The U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent more than $25 million to extremist groups with ties to Islamist terror groups between 2013 and 2023, according to a new report from the Middle East Forum.
Gregg Roman, executive director of the think tank, told JNS that the forum pored over publicly accessible government spending data.
“We matched these grants with extremist groups found in our research archives to identify the misuse of taxpayer dollars on a grand scale,” he said.
“Americans should know that their hard-earned money was allocated to build up security around a luxurious mosque compound in Maryland owned by Turkey’s Islamist government and that mosques in Michigan and Texas that serve as outposts for Iran’s regime were also recipients of DHS funds,” he told JNS.
Some $750,000 in federal grants went “to mosques suspected of operating on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran or its proxies,” according to the report. The report acknowledges that it is not known if the U.S. government ultimately paid the grants, only that it earmarked them in a specific year. (JNS sought comment from the Department of Homeland Security.)
The report, which the forum published on Monday, examines three federal grant programs — the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, Countering Violent Extremism, and the Disaster Relief Fund — from which the extremist groups received funding.
The Nonprofit Security Grant Program is “the greatest source of DHS funding to extremist groups,” as support for the program surged from $10 million in 2012 to $454 million in 2024, per the report.
Hellbound and Down 