Truthout74%
Trump Under Fire for Diverting Disaster Relief Workers to Immigration Policing 81%
By Mike Ludwig79%
7/16/2026, 1:53:28 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Hasty Generalization, and Confirmation Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 41.8% saturation with 685 hits. Analysis detected 3,512 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,637 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 72% and a BS Rank of 81% (4,306 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 80.30% of the article peer group.
Floods, storms, wildfires, and other disasters can strike in every state and district, and members of Congress in both parties have incentives to improve the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the nation’s premier disaster relief outfit.
However, current FEMA officials in the Trump administration were notably absent from a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing on bipartisan legislation to reform the agency, despite broad support for the bill among Republicans.
During the July 15 hearing, Democrats slammed President Donald Trump for politicizing FEMA by denying federal disaster relief to blue states and diverting personnel and resources to bolster his deadly mass deportation campaign.
Instead of assisting disaster victims, FEMA employees were directed to help immigration enforcement agencies recruit new officers, plan raids and patrols, and process arrestees at notorious prison camps in apparent violation of federal law, according to an investigative report submitted by House Democrats.
Not a single administrator attended the hearing to provide a response on behalf of FEMA or the White House.
FEMA also did not respond to inquiries from Truthout by the time this story was published.
“The politicization of FEMA by the president and his minions is absolutely wrong, and this committee ought to hold the administration to account on that as well as to these other issues,” said Rep.
John Garamendi, a Democrat from California.
“It’s got to stop.”
Hearings on federal agencies virtually always include current administrators alongside expert witnesses, in order to allow Congress to perform its constitutional oversight duties.
FEMA has been a consistent source of embarrassing headlines for Trump, who initially moved to eliminate the agency in 2025 before backing off.
“No one currently working for FEMA is here to talk about how we reform FEMA,” said Rep.
Hillary Scholten, a Democrat from Michigan, where recent floods destroyed homes.
“That’s a critical point.”
Beginning in August 2025, the Trump administration “activated a sustained deployment” of FEMA personnel to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) carry out Trump’s deadly mass deportation campaign across multiple states, according to an investigation released by Democratic Rep.
Greg Stanton of Arizona on July 10.
The deployment followed the deepest reduction of FEMA’s workforce in the agency’s history.
FEMA lost 5,000 personnel since January 2025 as part of the broader purge of federal workers by the White House and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE — but contracts for certain workers were automatically renewed if they agreed to work for ICE and CBP, creating what the report called a “coercive dynamic.”
Flush with cash from Congress, the Trump administration in 2025 engaged in a massive buildout of immigration jails and detention camps to fill with undocumented people while rapidly recruiting thousands of new ICE and Border Patrol agents to conduct violent raids and mass roundups.
One witness quoted in the report described FEMA as the “operational backbone” of Trump’s effort to jail and deport as many noncitizens as possible, telling investigators that “ICE could not have done this work without FEMA.”
FEMA told federal watchdogs its employees assisted ICE and CBP with data entry; operational planning support for arrests, raids, and patrols; and the logistics for managing the “physical flow of detained noncitizens from arrest to deportation,” according to the report.
FEMA has also helped transport personnel from other agencies, and its employees are “physically stationed within detention centers,” the report says.
A spokesperson for the Trump administration pushed back on the report in a statement to the Federal News Network:
President Joe Biden angered Republicans by deploying FEMA to help with the operational response during times when large numbers of migrant children arrived at the U.S. southern border, which may have set a precedent that Trump is exploiting today.
Still, Democrats point out that FEMA was created for such humanitarian work, not law enforcement.
“The people tasked with responding to disasters in the U.S. were diverted to provide support for executing arrests, raids, and patrols for ICE and CBP — the same ICE and CBP that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine, and Silverio Villegas González in my district in Chicagoland, and Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, and others over the last year and a half,” said Rep.
Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Illinois) during the hearing.
The Trump administration’s prioritization of politics over disaster response and preparedness predates the deployment of FEMA personnel described in the report.
For example, a call center supporting a FEMA helpline collapsed due to an expired contract shortly before flash floods claimed dozens of lives in Texas in July 2025, leaving FEMA workers overwhelmed by a spike in calls.
“That meant that disaster survivors, some of whom had just lost everything, were waiting hours and hours all day just to talk to someone, or the phone never got answered at all,” said Abby McIlraith, a FEMA disaster aid manager and whistleblower, in a call with reporters in February.
Trump Politicizes Disaster Aid
Instead of a current FEMA administrator, the Republican-led hearing this week featured testimony from Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator who served during the Obama administration.
Asked about reports suggesting that Trump is denying federal disaster relief to states with Democratic leaders, Fugate said current law does indeed give the president such authority.
“Unfortunately, the law gives discretion to the president and never precluded that,” Fugate told lawmakers.
“Nobody ever anticipated you would [have weaponization] of disaster declarations.”
A Politico analysis released in March found Trump had approved 89 percent of applications for emergency disaster relief from Republican-run states compared to only 23 percent for states with Democratic governors and two Democratic senators.
More recent data collected by the Urban Institute suggest that a community hit by a disaster in a state Trump won in 2024 is more than twice as likely to receive federal aid than a community in a state won by Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Trump recently rejected $227 million in aid requests from four blue states — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island — for help recovering from a major blizzard in February.
However, on June 30, Trump announced more than $846 million in disaster aid for nine GOP-leaning states while lavishing praise on Republican leaders and candidates.
Rafael Lemaitre, a former public affairs director at FEMA who works with the watchdog group Sabotaging Our Safety, said Trump clearly denied aid to the four blue states for partisan reasons, and one week later, “not a single administration official showed up to answer for it” at the House hearing.
“If the White House believes its record is defensible, it should send someone to defend it,” Lemaitre told Truthout in an email.
“Until then, Congress should draw the obvious conclusion: disaster relief cannot be left to the political whims of any president.”
The Push to Fix FEMA
Lemaitre and Fugate support the FEMA Act of 2025, bipartisan legislation considered by the committee that would streamline disaster relief payments and make FEMA an independent, cabinet-level agency.
Along with ICE and CBP, FEMA is currently part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was ousted from that role in March after mishandling funds and delaying relief to communities struck by natural disasters, including deadly flash floods in Texas last summer.
Immigration agents under her purview also perpetrated multiple high-profile killings while she was in office.
Although the FEMA Act of 2025 would remove FEMA from under the DHS umbrella, the bill would not change decades-old rules that require state governors to ask the president for an emergency disaster declaration in order to receive federal aid.
Still, as a high-ranking member of the president’s cabinet, the FEMA director would have major influence over disaster declarations and be shielded from the political influence of DHS, which has become Trump’s preferred vehicle for meting out state violence.
Like other cabinet members, the FEMA director would be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
FEMA has seen a rotating cast of leaders under Trump and remains without a congressionally confirmed director.
In May, Trump nominated former acting administrator Cameron Hamilton for the role after firing him in 2025 for publicly disagreeing with the president’s proposal to abolish the agency.
However, Hamilton did not attend the July 15 hearing.
Trump replaced Noem as DHS director with Republican Sen.
Markwayne Mullin earlier this year.
Along with Trump’s aggressive purge of federal workers and slashing of agency budgets, Fugate said Noem and her controversial adviser Corey Lewandowski created a climate of fear and inertia at FEMA during the first year of the new Trump administration.
“People at FEMA were so scared in the first part of the administration with the way the secretary operated that it was paralysis,” Fugate said during the hearing, pointing to Noem’s policy of personally approving expenditures over $100,000.
“Of all the damage that occurred in that first part, I’d say it was the morale and fear at FEMA [among] just people doing their jobs.
It has more impact than people realize.”
A group of FEMA whistleblowers who warned that Trump’s disaster policies put the nation in danger were suspended last year before having their jobs reinstated this spring ahead of hurricane season.
“If you are going to cut staff you can cut stuff — [but] not the way they did it,” Fugate said, in reference to the mass firings the Trump administration conducted last year.
Fugate said morale is likely improving at FEMA under new leadership.
However, FEMA has yet to be tested by a major, large-scale disaster during Trump’s second term.
“The answer is an independent, cabinet-level FEMA, so that whether a family gets help after a flood or a fire never again depends on how their state voted,” Lemaitre said.
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