A shooting at San Diego’s largest mosque that left at least five people dead on Monday, including the suspected perpetrators, is being investigated as a possible hate crime linked to white supremacist extremism, according to local authorities.
The two male suspects, aged 17 and 18, were found in a car and appear to have died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Mark Remily, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Diego Field Office, said Tuesday that the pair met online and shared a “broad hatred” toward different religions and races. Experts say the incident comes amid a backdrop of rising Islamophobia in recent years.
In its annual civil rights report published this year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it received 8,683 civil rights complaints in 2025—the most in a single year since its first report in 1996. That number is up from 8,658 in 2024 and 8,061 in 2023.
Read More: What We Know About the Shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego
Corey Saylor, research and advocacy director at CAIR, says complaints rise almost every year, except in 2022, when they dropped. Five states—Oklahoma, Illinois, Florida, Minnesota, and Texas—have all seen increasing complaints over the last three years.
“Unfortunately, Islamophobia remains at all-time highs,” he tells TIME.
These complaints come in many different forms—some are hate crimes, others are incidents of discrimination in the workplace. CAIR found 33 incidents explicitly targeting Islamic institutions—including mosques, Islamic community centers, or other spaces self-identified as a Muslim place of worship—in 2025.
Hate crimes against Muslims in America have often surged as a response to conflict—including following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Israel’s war in Gaza.
“In late 2023 through 2024, what we really saw is that events overseas seem to be driving Islamophobia here,” Saylor said. In 2025, though, his research found there was a pivot to a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment among elected officials.
The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, released a report last month that documented a 1,450% surge in anti-Muslim social media posts by Republican elected officials from February 2025 to March 2026.
“Islamophobia is an acceptable form of hate in the United States,” Saylor says. “A large number of elected officials, whether it be Randy Fine from Florida, Keith Self or Chip Roy, both from Texas, have smeared Muslims.”
CAIR has previously called for the resignation of Fine, a Republican representative, for his anti-Muslim social media posts, including a post on X in February, which read: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
President Donald Trump has also been accused of Islamophobia for implementing a ban on immigration from Muslim countries in his first term, and for remarks about Muslim communities in his second, including his attacks on the Somali community in Minnesota.
“These people come from a crooked country, disgusting country, one of the worst countries in the world,” Trump said of Somali Americans in March. “They come to our country – low IQs – and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind.”
“President Trump attacked an ethnicity [in Minnesota]—the Somali community—which is majority Muslim, but I would argue to you that’s because after the ‘Muslim ban’, when they learnt you can’t go after a religion, but you can go after ethnicities, they’ve become very good in describing communities that way.”
U.S. counterterrorism focuses on left-wing extremism
Despite rising Islamophobia and similarly high levels of right-wing terror attacks, the Trump Administration has focused much of its anti-terror and anti-extremism strategy on left-wing and Islamist violence.
In response to high-profile political violence—including the killing of Charlie Kirk and the assassination attempts on Trump’s life—the President has turned his focus to “radical left” groups who he claims are stoking the fires of partisanship and political violence in America.
But according to research released in September 2025 by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, 79 people have been killed by political violence in the United States from 2020 to September 2025. Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders, some 54%, Islamists account for 21%, and left-wing terrorists for 22%.
A separate analysis in September 2025 by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that right-wing extremists were much more lethal; in the last decade, right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people, compared with 35 attacks and 13 deaths attributed to left-wing extremists. While CSIS found that left-wing extremism has escalated, specifically since Trump’s first term in office began in 2017, the group emphasizes that it is rising “from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.” Still, the Trump Administration’s recently announced counterterrorism strategy identifies three “major types of terror groups”: narco-terrorists and transnational gangs; Islamist terrorists; and violent left-wing extremists. Right-wing terrorism is not discussed in the new strategy, a significant shift from the Biden Administration, which placed an emphasis on the threat of far-right and white supremacist ideologies linked to domestic terrorism.
The post San Diego Mosque Attack Comes Amid Rising Islamophobia appeared first on TIME.
