Yes, Of Course FEMA Could Have Used Their Illegal Alien Funding To Help Americans

They Just Didn't Want To

By A Former Border Patrol Agent

Recently, after Hurricane Helene, Vivian P. documented here the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s failure to provide for the American citizens having a certifiable Federal Emergency, while at the same time, FEMA, which has spent $800 million (FY 2023) and $650 million (FY 2024) on illegals who crossed the border during the Biden Rush, protested that they needed funds, and said that they couldn’t possibly use the illegal alien money to help Americans.

Can FEMA redirect money from illegals to citizens?

Short answer, YES!

When I was on the Southern Border during the Trump Administration I was appalled by what went on.

First, may I mention that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was the OG of immigration enforcement when he was in the Senate. It was Sessions who repeatedly derailed the amnesty attempts made by the Uniparty like the Gang of Eight. See 27 Times Jeff Sessions Fought for Americans Against DACA, Amnesty and Open Borders, Breitbart, September 5, 2017.

Since I was in the Border Patrol and I pay attention to politics (not all Border Patrol Agents did), I knew how hard Jeff Sessions fought various amnesty attempts and how he didn’t back down. Sessions had a plan for closing the border. Yes, he was Attorney General and not Secretary of Homeland Security, but DHS arrests the aliens, it is up to the Department of Justice to prosecute them—and it’s prosecution that leads to deterrence.

Jeff Sessions wanted to expand a program called Zero Tolerance that had been in use since as far back as George W. Bush and that had been also used by Barack Obama. An illegal alien is often just prosecuted administratively, not criminally, but (contrary to a lot of leftist publications), an illegal alien can be prosecuted criminally too.

It’s called 8 U.S. Code § 1325 - Improper entry by alien. By prosecuting them criminally instead of administratively, the illegal alien serves some jail time (although, most often they are sentenced to time served), and they can get much longer jail sentences if they try to come back into the United States after being removed or deported.

However, then the whole “Kids in Cages” propaganda happened.

The midterm elections were coming up and the propaganda was working on the American public, especially, on women. Remember, “Kids are cute, therefore, Open Borders.” Trump reversed what Jeff Sessions was trying to do at the border. Along with Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the Russian Collusion Delusion and appointing an independent prosecutor (Sessions thought that a well-meaning investigation would exonerate them, he did not realize it was a propaganda tool to sully Trump’s reputation), Sessions never recovered in the eyes of Trump.

Predictably, the moment Trump signed an executive order getting rid of Zero Tolerance, the flood of humanity increased. (See the PBS Frontline Series  Zero Tolerance for more info, and look for the individual interviews, not the propaganda piece that sought to vilify anyone against Open Borders).

When Trump overruled Sessions, effectively, the border was opened to anyone who brought their kid with them to the border. A lot of Agents on the Northern Border were detailed down to the southern border to help facilitate the invasion.

Ann Coulter was giving Trump a load of crap which Trump richly deserved and telling him that if he didn’t do something about his signature issue, he wasn’t going to get re-elected. There were other conservatives also giving Trump grief.

Stephen Miller, who had been the communications director for Jeff Sessions when Sessions was a Senator, was franticalltrying all sorts of different tactics to get the border back under control. At the time, it wasn’t working and Miller was fighting the neocon Republicans and the Democrats both. That’s not to mention the bureaucracy too.

When I got down to the Southern Border, one of the things I found appalling was all the government employees down there. Sure, there was Border Patrol and CBP Officers (Office of Field Operations, OFO, who work in parking lots, not fields), but there was also people from Health and Human Services, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Texas National Guard, the Federal Protective Service (they usually protect federal buildings), the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), and TSA.

All of these federal employees, most from out of state, had to have hotel rooms, meals, and transportation. The amount of money being spent on this was astronomical, AND, that did not even include the money that was being given to the NGOs like Catholic Charities.

From a balanced budget perspective, it was costing far more money to help illegal invaders in than it ever was to keep them out. We could have used a lot of the law enforcement wing and the National Guard to help us secure the border, but no, that was never to be.

This whole thing was a taxpayer drain. Which brings me to FEMA. With the disaster happening in North Carolina, the question arises on whether FEMA was using money that could have been used by regular Americans even if they are rural deplorables who probably vote Republican and not money for illegal aliens. The Democrats have gotten in front of the problem and gone on offense (as usual). They claim that the FEMA money for illegal aliens is from a separate pot than the one intended for emergencies, and that DHS Secretary Mayorkas’s hands are tied in getting this money.

So, I listened to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) podcast “FEMA Funding for Illegal Immigrants: A Slush Fund for NGOs and Blue States?”. If you want more details, listen to the full podcast, but the short of it is YES!!! One of the Left’s complaints was that Trump used FEMA money “to fund ICE arrests”—as if the migrant invasion was somehow not a Federal Emergency.

He wasn’t given much of a choice once he made the mistake of stopping Zero Tolerance, unless, Trump would have been willing to compound his error with the bad optics of letting women and children starve once they arrived in the U.S. The program under which they are funded, Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP), was actually started under Reagan and meant for homeless Vietnam Veterans and others. Of course, it gradually expanded as all government programs seem to do.

The person being interviewed by Mark Krikorian in this podcast, Andrew Arthur, actually wrote a lot of the bill responsible for DHS coming into being. Arthur says that since they didn’t know what would happen in the future as far as crises, they gave the Secretary of Homeland Security broad authority to redirect money from one program to another. This means that Mayorkas could ask Congress for permission to redirect money from FEMA’s EFSP program helping illegal aliens to Americans in North Carolina, or, Florida. He hasn’t. That should tell you all you need to know.