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 SPLC. “There were 56 hate crime prevention programs around the country, including a number from [the SPLC’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
In 2023, when the SPLC first designated October as Hate Crimes Awareness Month, the FBI released its hate crime reporting statistics for 2022 that showed its highest level ever of reported hate crimes, 11,634. In 2024, that number rose to 11,862 for the 2023 calendar year.
New data released in August, covering 2024, shows a slight decrease, to 11,679 incidents. Though not another record, it is still the second-highest number of hate crimes recorded in a single year.
What’s worse is that, while all crime reporting to the FBI is voluntary, hate crimes are hugely underreported. For starters, only 16,419 of the more than 19,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. reported their statistics to the FBI. Of those, 81% of the agencies affirmatively reported zero hate crimes — even though more than 50 of those agencies serve populations of 100,000 people or more.
That underreporting, Lieberman said, is particularly prevalent in the SPLC’s five-state footprint across Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
“When we’re talking about hate crime awareness and response, our states really need improvement,” Lieberman said. “The entire state of Mississippi reported eight hate crimes — the lowest number in the country. That does not seem credible.”
2024 FBI Hate Crime Statistics Act Report
(published August 2025)
Of the 11,679 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2024:
- 5,866 were on the basis of race
- 3,004 against Black people
- 797 against Latinx people (the second-highest figure ever recorded)
- 408 against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
- 137 against Arab Americans (the highest figure ever recorded)
- 2,783 were on the basis of religion
- 1,938 against Jewish people (the highest figure ever recorded)
- 228 against Muslims
- 1,950 on the basis of sexual orientation (the second-highest figure ever recorded)
- 463 on the basis of gender identity (the second-highest figure ever recorded)
The SPLC 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), almost 250,000 hate crimes occurred each year between 2005 and 2019. The BJS bases its estimate not on the Uniform Crime Reporting Program data collected from law enforcement agencies but rather on its annual National Crime Victimization Survey, 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 SPLC 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 empowers advocates and community members to push back against discrimination, 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 SPLC’s Learning for Justice team also publishes democracy building and inclusive education 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 SPLC.