Trump Officials Twisted Data About Terrorists, Lawsuit Claims

(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration used a bogus terrorism study to prop up its anti-immigrant agenda by claiming most offenses are committed by foreign nationals, a pair of advocacy groups claim in a lawsuit.

The suit, filed Monday in federal court in Oakland, California, alleges the January report by the the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security used unreliable methodology and violates the little-known Information Quality Act. The organizations that sued, Muslim Advocates and Democracy Forward, want the report retracted.

The advocacy groups claim it isn’t true that 73 percent of people convicted of international terrorism offenses in U.S. federal courts from 2001 to 2016 were foreign-born. When the report was released, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called it "an indisputable sobering reality" that proved the U.S. immigration system "has undermined our national security and public safety."

According to the complaint, the DOJ study ignores domestic terror incidents, analyzes incidents involving foreign-born Americans rather than foreign nationals, includes people extradited to the U.S. for committing terrorism overseas and relies on "irrelevant and debunked" data about “honor killings” and violence against women.

"The administration’s analysis mangles the facts in order to fabricate a threat posed by immigrants, particularly those of Muslim background -- in an effort to promote the administration’s extreme and anti-Muslim immigration policies," the advocacy groups said Tuesday in a statement.

DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores declined to comment.

To contact the reporter on this story: Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Paul Cox, Peter Blumberg

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