Shooting at San Diego Mosque Occurs Against Growing Wave of Islamophobia

(SeaPRwire) –   Authorities are investigating a shooting at San Diego’s largest mosque, which left at least five people dead on Monday—including the alleged perpetrators—as a potential hate crime connected to white supremacist extremism.

The two male suspects, aged 17 and 18, were discovered in a vehicle and appear to have died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Mark Remily, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Diego Field Office, stated Tuesday that the individuals met online and shared a “broad hatred” toward various religions and races.
Experts note the attack occurred against a backdrop of increasing Islamophobia in recent years.

In its annual civil rights report released this year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported receiving 8,683 civil rights complaints in 2025—the highest number in a single year since the organization began publishing reports in 1996. This figure marks an increase from 8,658 in 2024 and 8,061 in 2023.

Corey Saylor, CAIR’s research and advocacy director, says complaints have risen nearly every year, with the exception of 2022, when they declined. Over the past three years, five states—Oklahoma, Illinois, Florida, Minnesota, and Texas—have all recorded growing numbers of complaints.

“Unfortunately, Islamophobia remains at all-time highs,” he told TIME.

These complaints take many forms—some constitute hate crimes, while others involve workplace discrimination. In 2025, CAIR documented 33 incidents specifically targeting Islamic institutions, including mosques, community centers, or other spaces identified as Muslim places of worship.

Hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. have historically spiked in response to global conflicts—such as after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Israel’s war in Gaza.

“From late 2023 through 2024, what we observed was that overseas events appeared to be fueling Islamophobia domestically,” Saylor said. However, his research indicates that in 2025, there was a shift toward growing anti-Muslim sentiment expressed by elected officials.

The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, published a report last month showing a 1,450% increase in anti-Muslim social media posts by Republican elected officials between February 2025 and March 2026.

“Islamophobia has become an acceptable form of hate in the United States,” Saylor said. “Numerous elected officials, including Florida’s Randy Fine and Texas representatives Keith Self and Chip Roy, have engaged in rhetoric smearing Muslims.”

CAIR has previously called for the resignation of Representative Fine over his anti-Muslim social media activity, including a February post on X stating: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

President Donald Trump has also faced accusations of Islamophobia for enacting a ban on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries during his first term and for making inflammatory remarks about Muslim communities in his second term, including targeting the Somali community in Minnesota.

“These people come from a crooked country, disgusting country, one of the worst countries in the world,” Trump said in March about Somali Americans. “They come to our country – low IQs – and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind.”

“President Trump targeted an ethnicity in Minnesota—the Somali community, which is predominantly Muslim—but I would argue that after the ‘Muslim ban,’ when they learned they couldn’t openly attack a religion, they became adept at framing their rhetoric around ethnicities instead.”

U.S. counterterrorism focuses on left-wing extremism

Despite escalating Islamophobia and similarly high rates of right-wing terrorist attacks, the Trump Administration has largely centered its anti-terrorism and anti-extremism efforts on left-wing and Islamist threats.

In reaction to high-profile acts of political violence—including the killing of Charlie Kirk and assassination attempts on Trump—the President has shifted attention toward “radical left” groups, whom he accuses of inciting partisanship and political violence across the country.

Yet research published in September 2025 by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that 79 people were killed by politically motivated violence in the U.S. between 2020 and September 2025. Right-wing terrorists were responsible for more than half of those deaths—about 54%—while Islamists accounted for 21%, and left-wing terrorists for 22%.

A separate September 2025 analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) revealed that right-wing extremists have been significantly more lethal: over the past decade, they carried out 152 attacks in the U.S., resulting in 112 deaths, compared to 35 attacks and 13 fatalities linked to left-wing extremists. Although CSIS noted an uptick in left-wing extremism—particularly since Trump’s first term began in 2017—the group stressed that such violence remains “at very low levels and is still far below historical levels of violence perpetrated by right-wing and jihadist actors.”
The Trump Administration’s recently unveiled counterterrorism strategy outlines three “major types of terror groups”: narco-terrorists and transnational gangs; Islamist terrorists; and violent left-wing extremists. Notably absent from the strategy is any discussion of right-wing terrorism—a marked departure from the Biden Administration, which emphasized the danger posed by far-right and white supremacist ideologies in the context of domestic terrorism.