The massacre that left at least 22 people dead and two dozen wounded Saturday in a city that hugs the U.S.-Mexico border will be treated as a domestic terrorism case, but many acts of white nationalism-fueled violence are not classified as such, stoking concerns that the government is not doing all it could to address an increasingly dangerous national security threat.
"There's no domestic terrorism law — we just treat it as either a hate crime or some other sort of criminal charge," said Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. But white supremacists "are following an ideology the same way that other violent extremists that the U.S. designates as terrorists follow ideologies."
Investigators believe the man suspected of gunning down 22 people at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart Saturday posted an anti-immigrant screed on an anonymous extremist message board, citing the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooter who left 51 dead in March, as an inspiration.
In April, a man suspected of opening fire at a San Diego synagogue, killing one person, also posted a note online that was almost identical to one written by the Christchurch shooter. The note, which was full of anti-Semitic language and lauded white supremacy, named the Christchurch shooter and the man accused of fatally shooting 11 people inside a Pittsburgh synagogue as inspirations for the attack.
And less than a week before Saturday's shooting, a 19-year-old man, suspected of killing three people at a Gilroy, California, food festival before killing himself, left a note on Instagram instructing followers to read a 19th-century white nationalist book.
Those attacks followed six worshipers killed at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012; three people gunned down at Jewish community center in Kansas in 2013; and nine slain at a black church in South Carolina in 2015.
Extremist-related murders spiked 35 percent from 2017 to 2018, "making them responsible for more deaths than in any year since 1995," according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Last year, every one of those extremist-related murders was carried out by a right-wing extremist.
Meanwhile, white supremacist propaganda distribution nearly tripled from 2017 to 2018, according to the ADL, which also documented a rise in racist rallies and demonstrations.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018 was also the fourth straight year of hate group growth, culminating in a 30 percent increase overall, "roughly coinciding" with President Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency.
The Justice Department is documenting the same trends. Hate crimes in the country increased by 17 percent from 2016 to 2017, marking the third straight year of a spike in hate crimes, according to an FBI report released last November. More than half of the hate crimes reported in 2017 were motivated by racial or ethnic bias, while anti-Semitic hate crimes jumped by 37 percent.
White Nationalism is on the Rise
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