On Monday, The Dispatch Fact Check assessed claims that FEMA spent disaster relief funds it could have used to help victims of Hurricane Helene on housing for illegal immigrants—a claim we found to be false. While FEMA does provide funding grants to nonfederal entities to provide services to immigrants, those funds are appropriated separately from the agency’s disaster relief fund (DRF).
Following the widespread accusations, additional claims emerged that, during the Trump administration, funds from FEMA’s disaster relief fund were diverted to address immigration issues. “No, Biden didn’t take FEMA relief money to use on migrants—but Trump did when he took $38 million from FEMA’s disaster fund to use to house migrants during hurricane season in August 2019,” says one post, citing an article by Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post. “No, Joe Biden did not take money from FEMA to pay for housing for illegal immigrants. … But Donald Trump DID!”
This claim is true, though the transfer was relatively small. In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) redirected funds from several of its agencies, including from FEMA’s disaster relief fund, to support efforts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to expand immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations.
In August 2019, the DHS ordered the transfer of $116 million to ICE to “fund ICE single adult detention beds and transportation,” and a further $155 million to “establish and operate temporary Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP) Immigration Hearing Facilities along the Southwest border,” according to a report from the department. The DHS claimed that the transfers would allow it to “address ongoing border emergency crisis by alleviating the surge along the Nation’s Southwest Border while minimizing the risk to overall DHS mission performance.”
The DHS’s initial notification document indicated that $155 million of these transfers would come from FEMA’s disaster relief fund, with the rest being pulled from other DHS agencies. However, the actual amount transferred from the DRF appears to have been significantly less and was not anticipated to diminish FEMA’s disaster response capabilities for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ended only one month later. FEMA appropriations summary reports from August and September 2019 indicate that $38 million was redirected from its disaster relief fund to ICE, representing approximately 6 percent of the fund’s base budget. The transfer amounted to an even smaller 0.09 percent of the DRF’s total fiscal year 2019 budget when funding for major disaster declarations and predisaster mitigation are included.
The transfer did not end up impacting FEMA’s operational capacity in 2019—the DRF carried over approximately $29.4 billion of its FY 2019 funding into FY 2020, including $505 million in base funding.
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