The Department of Homeland Security has not published a report highlighting the most “direct, pressing threats” to the U.S. since President Donald Trump took office, as experts accused the department of largely going silent on the dangers at home amid the war in Iran.
National security experts have warned about the lack of communication to the public about potential terror threats on home soil amid the joint U.S.- Israeli military operation in Iran, now in its third week.
Following the war’s outbreak, the U.S. has experienced several acts of violence across the country, including an attack on a Michigan synagogue, a shooting at a Virginia university campus and another shooting at a bar in Austin, Texas.
Despite the attacks, the National Terrorism Advisory has not been updated by Homeland Security officials since last year, nor has the department published the annual Homeland Threat Assessment report during Trump’s second administration, The Washington Post first reported. The last time a report was published by the department was under the Biden administration in 2024.
It comes as 77 percent of U.S. voters in a recent Quinnipiac University Poll said they believed a terror attack was likely in response to the military action in Iran.
The DHS said its officials are actively monitoring the security situation, despite the lack of communication to the public.
The Independent has contacted the department for further comment.
National security experts said it was “shocking” that the department had not issued public alerts in the wake of the violence in the Middle East.
“It’s shocking to me that we haven’t gotten some very specific updates from DHS about the situation in the Middle East and ramifications here in the United States,” Ed Davis, a former Boston police commissioner who led the police department during the Boston Marathon bombings, told the Post. “You need heightened awareness everywhere at this point in time.”
Tom Warrick, a former DHS deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy, told the outlet that “the silence is baffling.”
“The fact that we’re having silence after a series of terrorist attacks cries out for some updated guidance on what’s going on and what people need to do,” Warrick, who is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the newspaper.
The last time the department published an alert on its National Terrorism Advisory System was in June 2025 after war broke out between Israel and Iran. The alert warned of a heightened threat environment in the U.S. because of the conflict, and the warning expired in September.
“The likelihood of violent extremists in the Homeland independently mobilizing to violence in response to the conflict would likely increase if Iranian leadership issued a religious ruling calling for retaliatory violence against targets in the Homeland,” the alert said.
The department has also come under fire from Democrats for prioritizing its mass deportation operation over the wider national security of the country, and redeploying specialist terror tracking teams to work on the anti-immigration sweep instead.
“You redeployed thousands of people responsible for tracking terror financing and fighting cyberthreats to go work on your mass immigration roundup,” Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin told outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a House committee hearing earlier this month.
“Federal law enforcement continues to coordinate directly with local officials and provide critical intelligence to safeguard our nation from terrorist threats,” DHS said in a statement to the Post.
Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt furiously denied a report that the FBI warned California police departments in February that Iran could retaliate against the U.S., if it were to conduct strikes by using drones aimed at the West Coast.
The alert, distributed at the end of February, told law enforcement that the FBI had “recently acquired information that as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United States Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the U.S. conducted strikes against Iran.”
Leavitt said that “no such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did” in a post on X.
