Boston was one of the first cities involved in an Obama administration initiative aimed at preventing terrorism, but locally it has had another unintended effect.

Under the pilot project launched five years ago, known as Countering Violent Extremism or CVE, several federal agencies sought the support of leaders in schools, mental and public health, law enforcement and religion. Together, the Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, FBI and National Counterterrorism Center have teamed to fund community programs, such as classes for parents and programs for teenagers.

Two CVE grants have gone to Boston organizations that focus on the city's Somali population. Their participation has sown divisions within the local Somali community and prompted debates among its members about how much they can trust their government. Suspicions have lingered among local Somalis about the true purpose of the anti-extremism program along with uncertainty about its scope and even its funding level.

The federal government claims this program helps to prevent the conditions that can lead to radicalization. When announcing the program in 2014, Eric Holder, then attorney general, said the program intends, “ultimately, to build a broad network of community partnerships to keep our nation safe.”

Local critics don't buy it.

“Essentially CVE extends surveillance into sectors that have been previously thought to be safe, such as education and health services,” said Shannon Al-Wakeel, executive director of the Muslim Justice League, which was founded to fight CVE.

Al-Wakeel said she suspects grants have been given to local groups in exchange for information on their communities, particularly on Muslim communities.

“The major problem is that it’s based on junk science,” Al-Wakeel said. “There actually are no identifiable factors about who is going to become a quote-unquote extremist.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts has also spoke out against the program. “We are certainly concerned about people’s First Amendment rights to freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of association,” said Rashaan Hall, director of the state ACLU's Racial Justice Program.

Hall said, at its inception, CVE was rooted on profiling people and communities because of their beliefs and ethnicity--not because they’ve done something wrong.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the initiative, did not respond to requests for comment. Its website, however, explicitly says CVE is not about gathering intelligence.

For years, officials have squared off against activists, debating exactly what CVE is and – even – whether the program is being expanded or cut under the Trump administration. In 2016-2017, $10 million in grants were distributed nationwide, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Some local Somalis say their community needs more CVE funding. Others say the whole program must be ended. Both sides agree the federal initiative has exacerbated existing rifts in their community that can be traced back to factions in the Somali civil war.

Tension Within Boston’s Somali Community

In a brick building in Roxbury, the Somali Development Center is tucked away down a maze of hallways. For 22 years, it has been helping refugee families make a new home in Boston.

The center helps Somalis learn English, find housing and get jobs. But Abdirahman Yusuf, the center's executive director, said they do something else too.

“If the family has teenagers or young people, we will have an informal discussion and give them whatever tools they need to make sure their children are safe and that they are not being recruited by any bad people online,” Yusuf said.

Pointing to a terrorist attack in 2008, when Somali-Americans from Minnesota went back to Somalia to commit terrorism there, Yusuf said the community needs the assistance.

“Twenty Somalis blew themselves up,” Yusuf said. “We wanted to make sure that doesn't happen again.”

The center used to have regular workshops, funded by a $65,000 grant from CVE in 2016, for parents of teenagers. In the classes, Yusuf said, parents learned about warning signs that their children might be going down a bad path. “People really appreciated it,” he said.

Yusuf said the workshops were popular, but the center didn’t get a grant to continue the program. Still, he is hoping to see more CVE funding flowing to the community.

The same year the Somali center received CVE funding, a larger grant, $500,000, went to a program run by the Police Foundation that brought together Somali youth and members of the Boston Police Department. The BPD did not respond to requests for comment, and the Police Foundation declined an interview.

Yusuf said, when his grant was active, he did send monthly reports back to the government. But he said it included only general information, such as how many people attended each workshop. He insisted it was not a surveillance program: “If it was, I wouldn’t be involved.”

While Yusuf calls CVE grants helpful, Nasteho Ali calls them sinister. She is the youth coordinator at the African Community Economic Development of New England or ACEDONE, another organization that serves Boston’s Somali population.

“To be offered money but then weigh that possibility: Is it worth feeding into a narrative or rhetoric that's going to only harm us more?” Ali said.
She said many teenagers she knows have been offered $60 to take a survey that, she believes, originated with a CVE grant.

“These surveys would have questions: Are you in a gang? Do you feel violent? Are you very religious?” Ali said. “So very leading questions and, in that way, they would collect data on these kids.”

Ali said this feeling of being profiled has undermined her community’s ability to trust elected officials and law enforcement. And, she said, it has deepened rifts within her community:

“There are already divisions among the Somali community. People are afraid of each other and blaming each other for the civil war,” Ali said. “And now the government is coming in with another program, creating more divisiveness because some organizations are taking it, others are condemning it."

While acknowledging the rifts, Yusuf of the Somali Development Center, who received a grant, does not think CVE is to blame.

“Maybe some people who, for whatever reason, don't like the Somali Development Center – maybe it is such a successful organization, and they are jealous – they talk talk talk,” Yusuf said. "But people do that kind of stuff."

Building Trust?

Carmen Ortiz helped launch CVE five years ago when she was the US Attorney for Massachusetts. She said the federal government was not targeting Somalis in Boston.

“I would say that they probably had the best proposals and were the best prepared to use those funds,” said Ortiz, who helped develop the framework before the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services distributed the grants.

Ortiz said the program was interested in everything from preventing people from joining ISIS to stemming the growth of white supremacist groups.

She strongly denied the allegation that CVE is a surveillance program: “There's probably always going to be surveillance going on, but that's not part of CVE."

While Ortiz was well aware that the program had initially inspired debate, she said she was surprised to learned that some members of the Somali community are still upset about CVE five years later.

"I think that it just means that some people are going to have a certain perception that is difficult to overcome," she said.

Ortiz stands behind the original goals. “Part of CVE is to prevent violence," she said. "And you prevent violence by building trust.”

Some Somalis in Boston says the Countering Violent Extremism program has done the opposite, undermining trust instead. What's certain is that the initiative has inspired a debate about exactly how much members of that community can trust the government--and anyone who takes its money.