Black Activists have been unnecessarily monitored by Top Government Agencies

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Federal agents and local police agencies once suspected that Black activists protesting police brutality might join ISIS and commit violence abroad, according to documents obtained by a government transparency group and shared with The Intercept.

In 2014, when Black protestors took to the streets in cities across America to lambast police violence against unarmed civilians, secretly law enforcement officials monitored protestors’ online footprint to ensure they didn’t link up with Islamic fundamentalist groups. The monitoring proved fruitless as police were unable to find any evidence that this was occurring.

READ MORE: Body camera footage revealed showing white man hurling racist slurs at a group of young Black activists

Still, documents obtained by Property of the People and shared with The Intercept, show that Department of Homeland Security officials and reps with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence went there, and even trumped up the importance of some isolated social media posts and searches, which were made primarily by foreign account holders, and sought to find a connection between community activists against police brutality in the United States and global terrorism.

For example, in intelligence reports and internal messages that were shared at the same time of the community protests in Ferguson, Missouri and the Baltimore protests after Freddie Gray died in custody, DHS officials worried that the Islamic State might attempt “to use the situation in Ferguson as a recruitment tool” or call on “Baltimore rioters to join them,” according to The Intercept.

And a year later, in July 2016, after Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police sparking nationwide protests, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an internal memo to monitor a situation where a single, foreign Facebook user who was pro-Al Qaeda might attempt to reach out to Black protestors and urge them to “take up arms” and “start armed war against the US government,” The Intercept reported.

And then the FBI designated a separate domestic terrorism category – “Black Identity Extremist” – and essentially warned that Black activists could become domestic terrorists.

READ MORE: ACLU Sues FBI For Sealed Documents That Label Black Activists A Domestic Threat

But nothing surfaced. In fact, critics argue that even perusing this route is indicative of how law enforcement has become out of touch and has inherent Black and Muslim biases.

“They try to make it more scary, it’s like, ‘If we link Islam to it, and we link Muslims to it, then people will see this as a real threat, because nothing is scarier than Muslims,’” Umar Lee, a St. Louis activist who is Muslim, told The Intercept. “Nothing is scarier than, ‘Hey, if the Muslims get together with these scary black dudes, then we got a real problem, so we need every resource available to stop this.’”

Omar Farah, a senior staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, told The Intercept that the messaging is dangerous. The Center launched a lawsuit against the FBI and DHS to get them to release details about its information-gathering of Black activists.

“Blackness and Muslim identity have been cast as threatening since America’s founding,” Farah said in an interview with The Intercept. “No surprise, then, that these documents reveal near obsessive fear of their intersection.”