(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) It was revealed that the University of Maryland center that the Biden administration funds labeled a pro-life group as a “terrorist” organization.
The project that was created by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, purportedly tracks “ideologically motivated criminal activity” and known “extremists” through 2021, the College Fix reported.
However, the leftists who created the database added two Students for Life of America (SFLA) members to the university’s research database, “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States,” or PIRUS, after they were arrested for writing “black pre-born lives matter” on a sidewalk in 2020.
In addition to that, the organization appears under a “Terrorist_Group” label in the raw dataset.
National security expert and former Department of Homeland Security agent Elizabeth Neumann told the news source that the labeling was inappropriate.
In 2020, Neumann resigned from the Trump Administration and accused it of failing to act against domestic terrorism, particularly “right-wing extremists,” the Fix reported. That same year, she criticized Donald Trump and endorsed Biden.
START’s portrayal of pro-lifers does not resemble how the DHS typically views “radicalization” in any political camp, she told the news source.
“We didn’t have a great definition, so we wanted to clear it up, what we were trying to prevent, which was violent thought,” she said, adding that an act of “vandalism” by college students would not have been a concern.
She also claimed that the DHS tracked violent extremism on “both sides” of the abortion issue during her term, even though START’s study has “anti-abortion extremism” as a category with no pro-abortion equivalent.
A former Deputy Assistant Attorney General and the University of California Berkeley Law professor John Yoo who helped shape counterterrorism policy at the Department of Justice also thought START’s terminology is overly broad.
“We are very concerned about government-funded programs engaging in viewpoint discrimination as they attempt to insinuate that there may be future harms from peaceful pro-life people,” SFLA spokesperson Kristi Hamrick said.
START was created by the DHS in 2005 as one of several “Centers of Excellence” at universities, often sharing its data with “homeland security professionals,” its website said.
The Fix additionally reported that the research center is currently working on expanding the PIRUS database with new funding from the DOJ.
