The Trump administration is accusing some state authorities and non-profits of in effect smuggling or harboring migrants after they provided food and shelter for such people – even though the services were funded through federal government programs and those being helped had already been processed and released by immigration officials.
The administration has also withheld funds it owes to service providers, which spent up front to support vulnerable families recently arrived in the US, on the good faith agreement that, as is usual practice, they would be paid back by Washington.
The nation’s Shelter and Services Program (SSP) – administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) – was created with the explicit purpose to financially support service providers that were struggling to welcome migrants and asylum seekers who had been released from federal immigration custody.
Yet in an ominous recent letter, SSP funding recipients were told that the Trump administration was pausing further payments amid “significant concerns” that government money had gone toward institutions “engaged in or facilitating illegal activities”, with allusions to serious crimes such as transporting undocumented immigrants and shielding them from detection.
The then interim Fema administrator, Cameron Hamilton, gave no evidence to support his agency’s sweeping allegations. Hamilton has since been fired. But he had told SSP grantees they had until mid-April to produce the names, contact information and any related documents for the migrants they had served, while warning that they would need to formally attest to not having knowledge of their personnel or contractors committing immigration-related crimes.
“I was flabbergasted that this would happen, and then I find that the letter … it made you look like a common criminal – that you were aiding and abetting those that were in need of food,” said Melony Samuels, CEO of the Campaign Against Hunger in New York.
Samuels’s organization had not sought the SSP grant they were allotted in fiscal year 2024 for nearly $512,000.
In fact, when New York City saw a significant increase in the number of arriving migrants as the hard-right Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, deliberately bussed them there as a political provocation and then word of mouth spread about a universal right to free shelter, the Biden administration had recruited the Campaign Against Hunger to distribute food to newcomers. The organization was already serving thousands of families each week from all walks of life, including migrants, and it stepped up its work to attend to the acute extra need.
Samuels was just one of many in the US who received Fema’s threatening letter, though other organizations and local governments declined to comment as they attempt to navigate what some feel is an intimidating situation, amid outrage that their humanitarian work is being portrayed as criminal activity.
The Campaign Against Hunger has spent several hundred thousand dollars on food that it expected would be reimbursed through the SSP fund. That’s part of $1.3m in rescinded or frozen grants affecting their budget as part of the Trump administration’s cuts – which in practice has meant slashing some services and watching with concern as people go hungry.
“We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the food. My staff just met with me and said: ‘What are we going to do?’” Samuels said.
“It’s not like something changed and … families who were in need all of a sudden are not in need,” she added, pointing to recent mass layoffs and other hardships that are making her work more urgent than ever. “It’s that the lines are constantly growing.”
Like the Campaign Against Hunger, many of the SSP grantees cater to diverse populations – not just migrants – and provide essentials like shelter and food. So the government’s decision to hold back reimbursements for costs that organizations operating on thin margins have already incurred may cause suffering for both non-citizens and Americans who rely on their help.
“Providing the services that you’re specifically contracted by the federal government to do, and to then be accused of a crime for fulfilling the terms of the grant, is frivolous and baseless – and targeted harassment,” said Kristin Etter, director of policy and legal services at the Texas Immigration Law Council.
The Fema letter is in effect a copycat of a tactic pioneered by Texas’s all-Republican leadership, which for the past few years has deployed myriad state and federal laws to try to incriminate 10 organizations that serve immigrants in the state, and intimidate others into abandoning their work.
For instance, in a court filing, Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, and his subordinates insinuated that NGOs could become “silent partners in cartel trafficking operations” unless his team prevailed in shutting down an organization that has served migrants for decades without problems, supposedly because it was “operating a stash house” and “harboring” non-citizens.
“We’re just seeing the exact same playbook, but at the federal level,” Etter said.
And it is not just migrant-serving organizations being targeted by the Trump administration in this way. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is similarly accusing environmental groups that received grants from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of potential “conspiracy to defraud the United States” and has asked Citibank to freeze their bank accounts, the New Republic reports.
Meanwhile, Fema has terminated the SSP grants, saying their use to support undocumented immigrants – including asylum seekers legally awaiting court dates – “is not consistent with DHS’s current priorities”. According to CNN, the agency is considering deploying leftover funds from the program for immigration enforcement.
As for the Fema letter, some SSP recipients, like the city of San Antonio and Catholic Charities of San Antonio, have decided to comply with its demands, saying they are not providing any information that the government doesn’t already have.
Others in Texas, such as El Paso county and its local non-profits, are less affected by the federal government’s threats because they never asked for reimbursements through the grant or asked for far less than their allotment after predicting that it would be difficult to access the funding under the Trump administration.
In New York, the Campaign Against Hunger has replied by requesting more time. But Samuels doesn’t understand what Fema wants from her, given that the program already requires periodic reports and she has cooperated.
Now she’s witnessing her community suffer an emerging hunger crisis that is even harder for her organization to address.
“I don’t think those that made the decision to cut these programs understand hunger,” she said, adding: “They might never have been hungry before.”
Fema responded to the Guardian’s request for comment by blaming the Biden administration for spending “hundreds of millions of federal dollars housing illegal aliens in our country on American taxpayers’ dime”.
The agency then repeated unsubstantiated allegations that a large hotel in the center of Manhattan that was turned into a migrant processing center had served as an operations base for the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and added, in part, that the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, “has directed Fema” to implement tighter controls on federal funds.
“The open borders gravy train is over, and there will not be a single penny spent that goes against the interest and safety of the American people,” said the homeland security assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin.
