Leaked Doc: Homeland Security's Domestic Terror Obsession
Forget Greenland; the American public are the real target
Despite Donald Trump’s fixation with Greenland and the suggestion that military action is imminent, the 2026 Homeland Threat Assessment, a draft of which was leaked to me, focuses instead on domestic terrorism.
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 reference to first appears in the executive summary, in a section summarizing public safety threats. Per the assessment:
“Of threat actors with ideological motivations, domestic violent extremists in recent years have been the most active plotters. They are motivated to conduct attacks by a wide range of factors, including anti-government sentiment, racial and ethnic grievances, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic beliefs, and class-based or economic grievances … The threat from US-based individuals inspired by foreign terrorist organizations has also risen to its highest level in five years, fanned by the ongoing Israel-HAMAS conflict and a resurgence in English-language terrorist media.”
The term again appears a second time in the full section on public safety threats.
“In recent years domestic violent extremists have been the most active terrorist attackers and plotters, and we expect this will remain the case in 2026. They are motivated to conduct attacks by a wide range of factors, including anti-government sentiments, racial and ethnic grievances. anti-Israel and anti-Semitic beliefs, and class-based or economic grievances.”
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.
The threat assessment is broken into four sections: Border and Immigration Security, Critical Infrastructure Security, Threats to Economic Security, and Public Safety and Security.
The latter section emphasizes the administration’s obsession with domestic terrorism, saying it has been and will remain the leading terrorist threat. Examples it cites include the assassinations of a Minnesota legislator, two Israel Embassy staffers in Washington, DC, as well as various attacks on ICE facilities and personnel.
“In recent years domestic violent extremists have been the most active terrorist attackers and plotters, and we expect this will remain the case in 2026,” the assessment says.
In contrast, foreign terrorist groups like ISIS are said to “have a diminished capability.”
Further bolstering the government’s new obsession with “domestic” terrorists, the assessment also says that foreign terrorists are attempting to cross the border at the lowest rate in decades. And when it comes to migrants, the number of “encounters” with foreign terrorists at the border are said to be at an historic low.
As the Department of Homeland Security sees it, 2026 is a year when southern border immigration as an issue takes a back seat in the Trump administration’s national security focus on North America and the Western Hemisphere.
But not Greenland. The closest the Trump administration’s 2026 assessment comes to even mentioning the Arctic nation and other northern ‘threats’ to the Western Hemisphere is one reference to China’s “stranglehold of rare earth minerals,” the very stone age war that Donald Trump has become so obsessed with.
The assessment does mention the ongoing aggressive actions against alleged drug boats, Venezuelan tankers and the usual kitchen sink list of perennial threats — gangs, human smuggling, weapons trafficking, transnational criminal organizations, small drones, money laundering, small drones, cyber threats, technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and on and on.
But what makes this still secret assessment really stand out is the certainty with which it states that the greatest “area of considerable concern to us in the coming year is the threat of mass casualty attacks and targeted violence.” From the World Cup to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, homeland security is preparing for the “threat.”
That threat is you.
Subscribe so you don’t miss a big story we’re working on about the Pentagon’s ‘contingency plans’ for Greenland
— Edited by William M. Arkin
"That threat is you."
The paranoid style of American politics is a long-standing tradition.
As in the Red Scares of the past, and earlier witch hunts.
It was inevitable that the apparatus built up for a global war on terror would be turned on natives and citizens, legal or not, given the cupidity and stupidity of its proponents.
This assessment assumes that the American people have finally come to realize it's time to throw off their shackles. Is anyone else seeing any sign of this?