A federal judge blasted leaders inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency for not following his order blocking Donald Trump’s administration from tying disaster relief funds to federal immigration enforcement.
Rhode Island District Court Judge William Smith had ruled last month that Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security could not require states that receive FEMA funds to assist with federal immigration enforcement.
Despite the court’s order, FEMA sent out grant letters that included the same immigration enforcement conditions Smith’s ruling had blocked.
The letters said that if the injunction were “stayed, vacated, or extinguished,” the conditions would immediately take effect.
Smith, however, wrote in a scathing order that the requirement’s “fig leaf conditional nature” made little difference and did not represent a good faith effort to comply with the earlier ruling.
“It is a ham-handed attempt to bully the states into making promises they have no obligation to make at the risk of losing critical disaster and other funding already appropriated by Congress,” he wrote.
“No matter how confident defendants may be of their chances on appeal, at present, the contested conditions are unlawful,” he added.
The states that brought the suit have a right to accept the awards without any regard to DHS’s immigration enforcement operations, the ruling said, and must receive new award letters within seven days without any references to immigration enforcement operations.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Besides the immigration enforcement scandal, FEMA has come under fire for bottlenecks and delays since Noem implemented a policy requiring her to personally sign off on purchases of more than $100,000.
When deadly floods hit Texas over the summer, Noem waited days to sign off on funding to deploy search and rescue teams, and thousands of disaster relief calls when unanswered because she hadn’t renewed the contract with call centers.
Republican Sen. Ted Budd has also complained about being unable to reach Noem’s office to get funding authorized to rebuild in North Carolina from last year’s devastating Hurricane Helene.
Instead of reviewing the policy, Noem has been focused on uncovering the identities of more than 150 staffers who anonymously signed an open letter warning that FEMA would not be able to properly respond to natural disasters thanks to the administration’s drastic cuts and additional red tape.
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