By Stephen Montemayor

Minneapolis Star Tribune

A Minneapolis nonprofit that works with Somali youth is rejecting nearly $500,000 in federal counterextremism funding, citing “an unofficial war on Muslim-Americans” launched by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Ka Joog was one of two local groups selected last month as part of a $10 million “Countering Violent Extremism” grant project run by the Department of Homeland Security.

Mohamed Farah, Ka Joog’s executive director, said late Wednesday that the nonprofit’s board of directors decided to decline $499,998 in funding — one of the biggest awards announced in the country and easily the largest grant Ka Joog would have received. Heartland Democracy, which ran the nation’s first rehabilitation program for a terrorism defendant, was also selected to receive $165,435. Both organizations applied under the focus of “developing resilience,” one of five areas outlined when the department announced the grant in July.

Ka Joog, in a prepared statement, said its board believed that its efforts to bring change have “been hindered by the Trump administration to instill fear, uncertainty and anti-Muslim sentiments.”

“In order for Ka Joog to continue building community, it requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization and injustice that leads us to behave in way that perpetuates more divisions,” Said Farah, whose relative Abdirizak Warsame was one of nine men sentenced last year in connection with a conspiracy to join the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant in Syria.

Farah has also worked with the local Somali-American Task Force created as part of a local pilot project managed by the U.S. attorney’s office.

Ka Joog’s announcement followed a Reuters report that counterextremism efforts under Trump would be recast to focus solely on terrorism inspired by radical Islamic groups and not far right domestic extremists, who have carried out bombings and mass shootings across the country. The report also cited sources who said that the CVE funding, announced a week before Trump’s inauguration, may now not be awarded to any groups.