProPublica despatched DHS an in depth checklist of questions on Fugate’s place, his lack of nationwide safety expertise and the way forward for the division’s prevention work. A senior company official replied with an announcement saying solely that Fugate’s CP3 duties had been added to his function as an aide in an Immigration & Border Safety workplace.
ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate by means of DHS and the White Home, however there was no response.
By way of intermediaries, ProPublica sought to talk with CP3 workers however obtained no reply. Speaking is dangerous; tales abound of Homeland Safety personnel present process lie-detector assessments in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.
Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from present and former Homeland Safety personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work intently with the workplace and have at instances been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on situation of anonymity for concern of reprisal from the Trump administration.
In these circles, two important theories have emerged to clarify Fugate’s uncommon ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z marketing campaign employee with a resume-boosting title that comes with little actual energy as a result of the workplace is in shambles.
The opposite is that the White Home put in Fugate to supervise a pivot away from conventional counterterrorism lanes and to steer sources towards MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border safety tasks earlier than ultimately shuttering operations. On this state of affairs, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”
DHS didn’t handle a ProPublica query about this characterization.
Rising MAGA Star
The CP3 homepage boasts concerning the workplace’s consultants in disciplines together with emergency administration, counterterrorism, public well being and social work.
Fugate brings a special qualification prized by the White Home: loyalty to the president.
On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to 9 years in the past, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”
Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin earlier than graduating magna cum laude a 12 months in the past with a level in politics and legislation from the College of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photographs and different public info from the previous 12 months chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.
Beginning in Could 2024, photographs present a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first marketing campaign, a bid for a delegate spot on the Republican Nationwide Conference in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy sweet and a flier with a photograph of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property. Fugate received an alternate slot.
The following month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Membership 47 fan group in West Palm Seashore. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sun shades.
Fugate on the Republican Nationwide Conference.
Posts within the run-up to the election present Fugate spending a number of weeks in Washington, a time he known as “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican conference, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in photographs with MAGA luminaries comparable to former Cupboard Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
By late summer time, Fugate was posting from the marketing campaign path as a part of Trump’s advance workforce, pictured at one cease standing behind the candidate in a crowd of younger supporters. When Trump received the election, Fugate marked the second with an emotional put up about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”
“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.
In February, the White Home appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration workplace at Homeland Safety. He assumed management of CP3 final month to fill a emptiness left by earlier Director Invoice Braniff, an Military veteran with greater than twenty years of nationwide safety expertise who resigned in March when the administration started chopping his workers.
In his last weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the workplace’s achievements, noting the dispersal of almost $90 million since 2020 to assist communities fight extremist violence. In response to the workplace’s 2024 report back to Congress, lately CP3 grant cash was utilized in greater than 1,100 efforts to establish violent extremism on the neighborhood degree and interrupt the radicalization course of.
“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he introduced his resignation.
In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate is aware of concerning the fundamentals of his function and likened conferences with him to “career counseling.” DHS didn’t handle questions on his degree of expertise.
One grant recipient known as Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback within the transfer towards evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a area nonetheless reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.
“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee mentioned. “Now that’s all gone.”
Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico having fun with a whirlwind entry to Washington. The issue, they are saying, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier remedy of an workplace that was funding work on pressing nationwide safety considerations.
“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Safety official mentioned. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”
Season of Assaults
Spring introduced a burst of extremist violence, a development analysts concern might lengthen into the summer time given infected political tensions and the disarray of federal businesses tasked with monitoring threats.
In April, an arson assault focused Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” 4 days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State College campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile image for a gaming account.
Assaults continued in Could with the obvious automobile bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the one fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs towards life and procreation. A couple of days later, on Could 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the battle in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides exterior a Jewish museum in Washington.
Associated | How Trump has left the combat towards extremist violence to the states
June opened with a firebombing assault in Colorado that wounded 12, together with a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the discharge of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s prices embody a federal hate crime.
If assaults proceed at that tempo, warn present and former nationwide safety officers, cracks will start to look within the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.
“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” mentioned the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.
Contradictory alerts are popping out of Homeland Safety about the way forward for CP3 work, particularly the grant program. Staffers have instructed companions within the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out one other funding cycle quickly. The CP3 web site nonetheless touts this system as the one federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” towards terrorism and focused violence.
However Homeland Safety’s price range proposal to Congress for the following fiscal 12 months suggests a bleaker future. The division beneficial eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”
The previous Homeland Safety official mentioned the choice “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”
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