Author name: moderat ereport

There might be a new opportunity for states to apply for some Federal Emergency Management Agency funding.  In a recent announcement, FEMA said that it will be distributing $608 million in grant money. Sure, states can only use those funds to incarcerate immigrants, which obviously doesn’t help when natural disasters strike, but nothing is perfect.  States have until August 8 to apply for the funding, which is a clear giveaway to red states that are chomping at the bit to lock up immigrants. But the joke might end up being on them, as $608 million is a comically small amount.  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ torture chamber in the Everglades cost more than $200 million to build and is expected to cost $450 million annually to operate. President Donald Trump visits Florida’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention facility. The recently passed budget allocated a staggering amount of money to Trump’s immigration crackdown. Over the next 3 years, $51.6 billion will go toward the construction and maintenance of Trump’s border wall and Customs and Border Protection facilities, and $45 billion for expanding detention capacity.  You might have been wondering what prisons for immigrants have to do with disaster aid and why FEMA money is being tapped, but that’s just because you haven’t spent enough time in the MAGA fever swamps. In 2024, Congress allocated $650 million to the Department of Homeland Security for its Shelter and Services Program.  That money is intended to help states, municipalities, and nonprofits provide food, shelter, medical care, clothing, and outreach services to noncitizen immigrants when they’re released from DHS custody. This helps alleviate crowding in CBP facilities while also housing immigrants. No money goes directly to immigrants, and entities can only be reimbursed for immigrants who are released by DHS, not all undocumented immigrants. The funding stream is also entirely separate from FEMA’s disaster aid funding. But MAGA invented a world where President Joe Biden used this money to put up Tren de Aragua gang members in New York’s swankiest hotels. So of course, because the Trump administration is full of the dumbest, most vicious people imaginable, that money has to be taken away.  Now, FEMA funding will be used for the “detention support program.” In any other administration, this would be an impermissible warping of congressional intent and a wild overreach by the executive branch, but not these days.  A person is seen reacting to the devastation of flooding in Texas on July 6. Meanwhile, the disaster aid funding typically associated with FEMA is now being provided based on sheer whimsy and partisanship. So Maryland doesn’t get money for floods, but Texas does. North Carolina, California, and Washington can take a hike. Since no one is stopping the Trump administration from using taxpayer money as a treat or a cudgel based purely on Trump’s feelings, this is going to continue.  But cutting FEMA to the bone hurts its overall capacity and infrastructure, so it doesn’t even work well as a treat for red states. This week’s departure of Ken Pagurek, FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue chief, lays this bare. Pagurek resigned in the wake of the Texas floods and in the face of the Trump administration’s cuts to agency funding and personnel. Even in a most-favored state like Texas, the administration’s response was abysmal. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sat on approving Urban Search and Rescue teams for 72 hours and laid off hundreds of call center contract employees who fielded disaster assistance calls.  If Trump doesn’t manage to entirely close FEMA, which is one of his goals, there will be even more of this. Disaster aid isn’t the sort of thing where you can just keep a few skeleton crew members around to spin things up when disaster strikes. You need infrastructure and personnel—two things the Trump administration doesn’t care about.  But, hey, at least red states can crawl over each other for a pittance of grant money to partially build immigrant prisons.

All the comforts of a Waldorf Astoria city-view suite did not, at that moment, seem to cheer Jasmine Crockett. The 44-year-old Texas Democrat known for her viral comebacks was frowning as she walked into her hotel room in Atlanta last month. She glanced around before pulling an aide into the bathroom, where I could hear them whispering. Minutes later, she reemerged, ready to unload. She was losing her race to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she told me, a job she felt well suited for. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were planning to vote for the senior-most person in the race, even though that person wasn’t actually a Black Caucus member, Crockett complained. California members were siding with the California candidate. One member was supporting someone else in the race, she said, even though “that person did the worst” in their pitch to the caucus. Crockett was starting to feel a little used. Some of her colleagues were “reaching out and asking for donations,” she said, but those same colleagues “won’t even send me a text back” about the Oversight job. To Crockett, the race had become a small-scale version of the Democratic Party’s bigger predicament. Her colleagues still haven’t learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper, fiercer communicators. “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” Crockett told me. In poll after poll since Donald Trump’s reelection, Democratic voters have said they want a fighter, and Crockett, a former attorney who represents the Dallas area, has spent two and a half years in Congress trying to be one. Through her hearing-room quips and social-media insults, she’s become known, at least in MSNBC-watching households, as a leading general in the battle against Trump. The president is aware of this. He has repeatedly called Crockett a “low-IQ” individual; she has dubbed him a “buffoon” and “Putin’s hoe.” Perhaps the best-known Crockett clapback came last year during a hearing, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made fun of Crockett’s fake eyelashes. Crockett, seeming to relish the moment, leaned into the mic and blasted Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.” Crockett trademarked the phrase—which she now refers to as “B6”—and started selling T-shirts. At the time, I wrote that the episode was embarrassing for everyone involved. But clearly it resonated. Crockett has become a national figure. Last year, she gave a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention and was a national co-chair of Kamala Harris’s campaign. This year, she has been a fixture on cable news and talk shows as well as a top party fundraiser; she was in Atlanta, in part, for a meet and greet with local donors. At an anti-Trump protest on the National Mall in April, I saw several demonstrators wearing B6 shirts. Others carried signs with Crockett’s face on them. Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there. That approach, her supporters say, appeals to people who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024, including many young and Black voters. “What establishment Democrats see as undignified,” Max Burns, a progressive political strategist, told me, “disillusioned Democrats see that as a small victory.” Republicans understand this, Crockett said: “Marjorie is not liked by her caucus, but they get her value, and so they gave her a committee chairmanship.” Perhaps inadvertently, Crockett seemed to be acknowledging something I heard from others in my reporting: that the forthrightness her supporters love might undermine her relationships within the party. Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats worry that her rhetoric could alienate the more moderate voters the party needs to win back. In the same week that Democratic leadership had instructed members to focus on Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for billionaires, Crockett referred to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as “Governor Hot Wheels.” (Crockett claimed that she was referring to Abbott’s busing of migrants.) In an interview with Vanity Fair after the 2024 election, Crockett said that Hispanic Trump supporters had “almost like a slave mentality.” She later told a CNN host that she was tired of “white tears” and the “mediocre white boys” who are upset by DEI. Unsurprisingly, Trump himself seems eager to elevate Crockett. “They say she’s the face of the party,” the president told my Atlantic colleagues recently. “If she’s what they have to offer, they don’t have a chance.” Some of the Republican targeting of Crockett is clearly rooted in racism; online, Trump’s supporters constantly refer to her as “ghetto” and make fun of her hair. [From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’] None of this appears to be giving Crockett any pause. The first time I met her, a month before our conversation in Atlanta, she was accepting a Webby Award, in part for a viral exchange in which she’d referred to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina as “child” and Mace suggested they “take it outside.” Backstage, in a downtown-Manhattan ballroom, I asked Crockett whether she ever had regrets about her public comments. She raised her eyebrows and replied, “I don’t second-guess shit.” This spring, I watched Crockett test her theory of politics in a series of public appearances. At the Webbys, most of her fellow award winners were celebrities and influencers, but only Crockett received a standing ovation. A week later, Crockett flamed Republicans and the Trump administration during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing about Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A 15-minute clip of her upbraiding ICE agents—“These people are out of control!”—has racked up more than 797,000 views on YouTube; I know this because she told me. On TikTok and Instagram, Crockett has one of the highest follower counts of any House member, and she monitors social-media engagement like a day trader checks her portfolio. She is highly conscious, too, of her self-presentation. During many of our