On Friday, one thousand American families hit by Hurricane Maria will be made effectively homeless by the Trump Administration.
Currently, more than 1,000 families are still displaced and being housed in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) paid hotel rooms. These families have already received three extensions for aid, but were shocked when the United States government recently announced that it was no longer going to assist them. From this, they took the government to court, and argued that aid should continue to be provided until the last family is settled.
They lost. As reported in ThinkProgress:
A federal judge in Massachusetts on August 30 allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to stop funding its Transitional Shelter Assistance (TSA) program, which allows hurricane-displaced people to live in hotels or motels throughout Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland.
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“Out of the initial 7,000 families that lived in government-funded housing, only 1,000 remain with most being sick or elderly victims who have no consistent or self-sufficient income,” said Natasha L. Bannon, a lawyer for LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a hispanic civil rights organization.
These 1000 families will be forced out of their temporary shelters this Friday. The Trump Administration is putting these people out to fend for themselves or die, pure and simple.
FEMA’s excuse, as argued in Court, was that the impoverished Puerto Rican government wouldn’t put up enough funds to assist in the housing. Recall that this FEMA is the same one Trump just raided to divert $10 million from its emergency preparedness reserves, in order to serve his plans to imprison immigrant families and their children.
FEMA officials say they have provided some of the families with housing vouchers. Unfortunately, those vouchers are next to worthless, assuming they haven’t already been spent on necessities such as, say, food to survive.
Bannan said the vouchers were valued at housing rental rates in Puerto Rico, while two-thirds of the people are checked into hotels on the U.S. mainland. She cited one family living in Brooklyn, N.Y. who received vouchers of around $450 per month, the value of the market rate in Cayey, Puerto Rico. The average rent of a studio apartment in Brooklyn is over $2,000 per month.
FEMA also declined to activate a separate HUD program, “Disaster Housing Assistance” (DHAP), which was created in the wake of Bush’s failure to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina. This same program was previously utilized to assist victims of Hurricanes Ike, Rita, Gustav, and Sandy. Predictably, the main victims of those storms weren’t brown people.
You can tell from the Judge’s opinion, delivered in the United States District Court of Massachusetts, exactly how he felt about being the vehicle by which these people were being tossed out into the street.
“I agree with the Plaintiffs that they will suffer disproportionate hardship given that to date, they have not been able to secure alternative housing and therefore, may well be rendered homeless,” Judge Timothy S. Hillman wrote in his ruling.
“While this is the result that I am compelled to find, it is not necessarily the right result. However, the Court cannot order that Defendants (FEMA) to do that which in a humanitarian and caring world should be done — it can only order the Defendants to do that which the law requires,” Hillman added. “I strongly urge the parties to work together to find temporary housing, or other assistance to the Plaintiffs and other members of the class prior to that date.
But Hillman is just a judge. This is a deliberate policy decision made by an arm of the Executive Branch. As Judge Hillman pointed out, there is no “legal requirement” that FEMA continue helping these people. This Judge can’t do anything about it. It’s FEMA’s decision.
In other words, it’s Trump’s decision. And we know he doesn’t exist in the “caring world” that would keep these families safe.