Trump Chose to Hunt Law-Abiding Migrants Rather than Right Wing Terrorists Like Vance Boelter.

It will be some time before we learn whether Vance Boelter, the Trump supporter charged with assassinating Melissa Hortman, could have been stopped if Trump hadn’t dismantled efforts to fight terrorists like Boelter.

But we do know that Trump has done real damage to those efforts.

Start with Kristi Noem’s degradation of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, an office trying to prevent attacks like the one Boelter carried out. Noem’s DHS put a 22-year old with no experience and a day job hunting migrants, Thomas Fugate, in charge of the office designed to fight radicalization.

[T]he 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.

The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.

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The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.

The office’s mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The “terrorism” category that framed the agency’s work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.

ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugate’s position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the department’s prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.

“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”

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But Homeland Security’s budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”

The FBI — another agency that has worked to prevent terrorism , too, has focused on law-abiding migrants instead of right wing terrorists.

As NBC has been tracking, Trump has ordered a significant number of FBI agents to help chase down law-abiding migrants, shifting some away from counterterrorism.

One of the memos says the goal is to have 2,000 FBI agents across the country working full time on immigration enforcement at any one time.

Given that FBI resources are finite, current and former officials say, a significant increase in immigration enforcement will draw agents away from what have long been top FBI priorities, including counterterrorism, counterespionage, fraud and violent crime.

That shift has only intensified as Stephen Miller struggles to find enough migrants to deport to fulfill the false claims about their numbers he dangled during the election.

FBI field offices around the country have been ordered to assign significantly more agents to immigration enforcement, a dramatic shift in federal law enforcement priorities that will likely siphon resources away from counterterrorism, counterintelligence and fraud investigations, multiple current and former bureau officials told NBC News.

The orders, given in a series of memos and meetings in FBI offices this week, come at a time when the Trump administration is proposing to cut 5% of the FBI’s budget, and as the Justice Department is deprioritizing investigations of certain types of white-collar and corporate crime, according to a memo obtained by NBC News.

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One federal law enforcement official estimated that the vast majority of agents were uncomfortable with being a part of the immigration operations, saying ICE doesn’t meticulously plan out arrest operations the way that the bureau does.

“This is not what we do, these are bad ideas,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity citing fear of retaliation. “If this was a Democrat administration, I’d be saying this is bad, we shouldn’t be doing this.”

Even as the manhunt continued for the pro-Trump terrorist, even as Minnesota grieves, Trump posted another Truth Social post adopting the language of Nazis and pitting his ICE goons against “Radical Democrat [sic] Politicians,” stoking yet more violence against them.

Stephen Miller and Donald Trump have made a choice: To hunt law-abiding migrants rather than the Trump supporters gunning down Democrats in their homes.