A Timeline of FEMA Funding for Migrants

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding for migrants who entered the United States illegally has reentered the news cycle, with reports that four employees were sacked over payments to reimburse the city of New York for hotel costs associated with migrant housing. Here’s a brief timeline of how a 40-year-old program for homeless vets morphed into a migrant sustenance fund.

• In March 1983, President Reagan signed the “Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Act” (TEFA), in response to a then-ongoing recession. TEFA established the “Emergency Food and Shelter Program” (EFSP) and directed the head of FEMA to establish a national board to funnel $50 million through local boards to private voluntary organizations providing “emergency food and shelter to needy individuals”.
• Thereafter, in 1987, Reagan signed the “Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act”, enacted to address “an immediate and unprecedented crisis, due to the lack of shelter for a growing number of individuals, and families, including elderly persons, handicapped persons, families with children, Native Americans, and veterans”. That bill authorized the EFSP.
• Decades later, in May 2019, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended more than 95,000 adult migrants travelling with children in “family units” (FMUs) and unaccompanied alien children (UACs).
• Due to a lack of DHS resources to send them elsewhere, many languished in Border Patrol facilities, which were never meant for long-term housing, or intended for anyone other than single adult males. To get those families and children into more suitable detention, the Trump administration appealed to Congress for funding.
• The Democrats who controlled the House balked at providing the funding, instead using the images of children in border detention for their own political purposes.
• When the spending bill was finally sent to the Trump White House in late June, it expanded the EFSP, providing $30 million for “assistance to aliens released from” DHS custody and then only “to jurisdictions or local recipient organizations serving communities that have experienced a significant influx of such aliens”.
• Trump asked for EFSP to be eliminated in his FY 2018 and FY 2021 budget requests and did not request funding for the program in FY 2019 and FY 2020, “citing the EFSP as being duplicative of” housing programs overseen by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and arguing that states and localities bore responsibility for providing emergency food and shelter.
• Regardless, Congress instead provided $125 million for EFSP in FY 2020 and an additional $130 million in FY 2021.
• After Biden took office, Congress at the administration’s request passed the “American Rescue Plan” (ARP). ARP appropriated $400 million for what FEMA terms “regular EFSP” (the Reagan-era version), and an additional $110 million for “humanitarian relief to families and individuals encountered by” DHS.
• That one-time $30 million in migrant resettlement funding from the 2019 border bill was now a regular line item in the federal budget.
• As illegal migration at the Southwest border surged, the FY 2022 appropriations bill shifted the proportions of FEMA support that was going to Americans, on the one hand, and migrants, on the other, with $130 million in funding for regular EFSP and an additional $150 million for what that bill termed “providing shelter and other services to families and individuals encountered by” DHS, referred to as “EFSP-H” (for “Humanitarian”).
• For FY 2023, the Biden administration initially proposed $24 million more for EFSP-H, but ultimately Congress provided $800 million to establish a new Shelter and Services Program (SSP) grant program to replace EFSP-H. Up to $785 million of that $800 million was to be used to provide shelter and services to migrants encountered by DHS through EFSP-H while SSP was established.
• As an August 2023 FEMA “Fact Sheet” explained: “SSP bolsters the capacity of states, localities, tribes and nonprofit organizations to receive noncitizens after they have been processed by DHS. It also ensures appropriate coordination with and support for state, local and community leaders to help mitigate increased impacts to their communities.”
• Some $363.8 million was made available under the program in FY 2023, broken up into two tranches, one of more than $291 million and a second of $77.3 million-plus.
• For last fiscal year, the DHS Appropriations Act for 2024 directed CBP to transfer $650 million of the appropriations it received to FEMA for the SSP. That bill explained that the money was intended “to support sheltering and related activities provided by non-Federal entities, in support of relieving overcrowding in” CBP’s “short-term holding facilities”.
• Some $9.1 million of that funding was for FEMA administration costs, and the remaining $640.9 million was administered through two separate programs: SSP Allocated (SSP-A) for $300 million; and SSP Competitive (SSP-C) for $340.9 million.
• SSP-A is available only to designated entities, while SSP-C is available to any local government, Indian tribe, or U.S. state (plus D.C. and Puerto Rico) that meets certain criteria.
• The Biden administration’s border release and parole policies created the need for such spending to reimburse state and local governments to provide for those migrants, but Congress bears a portion of the blame for continuing to fund EFSP-H and SSP.
• Note that this FEMA EFSP-H and SSP funding is in addition to the agency’s “Disaster Relief Fund” (DRF), “the largest source of federal financial assistance after disasters”.
• Congress’s FY 2024 appropriations — formally the “Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024”m— included $20.26 billion for the DRF. That funding is intended for domestic disaster relief.
• But in the wake of Tropical Storm Helene, which ravaged parts of Florida, Georgia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee just weeks before the 2024 election, then-candidate Donald Trump complained that FEMA funding was being directed toward migrants, not storm recovery.
• Shortly after taking office, President Trump suggested overhauling or abolishing FEMA, preferring that funding be redirected to the individual states.
• In a January 24 executive order (EO), he established a “Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council”, tasked with advising the White House “on the existing ability of FEMA to capably and impartially address disasters occurring within the United States” and proposing “recommended changes related to FEMA to best serve the national interest”.

• Seventeen days later, Elon Musk, head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), revealed on X (formerly Twitter):

  The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants. 

  Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order. 

  That money is meant for American disaster relief…

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2025

• The next day, a FEMA spokesperson issued the following statement: “Effective immediately, FEMA is terminating the employment of four individuals for circumventing leadership to unilaterally make egregious payments for luxury NYC hotels for migrants. Firings include FEMA’s Chief Financial Officer, two program analysts and a grant specialist.”
• In a February 11 court filing, FEMA Acting Director Cameron Hamilton averred that DHS had suspended SSP funding “based on significant concerns that the funding is going to entities engaged in or facilitating illegal activities”.
• Hamilton claimed that “a substantial portion” of that SSP funding was “funding alien housing at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. According to media reports, the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua [TdA] has taken over the hotel and is using it as a recruiting center and base of operations to plan a variety of crimes”, including “gun and drug sales as well as sex trafficking”.

Jurisdictions that have incurred costs associated with the migrant crisis aren’t likely to accede easily to either the world’s most powerful man or its richest one. But at least the American people are becoming better informed about how a Reagan-era support program for homeless vets now provides housing for migrants in upscale accommodations. Whether they approve or not remains to be seen.