Ex-New York Police Division Chief Terry Monahan on Thursday slammed Donald Trump for slashing hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in federal counterterrorism funding to the division simply weeks after the twenty fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 assaults.
“Taking this money away, it endangers Americans all across this country, I find it has a catastrophic-type touch,” mentioned Monahan in an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur. “It really puts all Americans in trouble.”
Monahan’s feedback arrive after a federal choose quickly blocked the Trump administration on Tuesday from slashing $187 million in funding for the state from the Homeland Safety Grant Program, which was launched within the aftermath of the 2001 terror assaults.
New York, 10 different states and the District of Columbia sued the Division of Homeland Safety on Monday in hopes of restoring the funding, pointing to Trump’s day one push for DHS to withhold such cash from states and cities with “sanctuary” jurisdictions that don’t fall consistent with his mass deportation agenda.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), in a press launch, referred to as it “utterly shocking” that the administration could be “walking away from the fight against terrorism in the number one terrorist target in America.”
Pacific Press through Getty Photographs
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch mentioned the division is about to lose about $80 million in federal counterterrorism funding, calling the transfer a “profound mistake” in a time of “global conflict and surging threats.”
“To be blunt, this is the difference between a city that prevents the next attack and a city left exposed to it,” she mentioned in a press convention on Wednesday.
Monahan — who served as NYPD chief from 2018 to 2021 — pointed to NYPD numbers that mentioned counterterrorism operations prevented 71 terror plots for the reason that 9/11 assaults, including that a number of the thwarted plans have been tied to different U.S. cities in “red and blue” states alike.
Because the twenty fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches subsequent 12 months, Monahan mentioned taking federal counterterrorism funding away from the nation’s largest municipal police drive is “absolutely wrong.”
Within the years since 9/11, town has seen a number of different assaults together with a 2022 subway mass taking pictures, a lethal truck-ramming assault on a Manhattan bike path in 2017 and a 2016 bombing within the metropolis’s Chelsea neighborhood.
