The Terrorism and Targeted Violence (T2V) in the United States project reported on LinkedIn on March 25 that their program was terminated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Housed at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, the T2V project seeks to provide the homeland security community with data and analysis on violent events occurring in the U.S. and its territories. These are events that have a significant impact on public safety, the security of critical infrastructure, and access to vital community services.
The following is reprinted with permission from Terrorism and Targeted Violence (T2V) in the United States:
Statement on DHS’ termination of the T2V project
March 25, 2025
It is with great disappointment that we report that the Department of Homeland Security has notified us of its intent to terminate the Terrorism and Targeted Violence (T2V) in the United States project. T2V was developed in direct response to the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence Implementation Plan, and the White House’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism, all of which direct the department to collect comprehensive data on attempted and successful terrorism and targeted violence events that occur in the United States and its territories. The T2V dataset was the only publicly available source of information that allowed homeland security professionals, law enforcement, school administrators, prevention practitioners, and policymakers to analyze the scope and nature of terrorism and targeted violence in the United States. It served as a critical resource for developing an evidence-based response to the contemporary threat. While the University of Maryland is appealing DHS’s decision and hopes to continue the work, the outcome is ultimately up to the federal government.
We are incredibly proud of what we were able to achieve in the short time we had. In under a year, we were able to compile the first-ever dataset that merged terrorism events with premeditated hate crimes, school-based targeted violence, workplace violence, grievance-motivated public mass violence, and attacks on critical infrastructure and key community services. We made these data available on our website 10 months ahead of schedule because we understood the importance of the data to the people who are working every day to keep U.S. communities safe. In its short lifespan, the public data produced new (and alarming) insights on the threat that terrorism and targeted violence pose to everyday Americans:
- Over the two years spanning 2023 and 2024, more than 1,800 terrorism and targeted violence events occurred in the United States (nearly 3 events per day), impacting more than 900 cities.
- Nearly 400 people lost their lives in these attacks, and more than 700 others were injured.
- Approximately 400 of these incidents targeted U.S. schools, and the 81 successful attacks that occurred at educational institutions killed dozens of children.
- The data reveal that grievance-motivated mass violence—a type of public safety harm that has been understudied and virtually ignored by the homeland security community—is the deadliest form of targeted violence in the United States.
- The data show that there is a growing intersection of terrorism, hate crime (especially anti-Semitism), and school-based mass violence—something that state and local law enforcement are neither trained nor prepared to detect and counter.
- The data illustrate that older age cohorts are increasingly committing terrorism and targeted violence crimes, highlighting the inadequacies in our prevention programs which disproportionately focus on juveniles.
Unfortunately, the T2V data indicate that the terrorism and targeted violence threat is growing. Just days prior to receiving the notice of intent to terminate the project, our team had completed incident identification for the first two months of 2025, and we found a 25% increase in events over the same period in 2024. With this decision, we will now have to cease our efforts to help DHS fulfill its legal obligation to collect data on terrorism and targeted violence events in the United States. This also means we will not be able to continue holding our quarterly webinars with DHS and its interagency partners to brief them on the evolving nature of the threat and the areas where they need to adapt. We will not be able to move forward with plans to use the data to train more than 15,000 state , local, and territorial law enforcement officers on the contemporary threat landscape. We will no longer be able to help prevention practitioners design evidence-based programs, or help the federal government evaluate the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI) for its applicability to targeted violence. Finally, we are greatly concerned about what this means for public safety moving forward.
To all the students who reached out about using the T2V data in your theses and dissertations, we are sorry that we will no longer be able to support your projects. We very much wanted T2V to be a foundation upon which the next generation of scholars could make breakthrough discoveries about how best to keep American communities safe. To all the students who have helped us compile the data and to those who applied to work with us this summer, thank you for your enthusiasm for the project and eagerness to contribute to the homeland security mission. While this is a setback for everyone dedicated to stopping mass violence in the United States, we must keep moving forward—the stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.
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