As recovery and clean-up from Tropical Storm Helene continues, assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to residents here in western North Carolina has been cast into the national spotlight. Indignation over meager agency aid payments to locals whose lives have been — quite literally — washed away by the storm has been heightened by the hundreds of millions of dollars FEMA’s spending on illegal migrants encountered by CBP at the Southwest border and released into the United States. What’s happening is both more and less than meets the eye, as I’ll explain.
Indignation over meager agency aid payments to locals whose lives have been - quite literally - washed away by the storm has been heightened by the hundreds of millions of dollars FEMA's spending on illegal migrants encountered by CBP at the Southwest border and released into the United States.
ESFP received $125 million in FY 2020 and $130 million in FY 2021.
ARP appropriated $400 million for what FEMA termed "Regular EFSP", and an additional $110 million for "Humanitarian relief to families and individuals encountered by" DHS. The temporary ESFP for migrants from the 2019 supplemental was now a line item.
In the FY 2022 appropriations bill, those proportions shifted, with $130 million in appropriations for regular EFSP, with an additional $150 million for what that bill termed "Providing shelter and other services to families and individuals encountered by" DHS, EFSP-H. The White House, in its FY 2023 FEMA budget request, asked for $130 million for regular EFSP and $154 million for the migrant version.
The request explained: "Since 2019, services to migrants provided by NGOs and local jurisdictions have significantly increased and in many cases quadrupled." Of course, "Services to migrants" increased and "In many cases quadrupled" over that period because instead of detaining those migrants - which the Immigration and Nationality Act mandates - the Biden-Harris administration has released the vast majority of them into the United States, 5.6 million-plus and rising.
To take pressure off small border-adjacent towns in the Lone Star State that were dealing with massive numbers of released migrants, in April 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott started busing those migrants, first to Washington, D.C. and then to New York City and elsewhere in the north and northeast.
At a September 2022 press conference, Biden-Harris Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre outlined the administration's response to those cities' migrant travails: FEMA Regional Administrators have been meeting with city officials on site to coordinate - to coordinate available federal support from FEMA and other federal agencies.
As an aside, "Trump gutted the asylum system" was a common refrain in the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration, even as the immigration-court backlog increased 42 percent, rising from less than 1.3 million cases in FY 2020 to nearly 1.8 million in FY 2022.
Again, according to FEMA, it disbursed $150 million in ESFP-H funding in FY 2022 - an increase of $40 million compared to the fiscal year before.
Note the use of "Mitigate" and "Impacts" in that passage, and couple it with the fact that ESFP-H/SSP is administered by FEMA and you'll realize it's all a tacit admission that the Biden-Harris migrant surge has been a disaster, both for the country as a whole and for the cities and states that are struggling to keep up.
Some $363.8 million was made available under the program in FY 2023, broken up into two tranches, one of more than $291 million and a second of $77.3 million-plus.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Making-Sense-FEMAs-MigrantPayment-Schemes
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