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The deluge of hate crimes in the U.S. has accelerated in the last few years. But the scariest part of the constant roar of violence and mayhem is the knowledge that a large portion of those acts goes unreported.

That is why the Southern Poverty Law Center has named October as Hate Crimes Awareness Month. A problem unseen cannot be solved, and the elimination of hate crimes in society is necessary if communities are to thrive.

And, under the Trump administration, funding for hate crime prevention has evaporated.

“One of the things that we have to talk about is the work that the administration and the Justice Department have done to restrict violence and extremism prevention programs — and eliminate hate crime prevention programs,” said Michael Lieberman, senior policy counsel on hate and extremism for the �����Խ�. “There were 56 hate crime prevention programs around the country, including a number from [the �����Խ�’s focus states], that were summarily terminated in April because they were perceived to be ‘too woke.’”

While those cuts were being planned and implemented, the headlines continued to roll. Before 2025 was even a few hours old, a man drove a truck into crowds of revelers in the New Orleans French Quarter, killing at least 14 people in what has been called an ISIS-inspired attack.

The war in Gaza has also generated violence on U.S. shores. Two Israeli embassy workers were shot and killed in an attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., in May. In June, a man used a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to attack a peaceful pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado.

And less than two weeks after a Mississippi man was convicted on federal civil rights and arson charges for setting fire to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Wiggins, Mississippi, another man crashed his truck through the doors of a Mormon church in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan. The attacker set fire to the building and opened fire on the congregants inside, killing four people and injuring eight.

Those are just a few of the more widely publicized attacks. Many never break the surface of public discourse, drowned in the constant noise of violence and bloodshed that is the current news cycle.

The need for resources

The �����Խ� is now helping to lead coalition efforts to enact bipartisan legislation that would require hate crime reporting to the FBI.

The president’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget request, released in June, cut a wide path through a swath of programs designed to eliminate hate crimes.

“The Trump administration eliminated funding for the three largest hate crime prevention grant programs,” Lieberman said. “The last year of the Biden administration, there was about $38 million for hate crime prevention initiatives.”

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), . The BJS bases its estimate not on the Uniform Crime Reporting Program data collected from law enforcement agencies but rather on its annual , which samples about 95,000 households. The actual number of hate crimes is likely somewhere between the BJS estimate and the number reported by the FBI.

Identifying hate crimes

Part of the problem in reporting, preventing and prosecuting hate crimes is knowing what they are. According to the FBI’s definition, a hate crime is a violent or property crime — such as murder, arson, assault or vandalism — that is “motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.” The bureau has published its data on those crimes every year since 1991.

Once hate crimes are identified, the task of preventing them looms large. The �����Խ� has developed several initiatives. The annual Year in Hate and Extremism report underscores the harms created by hate and extremism — particularly for Black and Brown communities — and , disinformation and conspiracy theories.

The organization’s Intelligence Project has also undertaken initiatives in conjunction with American University’s Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Laboratory (PERIL) to promote public health prevention approaches, including programs for parents, family members, caregivers and educators to identify and mitigate the effects of online radicalization. 

The �����Խ�’s Learning for �����Խ� team also publishes and resources that serve as another preventative measure to fight nascent radicalization.

Though these tools have had some success, they do not have the reach or bandwidth of a full-throated government effort. And that, it seems, is not going to be happening in the near future. Since taking office, the Trump administration has banned the use of the term “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism” in Department of State communications. Offices and programs across the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State and Department of Justice once dedicated to tracking and identifying terrorist threats before they happened have been gutted, either through budget cuts or layoffs.

William Braniff, for example, who is now the executive director at PERIL, resigned earlier this year as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention, Partnerships and Programs to protest drastic cuts in staffing and available funding for programs to prevent violent extremism.

Whatever the actual number, Lieberman said that eliminating hate crimes requires funding for training, monitoring and community prevention programs.

“Prevention is the most important thing,” Lieberman said. “The 56 hate crime grants that were terminated were part of more than 350 violence prevention grants that were terminated in April, basically on the same day, because they were perceived to be too ‘woke.’ We’re now working to restore those grants – and funding for future prevention programs.”

Image at top: Photo illustration by the �����Խ�.