This is the final installment in a three-part series detailing the potential abuses inherent in President Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7. Please read the earlier posts here and here.
President Trump issued a memorandum in September 2025 aimed at suppressing political dissent. The document, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), directs law enforcement agencies to turn some of their most powerful tools against the administration’s political opponents.
NSPM-7 instructs the Justice Department to activate joint terrorism task forces and, along with the Department of Homeland Security, to prioritize funding for state and local police investigations. In other words, law enforcement officers across the country have been given orders and money to find and punish people and groups espousing an assortment of disfavored views — from “anti-Americanism” to “extremism on matters of migration” — under the banner of fighting domestic terrorism.
Joint Terrorism Task Forces
Joint terrorism task forces bring together various federal agencies and state and local police. There are some 280 such task forces around the country. They are well-resourced with nearly 4,400 members and work across jurisdictions. Assigning NSPM-7 implementation to them not only shows the administration’s determination to investigate dissent as terrorism, but also unlocks counterterrorism investigative tools and databases for this pursuit.
These FBI-led task forces allow the Trump administration to aim counterterrorism resources at its political opponents. FBI Director Kash Patel recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the greatest domestic terrorism threats come from three categories of actors: anti-government violent extremists, nihilistic violent extremists, and racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists. These groups match those highlighted in NSPM-7.
The bureau has long identified antifa as an example of the anti-government threat. But that category can be stretched to fit other activity targeted by NSPM-7, such as opposition to ICE. The nihilist threat, first articulated in 2025, aligns with NSPM-7’s description of threats from people who want to prevent “the functioning of a democratic society.” The third category, racially or ethnically motivated violence, has historically meant white supremacists and the like, but nothing in this administration’s approach to race suggests that this is its concern.
And the rules governing FBI investigations make it all too easy for its joint terrorism task forces to focus on First Amendment–protected activity. After 9/11, these rules were loosened to allow agents to open investigations without even a hint of criminal conduct so long as they can claim an authorized purpose, such as detecting a threat to national security. My Brennan Center colleagues have shown how this opens the door to fishing expeditions against disfavored groups or viewpoints. Even before NSPM-7, these task forces repeatedly drifted into monitoring First Amendment–protected activity, prompting several cities to reconsider or withdraw from them.
Joint terrorism task forces were built up to improve coordination against serious terrorist threats, but the FBI’s expansive threat categories and low standards for opening investigations mean that they can be deployed against ideological and political opponents as well. And because these task forces include state and local police, they too become part of the administration’s campaign against its critics.
Fusion Centers
NSPM-7 also directs the government to make domestic terrorism a national priority and to steer grant funding to state and local law enforcement partners to “detect, prevent, and protect against threats arising from this area.” The fusion center network, created after 9/11, provides a ready-made vehicle for drawing state and local authorities into the administration’s campaign against the left. The FBI has already started training these centers on NSPM-7. And recent DHS funding guidance “strongly encourage[s]” states to spend terrorism grants on fusion centers so they can carry out the administration’s domestic anti-terrorism agenda, which sweeps in constitutionally protected activity.
Created after 9/11, the 80 or so fusion centers around the country are intelligence hubs that knit together federal, state, and local law enforcement as well as a host of other agencies. Unlike joint terrorism task forces, they are run by state or local governments and don’t investigate cases or make arrests. The premise is that police may encounter terrorism-linked information in the course of their normal work, which fusion centers can funnel up to the federal government. At the same time, the federal government supplies threat intelligence that shapes what fusion centers look for. This information pipeline, along with federal money and the federal personnel embedded in fusion centers, makes them a ready tool that can be turned toward whatever the federal government decides to treat as a threat.
In the two decades they have been in operation, fusion centers have not demonstrated much in the way of counterterrorism value. But they have routinely cast protest and dissent as a security threat. Initially, fusion centers focused primarily on Muslim Americans, reporting their get-out-the-vote campaigns and lawful lobbying efforts as potential threats. More recently, the racial justice protests that followed the killing of George Floyd prompted multiple fusion center reports about protesters. The Austin fusion center trawled social media for events organized by Black Lives Matter activists, reporting on a Juneteenth celebration, a meditation circle, and candlelight vigils for victims of police violence. Northern California’s pushed out bulletins on Black Lives Matter rallies. Boston’s fusion center monitored social media for protest-related hashtags, such as #BlackLivesMatter.
As my Brennan Center colleagues have shown, fusion centers operate under standards that encourage the production and dissemination of these types of low-quality intelligence reports that focus on First Amendment–protected activity, much of it innocuous. Longstanding rules for federally funded state intelligence programs bar collecting information without reasonable suspicion of a crime and specifically forbid collecting information on political, religious, or social activity unless it directly relates to criminal conduct. The DOJ told fusion centers to use a lower standard and report information that is “reasonably indicative of criminal activity associated with terrorism,” which can be as vague as taking photographs, observing buildings, and even just asking questions. Fusion center reports, regardless of their quality, are widely disseminated to police departments and are uploaded to a web of interconnected federal, state, and local data systems accessible to thousands of users. Erroneous or misleading reports that cast suspicion on innocuous activity spread across the system, where they can influence police around the country.
Fusion centers were designed to generate and share information across every level of law enforcement, with little regard for whether it relates to an actual threat or merely captures people’s ordinary speech. These qualities are exactly what make them useful to the Trump administration: They provide a channel for pushing the administration’s priorities down to local police and funneling information they collect back to federal agencies.
Terrorism Prevention
As it implements NSPM-7, the administration is also resurrecting aspects of countering violent extremism (CVE), a long-discredited approach that its predecessors used to identify people supposedly on the path to terrorism before they act.
CVE is premised on the idea that people display identifiable warning signs as they move towards terrorism, and that trained observers — teachers, counselors, religious leaders, police — can spot those signs and intervene before violence occurs. It is an appealing idea. It is also, as Brennan Center research has shown, mostly targeted at minority communities and empirically flawed. During the Obama administration, law enforcement, academics, and a variety of nonprofits were funded to develop programs aimed mainly at identifying Muslim Americans who might be on the trajectory towards terrorism. These programs often used religiously coded risk indicators that promoted bias (e.g., mosque attendance, concern about anti-Muslim discrimination). These markers were eventually replaced by vague risk factors, which included social isolation and a sense of grievance, that are shared by millions of people who never harm anyone. Even federally funded studies have recognized that there are no unambiguous early indicators of future violent behavior.
