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U.S. Put Environmental Group on ‘Extremist’ List With Nazis: Report

A DHS report includes at least two racist murderers—and five people accused of turning off an oil pipeline.

The Department of Homeland Security has included a group of anti-pipeline activists in a list of “extremists,” alongside white supremacists and murderers, The Guardian reports. The group, called the Valve Turners, consists of five members accused of turning off oil pipes in four states in 2016. Two members were convicted, in a trial that saw prosecutors liken them to the Unabomber and al Qaeda. Three other members were acquitted after a judge dismissed charges against them. Nevertheless, DHS reportedly listed the group alongside extremists like Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine black church-goers in a 2015 massacre, and James Fields, a neo-Nazi who killed one person and injured more than a dozen others when he drove a car into a crowd at a 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The “extremist” classification, revealed as the result of a Freedom of Information Request by the group Property of the People, came shortly after the U.K. was revealed to have placed the environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion on a similar list. Both classifications have prompted backlash from members of the environmentalist and anti-extremism communities, with anti-extremism experts saying the lists wrongly conflated environmental activism with terrorist ideologies.