Since the election, there’s been a bipartisan effort in Congress to push legislation that could have a significant impact on nonprofits such as charities, universities, and religious institutions. Last month the House failed to reach the ⅔ majority necessary to pass H.R. 9495, which contains the language from a bill it already passed last April: “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” If either bill eventually passes it would, according to The Intercept: “grant the secretary of the Treasury Department unilateral authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be a ‘terrorist supporting organization.’” While this legislation may seem redundant due to previous policies emerging out of the War on Terror, this new designation expands powers of the security state to surveil and limit the organizing power of the entire American social sector, especially social justice movements.
Unlike a terrorist organization, a terrorist supporting organization is “any organization designated as having provided (during the three-year period prior to its designation) material support or resources to a terrorist organization.” While the recent failure may have been a small win for nonprofits and charities, there remains a strong possibility that H.R. 6408 will eventually pass in the Senate, which was flipped on election day from a Democratic to a Republican majority.
If “terrorist supporting organization” sounds familiar that’s because it borrows the logic of the material support for terrorism statutes that have already been used to prosecute groups that unknowingly or purposely provide material support to terrorist groups. International humanitarian groups have long expressed their concerns about how these statutes limit their ability to provide desperately needed aid to communities in conflict zones where designated terrorist organizations operate.
But these statutes have mostly been used to target Arab, Muslim, and immigrant nonprofits and charities by leveraging Islamophobic and Orientalist stereotypes about shady financial networks and a heightened capacity to be violent terrorists.
In fact, the first nonprofit to be shut down and criminalized through anti-terror legislation was a Palestinian aid foundation. In December of 2001, the Bush administration designated the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. at the time, as a “specially designated terrorist group.”
The Department of Justice argued that the organization’s aid to Palestinians gave Hamas good PR, therefore it supported the group. The FBI then alleged that the HLF “funneled” over $12 million dollars to Hamas under the guise of charity to Palestinians and Palestinian charities (which the U.S. had also been funding).
It took seven years and one mistrial for the HLF’s leadership, dubbed the Holy Land 5, to be convicted of material support for terrorism. In the end, despite vehement and ongoing criticisms from the ACLU, prominent civil rights attorneys, and legal scholars, two of the five received 65-year sentences in federal prison while the other three received between 15-20 years.
Although this most recent legislation was drafted by a Republican congressman in November 2023 to go after Palestine solidarity groups (especially on college campuses), the bill found bipartisan support and was eventually co-sponsored by four Republicans and three Democrats.
Both H.R. 6408 and H.R. 9495 bank on bipartisan suspicions over pro-Palestine groups’ supposedly shady finances, most famously parroted by Nancy Pelosi, who stated that she wanted the FBI to investigate the funding of groups that are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, because, “this is directly connected to what [Putin] would like to see.” What she failed to take into consideration was that some of the very same philanthropic groups supporting Biden’s reelection were also supporting demonized Palestine-solidarity groups.
As recently as September 2024, Palestine Solidarity organizations have been explicitly targeted by Congress and the IRS. Congressman Jason Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, asked the Commissioner of the IRS to investigate and revoke the tax exempt status of Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation (AJP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), along with AMP’s “project,” Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), for allegedly “inciting riots and violence, supporting illegal activity, and conducting other activity contrary to the public good.”
These laws didn’t emerge out of thin air or a sudden turn to authoritarianism, but out of a history of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic anti-terror legislation which has enjoyed bipartisan support for at least two decades. As a second Trump administration comes into power, it isn’t difficult to see how these bills may be used to target vulnerable communities, political opponents, as well as progressive and dissenting organizations just as they have pro-Palestine groups.
