Feb. 13: Between FEMA and A Hard Place

Justice Dept. sues New York officials; Possible Mexico-Cartel war; RFK and Tulsi confirmed

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The Big Story

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Wednesday that she has “clawed back” $59 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds originally earmarked for the housing of illegal migrants in “luxury hotels” in New York City, one day after firing the FEMA employees responsible for the payment, according to Fox News. “There will not be a single penny spent that goes against the interest and safety of the American people,” a DHS spokesperson told Fox. On Thursday, city officials claimed the sum was even larger—$80 million—and that it had disappeared from city bank accounts overnight. We don’t know the source of the discrepancy between the $59 million claimed by Noem and the $80 million referred to by the city.

While that sounds like a triumph, the story may be a bit more complicated, particularly as it pertains to New York City Mayor Eric Adams and his ability to navigate both the migrant crisis and his relationship with President Donald Trump.

The $59 million figure cited by Noem appears to come from Elon Musk. As we noted in our Friday edition, Musk claimed last week on X that his Department of Government Efficiency had uncovered a FEMA payment of that exact sum, which he, like Noem, said was for “luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.” As the (generally pro-Trump) New York Post reported at the time, Elon’s number didn’t quite add up; according to city officials quoted by the paper, since the start of the migrant crisis, the Biden administration had allocated $237 million to New York City under FEMA’s Shelter and Services program. Only $19 million of that total was for hotels, with the rest intended to cover other costs related to managing the crisis. To make matters worse, according to city officials, the missing $80 million/$59 million represented a reimbursement for money that New York City had already spent.

The Trump administration’s recapture of the FEMA money puts Mayor Adams between a rock and a hard place. Recently, he’s been making appeals to the president, likely to help him deal with the corruption charges brought against him by federal prosecutors in New York. Those entreaties seem to have worked; on Feb. 10, the Justice Department ordered New York federal prosecutors to drop the charges, asserting that the indictment was impeding Adams’ ability to comply with their immigration crackdowns. Those attempts to help Adams have in turn created their own headaches: earlier today, Manhattan’s top career federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon resigned from her role as acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York rather than comply with DOJ’s orders to abandon the case.

But as senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Nicole Gelinas observes in The New York Times, the DOJ held out the possibility of refiling the charges after New York’s November mayoral election, giving Adams plenty of incentive to cooperate. Furthermore, in a “tense” meeting Monday, Adams instructed city leadership not to criticize Trump or his administration, expressing concern that those criticisms could impede the ability of the city to collect federal funding to assist in matters such as the migrant crisis, according to the Times. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, one of the mayoral candidates seeking to unseat Adams, told The City that he took Adams’ overtures as a request to aid and abet his attempts to earn a pardon from Trump.

Seemingly damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, Adams is being spurned by members of his cabinet for appealing to Trump and spurned by the Trump administration that hopes to control Adams through means that we’ll explain below. He is—assuming the figures from Lander and other city officials are accurate—now facing an $80 million hole in his budget, on top of $37 million promised by the feds that has not yet been disbursed. In Adams’ telling, it was his lobbying for this money that got him in trouble with federal prosecutors in the first place. Last month, Adams went on Tucker Carlson’s show and claimed that his persistent appeals to the Biden administration for financial assistance in dealing with the migrant crisis were what ran him afoul of the Democratic Party and led to his indictment on corruption charges.“They would just tell me, ‘Be a good Democrat, Eric. It’ll all work out,’” he told Carlson.

Of course, it hasn’t all worked out, and the city is now in the midst of a mess. While it’s true that many New York City taxpayers may not be happy about the amount of their money directed toward sheltering migrants, but the sanctuary city laws that allowed the crisis to escalate out of control were passed in 2017. During Biden’s presidency, there were about four times as many illegal border crossings as there were during Trump’s first term, according to Customs and Border Protection data cited by Politifact. And Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas sent many of those migrants to Democratic states with sanctuary city laws, including … New York. Adams knew the city was in crisis mode by 2023.

In the Times op-ed mentioned above, Gelinas suggests that the Trump DOJ’s decision to drop charges against Adams was a “poisoned offering.” Trump could have, after all, pardoned Adams outright. His refusal to let him off the hook, Gelinas says, suggests Trump is looking to weaken Adams and further humiliate the Democratic Party in the city:

The letter also makes clear the price that the White House has exacted from the mayor in the meantime. It said the criminal case had limited the mayor’s ability to help the federal government ‘protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.’ The implication is that Mr. Adams will use this reprieve to cooperate with Trump deportations — or else.

So, is the Trump administration’s withdrawal of FEMA funds a direct means of addressing the country’s immigration problem, as the November election mandated it to do, or a calculated attempt to degrade the Democratic Party in one of the country’s bluest cities by stripping the party of the means to deal with the crisis ravaging it? Lander clearly believes it’s the latter and is using the chaos to claim that Adams is hamstrung by the necessity to appease Trump and bolster his political saliency. Adams put out a statement yesterday addressing the administration’s recall of the money, even pondering legal action, according to Politico:

This morning, our office learned about the federal government clawing back more than $80 million in FEMA grants applied for and awarded under the last administration, but not disbursed until last week. While we conduct an internal investigation into how this occurred, our office has already engaged with the White House about recouping these funds and we’ve requested an emergency meeting with FEMA to try and resolve the matter as quickly as possible.

You may notice that Adams doesn’t address Trump by name here, which suggests that when you ask Trump for help, you’re not getting it for free.

Reported at 4:30 today, Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin said that Adams met with border czar Tom Homan and local law enforcement and came out of it saying he’ll be working on an executive order to reestablish Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ ability to operate on Riker’s Island.

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The Rest

→While on the topic of the New York migrant crisis, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Wednesday that the Justice Department would be suing New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Attorney General Letitia James, and DMV chief Mark Schroeder over New York City’s policy of limited cooperation with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. “New York has chosen to prioritize illegal aliens over American citizens,” said Bondi. “It stops today.” According to the New York Post, the lawsuit targets New York’s “Green Light Law,” which offers driver’s licenses to illegal migrants while preventing the DMV from sharing any personal information about migrants given licenses by the DMV. In 2022, New York was home to 672,000 illegal migrants, according to data from the Center for Migration Studies of New York. Although Mayor Eric Adams began addressing the migrant crisis as early as 2023, when he claimed the issue could “destroy New York,” the crisis is far from resolved. According to New York government statistics, 51,000 migrants are still being sheltered by taxpayer dollars, down from 69,000 in February 2024.

→ Article of the Day:

Writing for The Daily Wire, Todd Bensman looks at the prospect of a “hot shooting war” between Mexico and the drug cartels. He reports that the political slogan used by former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and current Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to describe their policy toward the country’s drug cartels—“Abrazos, no balazos (hugs, not bullets)”—might inevitably have to flip to its inverse of “bullets, not hugs.” President Trump has forced Scheinbaum into a “ruinous” 25% trade tariff on Mexican exports unless she uses military force to fight the flow of fentanyl (and illegal immigrants) into the United States. She’s now deploying 10,000 Mexican troops to cartel country. Bensman says that the conditions are eerily similar to the extremely bloody civil war against the cartels fought by Felipe de Jesus Calderón Hinojosa’s administration that led to six years of conflict and hundreds of thousands of Mexican casualties—which is widely considered to have failed. But, according to Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, Sheinbaum may want to buck her predecessor’s policy of appeasement toward the cartels. Nieto-Gomez tells Bensman that Sheinbaum has stacked her administration with “anti-cartel Morena Party hardliners” who are “spoiling” for a “good hard fight with the cartels,” and that Trump is now giving them cover. “With the right philosophy and the right level of American support, we may see a different type of violence in Mexico.”

Read the rest here: https://www.dailywire.com/news/will-mexico-face-a-hot-shooting-war-with-the-cartels

→Two of Trump’s most controversial cabinet picks—Tulsi Gabbard for National Intelligence secretary and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services—have officially been confirmed by the Senate. Gabbard was confirmed yesterday and Kennedy today. Liberal commentator Dace Potas takes the confirmations as evidence of unwavering loyalty by Senate Republicans toward Trump. “You don’t even have to be conservative,” he says. “You just have to bend the knee.”

→Quote of the Day

Don Jr. is laser-focused on keeping neocons out of government because he sees them as the faction who coalesced behind Haley and tried to dislodge his father from the Republican nomination …

That’s a quote from a source “familiar with [Jared] Kushner’s point of view” when it came to shaping Trump’s foreign policy in his first administration, speaking to Ben Smith for an article published by Semafor about the changing of the guard in Trump’s foreign policy for his second term. The article addresses the nomination of Elbridge Colby as a top policy hand at the Pentagon. Colby is, according to the article, a visible leader of the anti-interventionist wing of the Republicans and has publicly been critical of the relationship between the United States and Israel. The sherpa guiding Colby’s nomination is Arthur Schwarz, an adviser to Donald Trump Jr. and Vice President J.D. Vance. Smith sees the nomination of Colby as evidence that Trump’s foreign policy guidance is coming less from Kushner than it is from his son, Don Jr., as well as Vance and Tucker Carlson, who hosted Colby on his podcast last month.

→Hamas, who earlier this week was refusing to release any hostages, affirmed its commitment to continuing to release three Israeli hostages according to the initial cease-fire deal in a statement this morning. Earlier this week, Trump said there’d be “hell to pay” if they didn’t release all of the remaining hostages, but for whatever reason, Israel appears to be backing off of Trump’s demands. Israeli government spokesman David Mencer lowered Trump’s demand that all remaining nine hostages be released for Hamas to avoid more attacks to three hostages, according to The Times of Israel. At least one Tablet contributor doesn’t understand the concession: “The most powerful man in the world is vowing to shield and arm you. Why are you negotiating against him?”

→The owner of defense contractor S&L Aerospace Metals LLC, Jerry Wang, has been identified as an official for multiple Chinese Communist Party influence and intelligence organizations in the Chinese government, according to the Daily Caller. The contractor supplies parts for American military aircraft and advises the U.S. government on supply chain security. Through an attorney, Wang denied any ties to “foreign political entities” but didn’t deny being photographed at CCP intel agency functions alongside high-ranking CCP officials. Former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst L.J. Eads told the Daily Caller that allowing someone with Wang’s background access to the inner workings of the supply chain is a “glaring national security error.”

→A 24-year-old Afghani failed-asylum seeker in Germany rammed into a crowd at a trade union demonstration in Munich today in what authorities are investigating as a terror attack, The Independent reports. The suspect was arrested after police shot at his car. According to the news website Der Spiegel, the asylum-seeker is believed to have posted Islamist ideas on social media prior to the attack. The attack comes a day before the Munich Security Conference tomorrow and hours before the arrival of Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the city for the conference. Last December, a similar terror attack via vehicular manslaughter transpired in eastern Germany, killing five and injuring more than 200 people.

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