U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks to the media outside the White House in Washington, DC. U.S., January 15, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
America faces significant threats to our nation's infrastructure from hostile actors like Russia, China, and others. But a leaked security threats assessment from President Donald Trump's administration says the greatest threat America faces is within its own borders, according to a new report.
Each year since 2020, the Department of Homeland Security has published a Homeland Threat Assessment, a report that describes the specific threats America faces. A lot of the usual suspects are present: crime, drug gangs, illegal immigration, and so on. But a new crop of characters appeared in this year's report, which has not yet been made public, according to independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Klippenstein received a leaked copy of the report, which now focuses on terrorism stemming from “class-based or economic grievances.”
"The phrase could as much refer to an angry MAGA Midwesterner as it could any Mamdani-supporting urban dweller," Klippenstein wrote in a new Substack essay. "But the focus is clear: the main threat to the 'homeland,' DHS thinks, is the American people."
The threat assessment was leaked at a time when tensions between the public and DHS are at an all-time high. Recently, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer named Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, 37, a mother in Minneapolis, Minnesota, while she was driving away from an immigration raid in her car.
Good's killing sparked protests and outrage directed at DHS. Secretary Kristi Noem did her department no favors when she doubled down on defending Ross's actions, even after eyewitness accounts and testimony disproved her claims.