Last year, in the final months of the Biden administration, the federal government’s internal watchdog agency issued a warning: Thanks to a loophole granted by federal lawmakers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the nation’s immigration enforcement agency, was overspending — at the expense of other federal priorities like disaster relief.
It was a sign of things to come.
As the Trump administration carries out its sweeping immigration crackdown, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is siphoning ever more resources and personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The practice, first implemented in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, further empowered by an Obama-era regulatory carve-out, and cheered on by the organized right, now threatens national preparedness for climate disasters, even as flooding, wildfires, and hurricanes exacerbated by the changing climate threaten millions, from Texas to California.
ICE has been able to acquire these funds thanks to the broad authority that Congress has routinely granted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to reshuffle funds, as well as a decade-old loophole that allows DHS to grant ICE additional money for immigration detention with extremely limited oversight.
Meanwhile, FEMA is being gutted. In advance of the twenty-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Friday, August 29, current and former FEMA workers warned in a letter this week that the disaster relief agency’s capacities have been left “significantly limited” as President Donald Trump takes a sledgehammer to the agency, which he has said he wants to completely dismantle. (More than thirty employees who signed the letter were put on leave on Wednesday.)
For years, internal government watchdogs and outside advocates have warned that ICE has consistently diverted resources from other agencies within DHS, including FEMA. Under Trump, the phenomenon has reached a fever pitch.
The disaster relief agency is now led by a former weapons official with no experience in disaster response or aid. Grant money administered by FEMA was earmarked for “Alligator Alcatraz,” the new immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades now mired in a legal battle, all while the Trump administration tries to freeze the agency’s disaster-response grants. More than one hundred FEMA employees have been “threatened with termination” if they refuse reassignments to ICE amid the latter agency’s massive recruitment campaign.
At the same time, Trump has been wielding FEMA as a political cudgel. Earlier this month, the agency announced it would bar states from receiving disaster aid if they had laws on the books requiring a boycott of Israeli firms. (The Trump administration quickly walked back the guidance, but reserved the authority to enforce the restriction in the future.)
“We’ve seen that in prioritizing mass detention and these sweeping raids, the administration has siphoned funds from emergency services,” Jesse Franzblau, policy director at immigrant rights group National Immigrant Justice Center, testified at a congressional hearing last month. This, he said, “puts communities across the country at risk of devastating disasters.”
It’s a practice with a long history.
Twenty years ago, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, devastating the city of New Orleans. FEMA’s response to the disaster — which saw significant delays in evacuation assistance and food aid to survivors — was widely considered a disgrace; the agency’s chief resigned amid the fallout, and Congress launched an investigation into the matter.
The resulting congressional committee concluded that FEMA had been “systematically dismantled, stripped of authority and resources, and suffering from low morale, in part because of the Department [of Homeland Security]’s focus on terrorism.”
FEMA was once an independent agency, established in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter to centralize federal disaster response and preparedness efforts. But as part of President George W. Bush’s massive reorganization of the federal government following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, FEMA was subsumed into the vast Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The DHS was also charged with overseeing ICE, a new agency that centralized several immigration enforcement authorities.
At different times before this consolidation, presidents had directed FEMA resources toward “counterterrorism” work, including under President Ronald Reagan. But the agency’s mission was fundamentally reshaped under the Department of Homeland Security, with “terrorism response” officially becoming part of FEMA’s mandate.
This left the nation’s national-disaster preparedness efforts vulnerable to mission creep in favor of the “war on terror,” as highlighted by the post-Katrina congressional investigation and other government audits. In a 2009 investigation, the Office of the Inspector General at DHS found that there was “extensive missing documentation” for tens of millions of dollars that ICE had billed FEMA for enforcement efforts across the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, during which the agency made hundreds of arrests.
In the wake of FEMA’s failures responding to Katrina, facing immense public pressure for action, federal lawmakers passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006, a package of reforms that, among other things, was intended to help protect the agency’s independence.
Yet since its inception, Congress has regularly given the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to transfer funds among its various subagencies (flexibility not afforded to all government departments, which often are required to obtain approval from lawmakers for major transfers). That includes shuffling hundreds of millions of dollars to ICE, despite warnings from federal auditors and outside groups about the immigration agency’s overspending.
And as the number of immigrants detained by ICE steadily increased over the years, the agency has sought out additional regulatory loopholes to cover the enormous costs of immigration detention — including ICE’s sprawling network of detention centers, which are mostly operated by for-profit prison firms that in many cases charge the government per person per day.
“While Congress has been increasingly rebuking ICE, lawmakers have also increasingly given [Department of Homeland Security] wide discretion to add to detention spending,” the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration-focused think tank, wrote in a 2019 report.
In a 2013 appropriations bill under the Obama administration, Congress went further: For the first time, the Department of Homeland Security could transfer unlimited funds to ICE for detention spending, so long as immigration authorities notified lawmakers. Republican lawmakers expanded this loophole in 2017, under the first Trump administration, allowing ICE to transfer money for detention “as necessary,” with virtually no oversight. The provision has remained in homeland security spending bills ever since.
In 2019, Trump’s DHS used this loophole to transfer more than $100 million from FEMA’s disaster relief fund to ICE.
Defunding disaster response to boost immigration enforcement has long had the support of the organized right. A decade ago, the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that went on to author the Project 2025 plan to dismantle the federal government under Trump, issued a white paper urging “reforms” to FEMA. The authors claimed that it had become “far too easy for states to request disaster assistance” from the federal government, as Texas did when the state was overcome by flooding in July.
Instead, the group argued, FEMA’s funding should be “redirected to underfunded priorities.” One example the Heritage Foundation provided: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
Around this time, ICE began to receive significant annual budget increases, as it utilized the windfalls it secured for its detention spending to advocate for further budget expansions. In 2018, the National Immigrant Justice Center warned that ICE was citing its detention-spending numbers to justify its requests for ever more money from Congress.
“ICE has achieved this massive [budget] increase through a persistent manipulation of the appropriations process and chronic fiscal mismanagement,” the group wrote.
This massive redistribution was part of a long-term pattern of prioritizing immigration issues over other safety and security matters, a trend that continued under former president Joe Biden. Between 2014 and 2023, the Department of Homeland Security transferred $1.38 billion to ICE from other of its agencies, including FEMA, the US Coast Guard, and the Transportation Security Administration. These transfers reached record levels — over $400 million — under the Biden administration in 2023, as his administration was ramping up immigration detention.
The report does not include a full accounting of the $1.38 billion reallocation, so it is difficult to know the extent to which FEMA has been impacted, if at all, since the first Trump administration.
But regardless of the money’s origin, federal investigators found the transfers to be a unique phenomenon: nearly 80 percent of all transfers within the Department of Homeland Security during this period involved funneling money to ICE.
This was, in the eyes of immigrant rights groups, another example of ICE’s “egregious patterns of fiscal irresponsibility.”
ICE’s continually inflating budget — and its seizures from FEMA and other agencies — has set the stage for the Trump administration’s current immigration spending blitz, which has more than doubled ICE’s annual budget, all while the White House cuts disaster funding. Last month, US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-NY) sent a letter to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem condemning the department’s stated plans to transfer more than $500 million from other department subagencies to ICE this year, including from FEMA.
The recent reappropriations form “part of a long-standing pattern of prioritizing surveillance and incarceration over safety,” said Meisei Gonzalez, a climate justice advocate with GreenLatinos, an advocacy group focused on the impacts of the climate crisis on Latino communities. “When we see this money being transferred from FEMA to ICE, what we’re seeing is communities being stripped of essential preparedness [for climate disaster],” he added.
FEMA’s vulnerability has renewed calls to restore its status as an independent agency, outside of the auspices of the country’s homeland security apparatus.
Otherwise, as FEMA employees made clear this week, the agency’s independence is at risk of being further eroded. Noem has introduced new red tape requiring her personal approval for any expense over $100,000. And a third of the agency’s full-time staff have left this year.
These and other agency actions — including the transfer of employees to ICE — have run afoul of the safeguards lawmakers passed in the 2006 post-Katrina reforms, FEMA workers argued.
“FEMA is enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions [the law] was designed to prevent,” they warned.
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