Musk, Republicans say FEMA betrayed NC to help migrants. Here are the facts | Opinion
Elon Musk claimed this week that FEMA disaster relief funds were used for “luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants” — a claim that led to the firing of four FEMA officials Tuesday.
It’s also a claim that has been echoed by some North Carolina Republicans on social media, including U.S. Rep. Tim Moore, who called it “absolutely disgusting” and said the Biden administration “completely betrayed North Carolinians.”
U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, who represents western North Carolina, said Musk’s findings “[uncovered] what we all suspected. FEMA funds that could have been used to help western North Carolina rebuild were illegally diverted to house illegal aliens.”
If that were true, North Carolinians would have good reason to be angry. But the claims made by Musk, and echoed by Republicans, are misleading. While some FEMA funds are used to shelter migrants, those funds are separate from FEMA’s disaster relief fund and therefore would not interfere with the agency’s ability to support victims of Hurricane Helene.
Here are the facts:
▪ The funds that Musk appears to be referring to are payments made by the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), a grant program that allocates funds to local governments and organizations to provide shelter and other services for migrants. The program is funded from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection budget, and the funds are administered by FEMA. It replaced a similar program that began in 2019, during the first Trump administration.
▪ The funding for that program was not allocated by the Biden administration, but by Congress. For the 2024 fiscal year, Congress appropriated $650 million for the program through the Department of Homeland Security budget. Every Republican representing North Carolina in Congress — which, at the time, included Edwards — voted in favor of that bill.
▪ The funding was not “illegally diverted,” because SSP has its own funding that is completely separate from the funding allocated to FEMA for disaster relief.
▪ The $59 million payment made to New York City last week was part of a larger reimbursement that was allocated to the city last year, The New York Times reported. And according to The Associated Press, the government has paid on average $152 a night for rooms, far from “luxury” rates.
▪ FEMA has repeatedly stressed that it has not “run out” of money for disaster relief, as some Republicans have claimed. While there may be valid complaints about how FEMA has managed Helene recovery efforts, insufficient funding is not the cause of them.
This is not the first time this issue has been raised — or disproven. President Donald Trump made similar claims last year in the wake of Hurricane Helene, when he said repeatedly on the campaign trail that the government didn’t have enough money to respond to the disaster because FEMA spent it all on housing for migrants.
At the time, those claims were repeatedly debunked by news outlets and by FEMA itself. The Washington Post even pointed out that while the Biden administration never diverted disaster relief funds to handle undocumented migrants, Trump himself did. In 2019, the Trump administration informed Congress in the middle of hurricane season that it was pulling millions of dollars from FEMA disaster relief and sending it to the border to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum seekers.
Whether Trump, Musk and congressional Republicans believe that housing migrants is an appropriate use of federal funding is a separate issue. It does not change the fact that the funding was authorized by Congress and is being used for its intended purpose. Nor does it change the fact that the funds are completely separate from those allocated for disaster relief — none of the funds came at Helene victims’ expense. To pretend otherwise is blatantly misleading. They should know better.
