New information that emerged Thursday night has raised further questions about the role of local police and the FBI in the lead-up to Monday’s neo-Nazi terrorist attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, in which three Muslim men were murdered and roughly 140 children narrowly escaped death.

More than a year before Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, carried out the massacre, Chula Vista police filed an emergency gun violence protective order and moved to confiscate weapons from the home of Vazquez’s father, Marco Vazquez. According to court records reviewed by major news outlets, the January 2025 order stated that Caleb Vazquez had been involved in “suspicious behavior idolizing Nazis and mass shooters.”

The order stated that Marco Vazquez and his wife, Lilliana, owned 26 firearms, including Glock pistols, rifles and shotguns. In response, Marco Vazquez told authorities that the weapons had been placed in a storage facility, that the family had increased supervision of their son and that he had been placed in therapy. Authorities have since said they recovered 30 firearms and a crossbow from residences connected to the shooters.

Court records also indicate that Caleb Vazquez had previously been placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold. Separately, Bloomberg reported Thursday that Vazquez had been the subject of a 2025 FBI eGuardian alert. The eGuardian system is used by federal, state and local police agencies to flag suspicious activity and potential threats, with reports reviewed through the FBI’s counter-terrorism apparatus and Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

In other words, police at every level were aware, well before the attack, that at least one of the eventual shooters was immersed in Nazi ideology, mass-shooter worship and violent threats. This makes the refusal of law enforcement officials to clearly characterize the attack politically all the more significant.

At a press conference following the shooting, FBI Special Agent Mark Remily claimed the manifesto expressed “various ideologies” and that the “subjects did not discriminate on who they hate.” This formulation was calculated to blur what was obvious from the facts already available: the attack was carried out by neo-Nazis animated by the same “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that has become a central element of Republican and far-right politics.

The manifesto, social media material and symbols associated with the attack were not politically incoherent. They were saturated with fascist, racist and anti-Muslim hatred. The attackers’ worldview reduced all the problems of capitalist society to anti-immigrant and neo-Nazi filth about immigrants supposedly coming to the United States to take jobs, replace whites and “outbreed” them.

The deliberate vagueness of the police and FBI is aimed at covering up the social and political forces that cultivated this ideology. The anti-immigrant politics they espoused were nourished in a political climate dominated by the Trump administration, the Republican Party and a layer of billionaires, with Elon Musk foremost among them, who have promoted the same anti-immigrant and white supremacist conceptions in order to divide the working class along racial and national lines.

This political cover-up goes hand in hand with the continuing refusal by the San Diego police to provide a full accounting of what happened after Cain Clark’s mother called police Monday morning to warn them that her son had stolen her car, left with a friend, taken several of her weapons, left what appeared to be a suicide note and was wearing camouflage fatigues.

Clark’s mother reportedly called police at approximately 9:40 a.m., giving them the license plate number of the stolen vehicle. This should have provided police with the basic information needed to locate the car. San Diego, like thousands of other cities, towns and villages across the United States, uses Flock automated license plate reader cameras integrated with police databases. While such systems are routinely justified as tools for finding stolen cars or missing persons, they have also been used for far more sinister purposes, including abortion-related investigations and immigration kidnapping operations.

Despite having the license plate information, police apparently failed to locate the vehicle until after the killings had begun. Nor does it appear that police warned the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in the county, that at least one violent neo-Nazi was on the run, heavily armed and dressed in camouflage.

More than three days after the shooting, San Diego police have still not provided the public with a detailed timeline of their response. They have acknowledged only that officers were dispatched to a local mall and to Madison High School, where Vazquez had previously wrestled, while the shooters proceeded to the mosque and opened fire.

The new information demonstrates that the police were deliberately concealing the political motivation behind the mass shooting in order to cover for, and advance, the lies promulgated by the Trump administration: that the greatest “domestic terrorist” threat comes not from fascists and neo-Nazis, but from left-wing, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist opposition.

This was codified in National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, issued by Trump in September 2025. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, NSPM-7 is “a fascist blueprint for mobilizing the entire repressive apparatus of the American state—the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), State Department, Treasury, and the military—against all political opposition on the left.” The memorandum “brands anti-fascism and opposition to capitalism as ‘domestic terrorism,’” while remaining “silent on right-wing political violence.”

The same framework was deepened in the Trump administration’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy, drafted under the direction of White House counterterrorism director and fascist Sebastian Gorka. That document identifies three central targets: “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” The WSWS noted that “actual armed organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda are placed in the same category as those who oppose fascism and advance left-wing, socialist or anarchist political views,” while the document makes “no reference to ‘right-wing’ or fascist terrorism.”

The San Diego massacre exposes the fraud of this framework. The immediate terrorist threat did not come from anti-fascists, socialists or opponents of capitalism, but from neo-Nazis steeped in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory promoted throughout the far right and normalized within official politics. The police and FBI response after the attack, blurring the shooters’ ideology as a mixture of “various ideologies,” served to conceal the fact that the real fascist danger is cultivated within the orbit of the American ruling class itself.