Now ICE Is Raiding FEMA
There’s a Bible verse often deployed by clergy encouraging their flocks to tithe: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” It’s sometimes quite true in government as well as in church. And we are seeing a really graphic demonstration of where both hearts and wallets reside in the Trump administration right now, as the Washington Post reports:
The Department of Homeland Security has reassigned dozens of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help vet and process new hires for the government’s mass deportation initiative. …
[F]ive current and former FEMA officials said losing that many people, even for a few months, will greatly slow operations while the already much-reduced agency is juggling multiple ongoing disaster declarations, including the historic Texas floods.
The term you hear often these days about FEMA is that it’s a “ghost town” with an awful lot of key staffers accepting buyouts and/or taking other jobs, which isn’t surprising given the malice toward the agency often expressed by its two ultimate bosses, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump. Right now the administration is engaged in a real gamble as summer-disaster season ripens, hoping hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and other calamities don’t get out of hand and/or that states can pick up the slack while Team Trump figures out what to do with FEMA and its responsibilities. It could all work out in the long run, but right now is a strange time to send FEMA staff over to ICE — at least until you grasp how incredibly important mass deportation is to these birds. As Allison Quinn recently explained, the new ICE recruitment campaign the diverted FEMA staffers will work on is a frantic, white-hot priority:
The Department of Homeland Security this week rolled out an Uncle Sam–themed website and a “Defend the Homeland” initiative offering a $50,000 signing bonus to “heroic Americans” who join Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “deport criminal invaders” and “save America,” as senior White House adviser Stephen Miller put it. …
More than $4 billion from the government spending bill signed into law this month was allocated for the hiring and training of up to 10,000 new ICE agents. ICE received the biggest windfall of all federal law-enforcement agencies from the bill, with its annual budget set to soar from $8 billion to about $28 billion.
Just today Noem announced DHS was abolishing the traditional age limit on service as an ICE agent; now officially no one is too old or gray to wear a mask, bust heads, and smash people’s car windows. The urgency of it all was underlined by DHS spox Tricia McLaughlin when the Post asked about the ICE raid on FEMA staff: “[T]hrough the One Big Beautiful Bill, DHS is adopting an all-hands-on-deck strategy to recruit 10,000 new ICE agents.”
So if you’re a storm-tossed family or a devastated community who could use a hand from FEMA, consider it your patriotic chore to deal with it yourself. There are immigrants to be deported. That’s job one.