Funneling money from FEMA to migrant detention 'harms us with any disaster we face'

by Laura Clawson

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday, Sep. 13, 2018 Thursday, Sep. 13, 2018 at 11:06:48am PDT

FILE - In this Sept. 10, 2014, file photo, detained immigrant children line up in the cafeteria at the Karnes County Residential Center, a temporary home for immigrant women and children detained at the border, in Karnes City, Texas. As the private prison industry profits from an immigrant detention boom around the country, GEO Group, one of its top corporations is struggling to convince Texas lawmakers to shield its lucrative family detention facility from closure. An outside political organization working on behalf of the GEO, lobbied a state representative to introduce a bill enabling Texas to license family immigrant detention centers as childcare providers. The legislation would potentially help GEO's Karnes Residential Center and Texas' other family facility comply with federal requirements for housing children. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

That $9.75 million funneled from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ICE for migrant detention centers is just the tip of a $169 million iceberg. ICE’s cruel, punitive detention practices also got $29 million from the Coast Guard, $34 million from the TSA, and more. And while Trump administration officials were quick to point out that the FEMA money didn’t come from disaster relief funds, that doesn’t mean it won’t make a difference to emergency preparedness:

… money was taken from the response and recovery, preparedness and protection and mission support operations budgets, which are used to prepare for emergencies like Florence. Those FEMA budgets are for "training for all hazards, preparing our warehouses, making sure we have things ready to go so that we can pre-deploy like you see FEMA doing now," Moira Whelan, FEMA's former chief of staff for the office of Gulf Coast rebuilding, told Maddow on Wednesday. "Taking money away from that operation doesn't just harm [FEMA's hurricane response], it harms us with any disaster we face."

But hey, ICE needs that money to indefinitely detain asylum seekers and their kidnapped children and to fly detained migrant children around the country far from their parents. Case in point: ICE has increased its spending on flights by $107 million.

The Trump administration is literally shifting money from saving lives to destroying them.