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.

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. 

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.