A Daily Beast Exclusive
The Trump administration was clear: ‘An analysis conducted by DHS’ concluded that 73% of terrorists were ‘foreign-born.’ Except DHS analysts had nothing to do with the conclusion.
By Spencer Ackerman
The document didn’t mince words. It claimed three-quarters of
“international terrorism” convicts were immigrants, an assertion meant
to bolster Donald Trump’s cherished Muslim-focused ban on entering the country.
And the report put the claim in the mouths of an agency assembled to
keep Americans safe after 9/11: the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS).
Working off the 549 federal international-terrorism
convictions tallied by the Justice Department, the document stated: “An
analysis conducted by DHS determined that approximately 73 percent (402
of these 549 individuals) were foreign-born.”
But the Department
of Homeland Security did not perform that analysis. DHS’ analysts did
not contribute to the highly controversial report, The Daily Beast has
learned.
According to a government source familiar with the
episode, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ office took charge of the
report’s assemblage of statistics—which some terrorism analysts consider highly misleading—and sent it to DHS Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen for her imprimatur after it was all but finalized.
“The
Trump administration is trying to turn counterterrorism into an
immigration issue,” said Charles Kurzman of the University of North
Carolina, where he tracks Muslim-American involvement in terrorism.
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