2026-02-05 07:10:42
This post originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s site Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here.
On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.
I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE—a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement—and found myself horrified anew.
Good morning; my name is Garrett Graff and I’m honored to be here to speak about the historical challenges and problems with the Department of Homeland Security and two of its largest components, CBP—aka Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol—and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly known as ICE.
First, let me introduce myself. I’m a journalist and historian; I’ve written multiple books focused on federal law enforcement, national security, and American government—one of which, about Watergate, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History—and published dozens of articles in places like POLITICO, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic about DHS, the Justice Department, and federal law enforcement, including the FBI, CBP, and ICE.
My testimony today is based on, draws upon, and in places quotes from that extensive previous reporting and writing over the years and is informed by literally hundreds of conversations with agents and executives at all levels of federal law enforcement, including dozens or scores of interviews with agents and officers of ICE and CBP. I’ve interviewed CBP commissioners and ICE directors in their executive suites; I’ve been on patrol with Border Patrol, ridden on their boats and flown in their helicopters, shared meals with the union officials and been in the studio while they recorded their popular podcast, and observed as Border Patrol apprehended migrants crossing the Texas-Mexico border.
My goal today is to outline for the Commission some of the history of ICE and CBP and, in particular, to outline what has changed—and what is changing—as the Trump administration floods both agencies with money from the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
What I hope you will take away from my testimony today is that the problems, abuses, scandals, and controversies involving CBP and ICE that have been on display over the last year in far too many American cities and social media feeds—from deadly shootings and agent brutality to the routine abuse of Constitutional and civil rights and liberties—is entirely consistent with long-identified problems in CBP and ICE that have gone ignored and uncorrected both by a generation of Congress and multiple Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
These are not aberrations—these incidents are the entirely foreseeable consequence of specific funding and management decisions and how the nation has approached immigration enforcement since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
In particular, CBP has been likely the deadliest and certainly the most troubled federal law enforcement agency for the better part of two decades now. Since 9/11, the culture of ICE and CBP has meant that the agencies have been what you might call a fascist-secret-police-in-waiting, troubled agencies simply waiting for an ambitious would-be authoritarian.
ICE is an agency whose recruiting and training standards are so low that other federal law enforcement agents say pejoratively that ICE is “hired by the pound, from the pound.” And the paramilitary CBP, especially, has been uniquely callous with human life and suffers from a deeply ingrained culture of racism and misogyny, all of which is enabled by an all-but unequaled longstanding sense of impunity.
CBP—the nation’s largest law enforcement agency—has been plagued for two decades by a tidal wave of crime, corruption, and misconduct driven by a disastrous post-9/11 hiring surge that flooded the force with thousands of agents and officers who never should have been given a badge and a gun—including, as one CBP commissioner told me, even accidentally hiring members of actual drug cartels.
Criminality is so rampant inside CBP that it has seen one of its own agents or officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005. CBP’s misconduct scandal is so long-running that today it would be old enough to drink.
In total, according to CBP’s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024—the last year numbers are available—at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times. (In 2018 alone, a single CBP employee was arrested five times.) To put that number in perspective:
Before I dive in, I want to add an over-arching caveat. None of what I’m about to say is meant to imply that everything was hunky-dory in DHS at noon on January 20th last year when Donald Trump returned to the presidency. Quite the opposite.
And yet something was fundamentally different before last year: ICE and CBP managed to go about their work in such a way that didn’t cause ordinary law-abiding US citizens to fear for their lives; ICE or CBP agents didn’t routinely operate wearing masks and deploy teargas daily against US citizens; the entire school systems of major US cities didn’t have to close in fear of CBP and ICE operations targeting neighborhoods, and professional sports leagues like the NBA didn’t have to cancel games because of ICE and CBP violence in major American cities.
Something big has changed—and my hope is that this testimony will help explain what and how.
First, how history plagues CBP and ICE. On September 11, 2001, immigration was the purview of the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service while border trade and travel was the responsibility of the Treasury Department’s US Customs Service.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and as part of the creation of DHS and the massive reshuffling of government, both INS and Customs were broken apart. ICE brought together the “legacy INS” deportation and detention officers, which were renamed as what’s now known as Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), as well as the “legacy INS” and “legacy Customs” special agents to form the Homeland Security Investigations division, HSI.
Other parts of INS and Customs were reshuffled into the new, supposedly “unified” border agency of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The green-uniformed Border Patrol were in charge of patrolling the border in between legal ports of entry while a team made up of “legacy Customs inspectors” and USDA agriculture inspectors were combined and renamed into the blue-uniformed Office of Field Operations to handle legitimate trade and travel through “ports of entry” like land crossings, seaports, and airports.
PROBLEM #1: A HIRING SURGE GONE WRONG
One of the first things Congress did with the new agency was to super-charge its hiring. The agency’s own studies concluded the Border Patrol did not have “operational control” over 97 percent of the border.
The plan to remedy this lack of control of the border was audacious—and remarkably ill-conceived: During the eight years of the Bush administration, the Border Patrol surged from 9,200 agents in 2001 to some 18,000 agents—and eventually peaked in the Obama administration at 21,000 agents. Add in the officers of the Office of Field Operations and the air and marine officers, and CBP had a gun-carrying workforce of about 45,000 agents and officers.
There was plenty of evidence even before the hiring surge to believe it was a bad idea. Police departments in Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., had all been beset by systemic misconduct scandals after they had tried to grow their force rapidly in the 1980s and ’90s.
The Border Patrol hiring surge would be no different.
The surge meant the agency had to search far and wide for increasingly less qualified candidates. The agency raised its recruiting age limit from 37 to 40, and regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks. Agents in the field pejoratively referred to the new hires as “No Trainee Left Behind.” By the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years.
This hiring surge collided with two other fundamental and foundational problems with CBP—its legal authorities and its culture.
PROBLEM #2: LIMITED LEGAL AUTHORITIES
Understanding both ICE and CBP requires starting with the difference between two US government “job codes,” known as “1811s” vs. “1801s.”
So-called “GS-1801s” are the federal government’s street cops—the bottom ranks of law enforcement. The positions come with less training and lower education requirements—usually only a high school degree or equivalent—as well as more limited authority.
All of CBP, including both the Border Patrol and Office of Field Operation, are “1801s,” as are all ICE ERO deportation officers. All of them have strictly limited arrest powers.
Then there are the “GS-1811” positions, known as “Special Agent / Criminal Investigator.” These are the government’s detectives—think the FBI, Secret Service, US Marshals, and, notably, ICE HSI agents. These positions usually require more work experience and a college degree, and come with far more training (months, not weeks), and more broad investigative authority.
The difference between 1801s and 1811s may seem minor, but it’s incredibly important in understanding why CBP and ICE are as rogue and poorly trained as they are.
For one thing, that subtle difference in job code meant that CBP was entirely set up as 1801s, which inadvertently meant that it had no authority or power to investigate wrongdoing by its own agents and workforce—to make that point more sharply, in the post-9/11 reorganization, we created the nation’s largest law enforcement agency and didn’t give it the power to have the internal affairs capacity that one would expect at even a mid-size local police department.
It was a key ingredient in a recipe for disaster—one that would not be fixed until the final months of the Obama administration, more than a decade after the creation of DHS.
Which brings me to the third fundamental challenge and problem with CBP and, especially, the Border Patrol—its fiercely independent and closed-rank culture and tradition, borne of policing and protecting a largely unpopulated, harsh, and isolated region along the US-Mexican border.
PROBLEM #3: TRADITION AND CULTURE
The Border Patrol’s culturally and traditionally something akin to what I’ve described as “part police force, part occupying army, [and] part frontier cavalry.” The traditional job of Border Patrol agents has been hard—they often work alone or in pairs in rural, rugged terrain, with backup and help often miles and sometimes even an hour or more away. Agents developed a strong tradition of frontier-style justice; its agency motto, “Honor first,” is as much a statement of machismo as it is about integrity.
This fierce independence manifests itself in distinct areas worthy of note, which combine to make it particularly susceptible for a would-be authoritarian—its approach to its daily work and use-of-force; a deep-seated institutional culture of racism and misogyny; and a pugilistic approach to politics.
Use of force: This is an agency that is uniquely callous about human lives—both of US citizens and migrants.
Racism and misogyny: The racist and nativist roots of the Border Patrol are well known, as scholars like Kelly Lytle Hernandez traced in her book “Migra!”
But what is remarkable is how the seeping cultural corruption since 9/11 has taken an agency founded a century ago to enforce explicitly racist policies and managed to make it even more racist.
This underlying racism, misogyny, and nativism has contributed to the third area of the Border Patrol’s culture I’d like to address—its unusually pugilistic participation in national politics. The Border Patrol union has particularly resisted transparency efforts and attempts to rein in use-of-force. When CBP announced it would recognize officers and agents who de-escalated confrontations and avoid using deadly force, the union called the new award “despicable.”
The union has also especially carved out a unique relationship with Donald Trump since the earliest days of his presidential campaign. It was the first union to endorse Trump—later followed by ICE’s union—and Donald Trump actually first wore his now signature “Make America Great Again” hat during a summer 2015 tour of the border initiated by local Border Patrol union officials.
The entirely predictable result: It wouldn’t surprise any seasoned law enforcement leader that doubling the size of CBP without adequate vetting, training, oversight, or management led to a host of problems—not the least of which was the stunning arrest statistics I cited earlier.
Hugely elevated misconduct, crime, and corruption problems continue to dog CBP to this day.
Overall, CBP’s arrest and misconduct rate is FIVE TIMES higher than other federal law enforcement agencies. CBP’s corruption problem was so bad that, according to what two CBP officials told me, DHS leadership under Janet Napolitano ordered CBP to change its definition of corruption to downplay to Congress the breadth of the problem.
US law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005.
It’s a story that too much of the public still doesn’t know and too many policymakers still don’t understand.
Let me add one more caveat here: It’s not my goal here to paint all of CBP with a brush of misconduct, racism, and corruption. Many agents and officers are excellent—serving our nation in hard jobs in the best possible tradition. But as one female agent told Mother Jones in 2024, “I was a loyal agent and employee for 27 years and I see the good in the agency. But I can’t deny that the worst that I’ve seen has come at the hands of agents, and not the criminals we’re supposed to arrest.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ICE
Now let me turn my attention for a moment to ICE. In the reshuffling of DHS, ICE got the job no one wanted—immigration enforcement domestically is arguably the country’s most fraught and unsettled policy area.
For most of its roughly 20 years of existence, ICE has faced a clear problem—there are way way way more undocumented immigrants in the United States than Congress funded ICE to find, arrest, and deport. For many years, ICE was budgeted for around 400,000 deportations.
ICE’s ERO side has long relied upon and focused heavily on what’s known as “prosecutorial discretion.” Under that strategy, ICE ERO mostly focused on deporting people with a so-called “final order of removal”—e.g., people who had exhausted all the legal process and ignored the binding decision of the immigration courts to leave the country—or people with criminal records above and beyond simply being undocumented—e.g., the much-talked murderers, drug smugglers, gang members, rapists, and the like who are always cited as the Trump administration’s main targets.
That meant—generally speaking, and again with the all caveats I listed above—that if you were an undocumented immigrant but weren’t on the government’s radar, you didn’t have to worry much in your day-to-day life.
The strategy of discretion worked. By 2011, nearly half of the 400,000 people deported by ICE had a criminal conviction, up from a third in 2008.
That work was manpower intensive, but it also meant that they were making a real difference in terms of crime in the United States. They were actually finding, arresting, and deporting the “worst of the worst,” while, for the most part, leaving the day-laborers and abuelas alone to await whatever political solution to America’s immigration crisis Congress could someday find.
Then Donald Trump was elected president and took office a second time last year.
Today, that “prosecutorial discretion” is out the window. Last spring, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller set an arbitrary target of one million deportations a year—which translates into immigration officers making 3,000 arrests a day. That new quota meant ICE and CBP had to abandon any pretext of targeted enforcement operations; it took too long and required too many officers.
Those raids where Greg Bovino’s heavily-armed CBP agents storm into Home Depot parking lots are a necessity of this new quota because it’s the low-hanging fruit of immigration enforcement.
Similarly, ICE and CBP officers around the country—and particularly in targeted operations in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, or Minneapolis—are stopping, detaining, and deporting people with no criminal records who are following all legal procedures for their asylum, immigration, or citizenship proceedings. These actions aren’t because any of these immigrants pose a threat to the United States—it’s because they’re easy pickings and ICE and CBP have embraced “quantity” over “quality.” The terror and trauma of theses arrests is the point—not the safety of the United States.
That shift is reflected in how most people now detained by ICE have no criminal record. A CATO Institute roundup in November found that “nearly three in four (73 percent) had no criminal conviction” and just “5 percent had a violent criminal conviction.”
This is not how ICE has traditionally been used, and CBP wasn’t supposed to be routinely policing the streets and cities of America’s interior.
The Border Patrol and ICE are just not trained, prepared, or accustomed to patrolling “regular” America and rolling through neighborhoods, school grounds, parking lots. They’re not regular police, and they don’t know how to behave or navigate urban civilian environments. They don’t have the muscle memory or de-escalation skills of dealing with angry citizens or innocent people. It’s clear that many lack real-world policing skills.
The fact that they’re instead approaching their work not as law enforcement but as an occupation military force is clear in the language officials are using; yesterday alone, Greg Bovino gave an attaboy video calling for agents to “Turn and Burn” and Tom Homan referred to agents deploying to Minneapolis as being “in theater.” This is not the mentality we want guiding or inspiring a federal law enforcement agency.
Their poor training and sense of political impunity is contributing to and driving their “Arrest First and Question Later” approach, which is the exact opposite of what would you expect in a free and democratic society, and it has had entirely predictable outcomes. ProPublica found in October that more than 170 US citizens had been arrested by immigration authorities, some disappearing into ICE’s apparatus for days.
Sometimes I believe that American exceptionalism—the sense that “it can’t happen here”—blinds us to the realities of our current political life. The behavior of ICE and CBP over the last year is one such case. In any other foreign country, if a US reporter was writing about these raids and the occupation of Chicago last fall or Minneapolis right now, we wouldn’t hesitate to call ICE or CBP as a “paramilitary force loyal to the regime” or “masked right-wing militia” (and that, by the way, is exactly what other countries’ media are calling it here).
And, as an even larger cohort of even less qualified and less trained ICE and CBP officers begin to hit the streets, this is all almost certainly going to get worse.
I want to focus my final section of remarks about what we can expect in the months to come as ICE and CBP together see a flood of funding that is unprecedented—even measured against the wild amounts of money thrown at immigration and border security after 9/11.
In 2014, my Border Patrol reporting was titled “The Green Monster.” Today, we’re creating something even more dangerous to the country: A masked monster of a law enforcement agency—one uniquely unsuited for its new power, authority, reach, and funding levels. This time, unlike the money for the Border Patrol after 9/11, ICE’s giant new supercharged ranks will be focused not on America’s borders, but America’s streets, neighborhoods, and businesses.
We are set to repeat as a nation every single mistake we made after 9/11 with CBP and the Border Patrol—but worse.
The goal for growing ICE with 10,000 new officers is both a larger total number than the Border Patrol tried to hire during its surge and also represents a larger total percentage of the existing ICE force. ICE is set to receive $30 billion in new funding for this hiring surge.
Moreover, we should have specific fresh concerns about WHO is applying for these new jobs at ICE and CBP, which also has plans to hire thousands of new agents. After 9/11, the Border Patrol played on patriotism in its recruiting. Today, DHS and ICE are relying are explicitly white nationalist rhetoric and imagery in their promotion materials.
As one of the first moves to revamp its training, ICE proved that it’s building a Trump cult of personality as much as hiring for a law enforcement agency—it cut its previous five-month training academy to just 47 days, a period chosen, according to what three officials told The Atlantic, “because Trump is the 47th president.” ICE is no longer interviewing candidates before hiring them and swearing them in virtually, promising that it’ll catch up on their background checks later, CNN reported. The training has already been cut a second time to just 42 days to speed getting officers into the field.
The fact that as DHS deploys CBP and ICE in new ways in American life that it is actually CUTTING, and not increasing, training, shows that DHS has no intention to have them up to the basic national law enforcement standards—they are being designed to be a blunt instrument only, a roving paramilitary force that serves at the pleasure of the president himself.
Lastly, news headlines are also beginning to feel eerily familiar about what the early warning signs of CBP’s tidal wave of misconduct and criminality looked like in the late 2000s. There are major warning signs that ICE’s workforce has a similar misconduct problem today. In December, a detention officer at an ICE facility in Louisiana pleaded guilty to raping a Nicaraguan detainee for months, and an off-duty ICE officer who shot and killed a man in L.A. on New Year’s Eve had been accused of “allegedly whipp[ing] his sons with a belt and ma[king] racist and homophobic remarks in the past.”)
And again—the hiring surge is just getting started.
Furthermore, there are two specific new concerns I see looming on the horizon that I have not addressed previously in today’s testimony.
First is ICE and CBP’s giant investment and deployment of surveillance technologies—some of which have been leading to mistaken arrests in the field and much of which, as currently envisioned, is not consistent with policing in a free society. ICE is extensively using data-mining and facial recognition technologies with little public understanding of the safeguards behind their use. In particular, there’s a facial recognition app called “Mobile Fortify,” which ICE is using and claiming is the “be-all-and-end-all” of whether someone is in the United States legally. There are multiple documented instances where this app has returned false or contradictory information and yet ICE has relied on it to make detentions and arrests.
Second, I have not spoken much about ICE’s detention centers; the Trump administration and ICE are in the midst of enormously ambitious plans to double the capacity of detention facilities, from about 55,000 beds to more than 107,000 beds, as part of the plan to pour about $45 billion into detention facilities. I would expect and predict that over the course of 2026, we will see this plan become the center of new scandals.
Let me leave you today with a final point: This doesn’t change unless we demand change and make it change—the way that the funding for ICE has been allocated, it can spend this money straight through 2029. Congress is going to have to act to turn that funding and hiring spigot off—otherwise, this continues on autopilot for the next four years. But the damage we are doing to our own country is long-lasting. Remember we are two decades removed from the start of the CBP hiring surge and I can still find you a news story or headline every single day that traces its origins back to the mistakes made in that surge.
We as a nation must act to change the trajectory of immigration enforcement in our country.
America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year—let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.
2026-02-05 03:00:00
This story was co-published with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.
On December 31, in the waning hours of 2025, the Washington Post reported on an internal ICE document that concerned the agency’s “wartime recruitment” strategy, or rather its attempt to expeditiously swell its ranks of deportation officers. The memo, according to the Post, had in mind a pool of ideal candidates who lead a “patriotic” lifestyle and have an interest in “military and veterans affairs,” “physical training,” “gun rights organizations,” and “tactical gear brands.”
The memo’s logic was easy enough to understand, since what it described, if you read between the lines, was an informal paramilitary that was waiting to be tapped. Over the last month—as a violent federal occupation has unfolded in Minneapolis, where veteran immigration agents brutally killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti—both the memo and the new recruits it would draw into the fold began to take up outsized space in my mind. For a long time now, the gun rights movement has been animated by the promise of a violent reckoning, a sentiment nurtured by the groups that represent it and Republican politicians, who seek to channel a wild, truculent energy into votes and profits. It seemed the promise was being fulfilled in Minneapolis, like the fatal denouement of a production that had one harbinger after another.
“Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range.”
During the 2016 election cycle, when as a reporter I attended my first National Rifle Association annual meeting, I began to see that the promised reckoning could not be delayed forever. At the convention, in Louisville, Kentucky, there was the tradeshow floor, akin to a medieval arms bazaar and containing some 520,000 square feet of guns and tactical accessories. There were seminars covering “Defensive Shooting Skills Development,” “Methods of Concealed Carry,” “Current and Emerging Threats,” and “The Bulletproof Mind For The Armed Civilian.” And there was a line of some 7,000 people, leading into an arena called “Freedom Hall,” where there would be speeches by the emerging Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, and Mark “Oz” Geist, a member of the Benghazi diplomatic compound’s security team that had come under siege in 2012.
Three middle-aged white men stood in line in front of me making confident assertions about Barack Obama and “government cover-ups.” One informed the others that Obama, still president, had purchased a “$10 million mansion in Saudi Arabia,” where he and his family would flee after leaving the White House to “evade charges.” Trump would of course chase him down, the man assured everyone, while the United States reembraced frontier justice and flourished under his rule.
The line then moved inside, 7,000 people took their seats, and the Republican presidential candidate promised them: “I will never let you down.” Based on the ecstatic response from the crowd, it seemed to me that the message Trump had transmitted was about power—raw power—and who would wield it during his administration.
Going back to at least the early nineties, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was in office, gun rights organizations, led by the NRA, and various prominent Republicans pushed an argument for the Second Amendment that was disguised as a historical one. The right to bear arms, they said, was intended to be unfettered because its purpose was to provide citizens with the means to fight a tyrannical government that had turned against its own people. Federal agents, under Clinton, were “jack-booted government thugs,” according to a notorious fundraising letter signed by former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. These thugs, he said, had the power to “take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”
It was often implied that such arguments, which grew in prominence during Barack Obama’s tenure, applied only to the Democratic Party, which posed a vague yet persistent threat to “freedom,” while the Republican party would preserve it. Republican values were antithetical to tyranny, whereas Democrats were inherently tyrannical, and therefore any actions taken by the former were in service of saving the country from the latter.
In 2016, while sitting in “Freedom Hall,” I began to feel a sense of alarm that I’d never before felt. Under Trump, this contingent would feel it had permission to act against the enemy. The carrot that was dangled during each election cycle—in fundraising pitches by gun rights groups and the sale of military-style firearms to civilians—was finally being fed to the horse. There would be no more “couch commandos,” as gun industry executives referred to their most enthusiastic customers in the years after 9/11. This was the period in which soldiers were in American streets, and the industry, en masse, had seized on a marketing opportunity to blur the line between soldier and civilian.
What the industry was selling was theatrical participation, the thrill of COSPLAY, except the props were real. “As close as you can get without enlisting,” one gun company, in 2010, boasted as it advertised its “semi-auto only version of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s newest rifle.” “Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range,” said another manufacturer about its latest assault weapon. In the ad it was equipped with a scope and propped on a tripod, as if intended for a sniper, which of course was the point. Companies were selling military-style weapons with a “combat-proven design,” that provided “versatility on the range or during patrol,” and were a symbol of “bravery on duty.” To enhance the feeling of a simulated combat experience, manufacturers of AR-style firearms cut product placement deals with video game designers. An executive at the gun company Sig Sauer told authors Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, who co-wrote the book American Gun, that featuring the weapons in games was tantamount to “seed planting.”
Buying a gun had become a way to serve at home, and serving at home came to mean preparing for Democratic tyranny. In 2015, for instance, while Obama was still president, the Pentagon prepared for a training exercise across the American Southwest called Jade Helm 15. It was here that the performative, paranoid politics of the right during the Obama years reached something of a fever pitch. Conservative bloggers and commentators created widespread hysteria by alleging that the exercise was a veil for imposing martial law, confiscating firearms, arresting dissidents, and taking over Texas. The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, called on the Texas State Guard to monitor developments. It was “important,” he said, that Texans know their “rights” and “liberties” would not be “infringed.” The last word did not seem like an accidental allusion to the Second Amendment.
For conservative elites, the preservation of power requires giving those beneath them a taste of it, without actually surrendering anything substantial, such as higher tax payments. In the meantime, they have created a shadow army, empowering them not with wealth but with the alluring prospect of crushing their opponents. A few months after the 2016 NRA convention, Trump said at a rally that Hillary Clinton “wants to abolish” the Second Amendment. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he went on. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” Trump for much of his career had been the paragon of vapid wealth, but unlike other leaders of the right who came before him, he was signaling that he would take the army off standby, out of the realm of theater, and move the violent plot forward.
The 2020 anti-lockdown Covid protests were a stark indicator of the new paradigm under Trump, who directed blame for restrictions toward Democrats such as Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer. After state lawmakers voted to extend her state of emergency, a large group of men carrying assault rifles packed the Michigan Capitol rotunda and attempted to barge into the legislature, where a line of police guarded the doors. They screamed in the faces of the officers, who looked on impassively.
The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed.
As the year wore on, Trump told the Proud Boys during a televised presidential debate to “stand back and stand by.” His loss to Joe Biden then set into motion the January 6 insurrection. Oath Keepers stashed an arsenal of weapons at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. One member imagined a scenario in which “millions die resisting the death of the 1st and 2nd amendment.” A week later, a middle-aged white man named Ian Rogers, a California resident and proud NRA member, was arrested with his best friend for planning to attack the state’s Democratic headquarters. He owned roughly 50 firearms, including four illegal automatic weapons, and had stockpiled 15,000 rounds of ammunition. Writing to me from prison last year, he said that the Democratic Party was “the greatest threat facing the United States today.” He went on, “Just as Rome was brought down by enemies within, we have such traitors amongst us now,” adding, “These people fundamentally hate the country and they will do anything to impose their vision on the nation.”
Now, in Minneapolis, masked federal agents, dressed as soldiers, have fatally shot two American citizens. Both were victims of an occupation, in which the Trump administration has unleashed a savage campaign of terror against civilians. The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed. The party in power is not a Democratic regime, but a Republican one, prompting accusations of hypocrisy against gun rights organizations, who have had little to say and have not called on their followers to face down tyranny in Minneapolis.
Following the merciless second killing, of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, federal officials, led by Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, concocted a false narrative alleging that Pretti had murderous intentions. Pretti had a sidearm on his waist, and they shamelessly pointed to it as evidence, even though the gun was holstered, he was legally carrying it, and agents shot him after they had removed the weapon.
Officials also tried to argue that, owing to the firearm’s presence, Pretti’s death was justified. This assertion presented an existential quandary for gun rights organizations, which have spent decades working to dismantle carry restrictions. One by one, the groups issued statements about how a holstered handgun did not give law enforcement the right to kill a person. That was the wrong message, the groups said, but the tyranny of the occupation itself was treated as legitimate. Gun Owners of America stated that “the Left must stop antagonizing @ICEgov and @CBP agents who are taking criminals off the streets and play a crucial role in protecting communities and upholding the rule of law.” The NRA similarly declared, “For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs.”
What is happening now, in other words, is a reminder that the argument about government tyranny was always a canard. Beneath it lurked what was really at stake, which was the right to assert control through force. Over and over, conservatives and Second Amendment stalwarts have claimed that right as their own, with Minneapolis being the latest example. The story they have told for decades is a binary one—good versus evil. In that framing, they are righteous and have but one job: Vanquish the enemy. Hold power. Save America.
The same day Pretti was shot, video surfaced of federal agents pointing their weapons at civilians. “It’s like ‘Call of Duty,’” someone could be heard saying, referencing the blockbuster military-style video game series. Since then, Trump has suggested he will deescalate in Minneapolis. But whatever happens, the players have had a taste of the real thing, and there’s no going back.
2026-02-05 00:27:49
President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced Wednesday that the Trump administration will remove 700 federal immigration officers from Minneapolis. The decision, effective immediately, still leaves over 2,000 agents in the area, nearly four times the number of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department.
Homan claimed that although he and the president shared the goal “to achieve a complete drawdown and end this surge, as soon as we can,” such a complete withdrawal would depend on the “continued cooperation from state and local law enforcement and the decrease of the violence, the rhetoric, and the attacks” against immigration officials.
The plan marked a stark contrast to ICE’s retreat in Maine, after Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican up for re-election this year, abruptly announced last week that ICE was ending its surge in the state, citing a conversation she had with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
In his press conference, Homan also said that Wednesday’s reduction did not signal a pause in Trump’s overarching goal of mass deportations.
“Let me be clear: President Trump fully intends to achieve mass deportations during this administration, and immigration enforcement actions will continue every day throughout this country,” Homan said. “President Trump made a promise. And we have not directed otherwise.”
Homan was sent to Minneapolis to take over what the administration calls “Operation Metro Surge,” replacing Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino after the fatal shootings of US citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents.
The presence of immigration officers over the last month has seen repeated use of chemical irritants on protestors, the targeting of children at school, the separation of families, and the detention of people here legally—all of which have created an environment of intense fear.
2026-02-04 22:11:58
A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
With so much going on these days—ICE murders, Venezuela, Epstein documents, and Melania—one development has not gotten enough attention: Donald Trump’s plan to become king of the world.
Last month, Trump announced he was establishing a so-called Board of Peace to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza, and the chair of this august group would be…him. And the executive board would include Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gabriel, and Trump donor and billionaire investment banker Marc Rowan, as well as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and World Bank head Ajay Banga.
Not a very independent board, is it? By the way, the latest release of Jeffrey Epstein documents shows that Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, according to the Financial Times, had “wide-ranging discussions” with Epstein, though Apollo previously insisted it had not done any business with the sex criminal. (Former Apollo chief Leon Black resigned his position in 2021 after an independent review showed he paid $158 million to Epstein for financial services.) And fun fact about Gabriel: During the January 6 riot, when he was a White House speechwriter, he sent a text message saying, “Potus im sure is loving this.”
Each member of the executive board, the White House said, will oversee “a defined portfolio critical to Gaza’s stabilization and long-term success,” and a Gaza Executive Board within the Board of Peace will also be set up, with Kushner, Witkoff, Blair, and Rowan as members, along with several others, including a Cypriot-Israeli billionaire, an Egyptian intelligence official, and a UN official. No Palestinians were recruited for either of these boards.
So it looked as if this Board of Peace would be a Trump-dominated, crony-ish operation deciding the fate of 2 million Gazans. Not surprising. But it’s turning out to be much more.
The opportunities for graft and grift are immense.
Shortly after the White House unveiled this outfit, it released the charter for the Board of Peace. Oddly, the document said nothing about Gaza. It proclaimed that the Board of Peace would seek to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” That is, anywhere in the world. Under the rules presented in the charter, Trump would be the chairman and the US representative to the Board of Peace…forever. That is, until he resigns or is booted due to “incapacity”—which would require a unanimous vote by the executive board. And, according to the charter, he decides who’s on the executive board. Each member serves entirely at his pleasure (and whim).
Even after he leaves the White House, Trump will rule this competitor to the United Nations (which now is in danger of financial collapse). And the charter gives him “exclusive authority” to “appropriate,” which seems to mean total control over the funds. Also, he determines what nations can join. Nations can only serve a three-year term, subject to renewal by, of course, Trump. But if a country ponies up $1 billion (in cash) to the Board of Peace, the three-year limit is waived.
Trump is essentially cooking up a global slush fund over which he will exert complete control. Countries that get in early—while he’s president—will certainly be in a strong position to request preferential treatment in state affairs. The opportunities for graft and grift are immense. He will probably ask Congress to kick in the $1 billion pay-to-play membership fee to guarantee he’ll have a pot of money to spend (or pocket) at his fancy.
What’s to prevent him from naming Ivanka Trump his successor? Or Don Jr.? Or Jared? (Talk about a succession battle!) Under this charter, Trump could establish an international monarchy of sorts. Hail King Barron!
That’s not all. How will Trump’s successor as chair be picked? Silly to ask, right? By Trump, naturally. Per the charter, he will designate a successor who “shall immediately assume the position” if Trump leaves or is—ha ha ha—pushed out because he cannot do the job. The charter, as I read it, doesn’t say how long the successor will reign—presumably, under the same terms as Trump. What’s to prevent him from naming Ivanka Trump his successor? Or Don Jr.? Or Jared? (Talk about a succession battle!) Under this charter, Trump could establish an international monarchy of sorts. Hail King Barron!
At the recent World Economic Forum shindig in Davos, Trump held a charter signing ceremony for the Board of Peace, with representatives from Argentina, Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Qatar, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Paraguay, and Pakistan. Not to be condescending, but this is not the A-team, and many of these nations have assorted human rights problems—an issue absent from the charter. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who backs this Trump venture, couldn’t be there because he’s subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Gaza. He was present in spirit, no doubt. Conspicuously missing from the lineup were the United States’ most important allies.
To add to the absurdity, Trump has invited Russia and China to join. Offering a spot on the Board of Peace to Vladimir Putin while his invasion force is killing civilians in Ukraine is quite a bad joke—and an insult to those Ukrainians losing their lives and their loved ones to combat Russia’s aggression.
Trump’s Board of Peace is another Trump scam—though much grander than Trump Steaks or Trump’s meme coin (which has dropped about 90 percent in value since being launched a year ago).
In fact, the whole thing is a bit of a joke. As Charbel Antoun, a writer who specializes in foreign policy, points out, “The Board of Peace lacks the basic components of a functioning international institution: no defined legal status within existing international law; no enforcement tools or dispute resolution procedures; no accountability mechanisms; a mandate that drifts from Gaza reconstruction into a vague promise to ‘address global crises.’” It can’t really do anything. Except be a platform for you-know-who.
Meanwhile, it’s unclear what the Board of Peace will be doing about Gaza. At Davos, Kushner unveiled a Gaza development plan that called for glittering high-rises on the coastline and gigantic data centers and industrial parks inland. He had a nifty PowerPoint presentation but apparently had not consulted with any Palestinians. He arrogantly signaled this scheme was not open to discussion, remarking, “There is no Plan B.” Kushner did not say who would finance this makeover—or profit from it.
Trump’s Board of Peace is another Trump scam—though much grander than Trump Steaks or Trump’s meme coin (which has dropped about 90 percent in value since being launched a year ago). Trump is looking to shake down nations that want to earn his favor—it’s only a billion bucks!—and set up an outfit he can exploit once he has wrung the Oval Office dry. The charter calls for an official seal for the organization—and the logo Trump approved shows only half the world—but it left out what Trump really wants: a crown.
2026-02-04 20:30:00
In medieval England, there was no law if your pockets were deep. Crimes had fixed costs: A couple of hundred gold coins got you off the hook if you killed a poor man; 2,000 if you killed a rich one. America’s founders imagined a different way forward. In their debates about the pardon power, Edmund Randolph, later the first attorney general, demanded an exception for treason. “The President may himself be guilty,” he objected. “The traitors may be his own instruments.”
Randolph secured an exception for those impeached, but other than that, the president can pardon anyone for any reason. And while there have always been dubious pardons for political cronies, “unprecedented” doesn’t begin to describe how Donald Trump has corrupted the power of presidential forgiveness. First, there’s the scope: He granted 238 pardons and commutations in his first term. Last year, he went into overdrive, granting some 1,700 more, including to many key actors in the plot to steal the 2020 election. That included all 1,583 people charged with or convicted of joining in the January 6 riot—a mass pardon of violent insurrectionists exceeded only by Andrew Johnson’s blanket amnesty for Confederate troops. In fact, two-thirds of all pardons since 2001 went to people who invaded the Capitol, including 169 people charged with beating cops and 174 who stormed its grounds with a deadly weapon. Some went on to get new convictions: possession of child porn, even reckless homicide.
Trump’s other pardons show his affinity for white-collar criminals, especially those who line MAGA pockets. Con artist Jacob Wohl and his business partner Jack Burkman got a million to help nursing home fraudster Joseph Schwartz. Lobbyist Ches McDowell, a hunting pal of Donald Trump Jr., charged at least $450,000 to bag a pardon for crypto mogul Changpeng Zhao. Altogether, Trump has erased more than a billion dollars in restitution and nearly 2,000 convictions. You need data to understand a break this extreme—so we crunched the numbers.
The most revealing (and ridiculous) abuses of pardon power in Trump’s second term.
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, facilitating money laundering
What they were convicted of: In 2023, the then-CEO of Binance pleaded guilty to allowing bad actors—including some from ISIS—to use his massive cryptocurrency exchange to skirt international sanctions. Binance was fined $4.3 billion; Zhao personally paid a $50 million penalty. Trump said he knew nothing about the case—except that he’d “heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
Trump said: “I don’t know who he is.”
Juan Orlando Hernández, drug trafficking
What they were convicted of: In a landmark Department of Justice drug trafficking case, the former president of Honduras was extradited in 2022 for helping flood the US with hundreds of tons of cocaine. His conviction in 2024 marked a major win for Biden’s DOJ. In November, Trump wiped out his 45-year prison sentence. About a month later, Trump invaded Venezuela and spirited away President Nicolás Maduro, whom the administration accused of trafficking coke.
Trump said: “It was a Biden setup.”
Todd and Julie Chrisley, tax evasion and fraud
What they were convicted of: Real estate magnates. Reality TV stars. Right-wing icons. Convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud. If it sounds like that would strike a chord with Trump, you’re right. Their daughter, Savannah, spoke at the Republican National Convention, part of her campaign to promote the idea that the Chrisleys had been persecuted for their conservative beliefs. It worked.
Trump said: “I don’t know them, but give them my regards.”
Lauren Handy, blocking clinic access and harassment
What they were convicted of: In his second term, Trump became the first president to pardon convictions under the FACE Act, the 1994 law against blocking access to abortion clinics. Handy helped lead a movement defined by clinic invasions, threats toward providers, intimidation of patients, and theft of fetuses. Sentenced in May 2024, she was among 24 anti-abortion activists Trump pardoned—one of whom said they were “emboldened” by the president’s decision.
Trump said: “Great honor to sign this.”
David Gentile, securities and wire fraud
What they were convicted of: The private equity tycoon ran a Ponzi scheme that made $1.6 billion by fleecing 17,000 investors, including some 4,000 senior citizens, many of whom lost their life savings. Trump excused Gentile from paying back $15.5 million to his victims and freed him from prison 12 days into a seven-year sentence. Meanwhile, he didn’t pardon Gentile’s co-conspirator.
Trump said: Nothing.
January 6 rioters, seditious conspiracy to deadly assault
What they were convicted of: 1,583 cases. One stroke of the pen. Hours after taking office for the second time, Trump nixed all charges stemming from the Capitol riot, even for those who perpetrated the most brutal assaults—calling them victims of a “grave national injustice.” At least 33 J6 insurrectionists have racked up new charges since the riot, including reckless homicide, domestic violence, terroristic threats, and home invasion.
Trump said: “Fuck it. Release ’em all.”
Dread Pirate Roberts, drug crimes and money laundering
What they were convicted of: Trump’s first individual pardon this term went to Ross Ulbricht, alias “Dread Pirate Roberts”: the libertarian architect of Silk Road, the original dark web black market. Though known as a drug bazaar, Silk Road originally moved everything from arms to stolen identities—Ulbricht used contacts he met through the site to order six hits on online enemies. His life sentence, the result of a massive federal operation, was wiped out on Trump’s second day.
Trump said: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
Carlos Watson, securities fraud and identity theft
What they were convicted of: Through Ozy, his richly funded startup, Watson went from TV host to new media mogul—and then to convicted fraudster, after a Justice Department probe found that he had defrauded investors of some $60 million. Trump commuted Watson’s 10-year sentence on charges of wire fraud and identity theft, forcing the SEC to drop its efforts to collect restitution—and allowing him to keep tens of millions in ill-gotten gains.
Trump said: Nothing.
Tina Peters, identity theft, influencing a public servant
What they were convicted of: Colorado election clerk Peters, a Trump loyalist, was on the front line of the push to rig the 2020 election. Convicted of nine felonies for election interference, charges that centered on breaching voter data to “prove” Trump won Colorado, Peters is serving a nine-year prison term. Trump’s pardon meant nothing—Peters isn’t serving federal time—but he coupled it with a promise to punish Colorado if its governor didn’t free her.
Trump said: “If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”
George Santos, wire fraud, campaign finance violations
What they were convicted of: Party monster George Santos spent less than a year in Congress—and, to all appearances, wanted to get caught. Santos was comically open about his corruption: straw donors who’d never heard of him; election funds gone to Botox, OnlyFans, and luxury shopping; a campaign built on weird, self-aggrandizing lies about his family, career, and non-existent college sports career. Trump, who granted him clemency weeks into a seven-year term, must have loved it.
Trump said: “At least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”
Rogues’ Gallery photo credits: Vincent Isore/IP3/Zuma, Gabriel Aponte/Vizzor Image/Getty, Tommy Garcia/USA Network/Getty, Eric Lee/Washington Post/Getty, GPB Capital Holdings, Unsplash (2), Gage Skidmore/Zuma, Britta Pedersen/DPA/Zuma, Marc Piscotty/Getty, Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma
2026-02-04 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Kristi Noem faces intensifying public scrutiny over her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Criticism of the former South Dakota governor has focused on her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent and her oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The controversies have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers—and a small but noteworthy group of Republicans—for her resignation or impeachment.
The immediate flashpoint has been the January 24 killing of Pretti, which occurred during ongoing protests in Minneapolis. Noem initially described Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, as a “domestic terrorist,” a narrative repeated by others in the Trump administration. Her account was almost immediately contradicted by numerous videos that showed Pretti was unarmed and restrained when federal agents shot him repeatedly.
“She should be out of a job,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said after the videos emerged. While President Donald Trump has publicly said Noem’s position is secure, a number of potential successors have reportedly emerged, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency.
“It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something to happen.”
Noem’s handling of the killing—which came two weeks after a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis fatally shot protestor Renée Good—follows sustained criticism of her management of FEMA. Lawmakers, disaster response experts, and disaster survivors say her policies have slowed emergency response and delayed recovery funding. Long before the crisis in Minnesota, concerns were building over her approach to FEMA preparedness and spending and its response to calamities like last year’s devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country.
“It’s a policy of chaotic austerity,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies disasters and adaptation. “It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something to happen.”
FEMA helps coordinate the response to major disasters like last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, but the agency more often acts like a bank, reimbursing states and cities for their disaster preparedness and recovery spending. When Noem took office, she throttled that spending by, among other things, requiring her personal sign-off on all expenses over $100,000. The pace of disbursements has since slowed to a trickle.
Those restrictions reportedly hindered the agency’s response to emergencies like July’s floods in Texas because officials could not pre-position search and rescue teams. The acting head of FEMA at the time, David Richardson, was reportedly unreachable for several hours, and the agency did not answer two-thirds of calls to its hotline. More than 130 people died in the floods.
On Thursday, a coalition of disaster survivors released a “report card” that gave Noem’s leadership an “F.” Brandy Gerstner, a member of that coalition, lost her home and belongings in the Texas flood. She and her family live in the rural community of Sandy Creek and spent three days without power or water waiting for federal assistance.
“Official help was scarce,” she said. “Despite that, Kristi Noem and Texas Gov. [Greg] Abbott have described the response as exceptional, a lie that insults the memory of those lost in the floods.”
Beyond floods in Texas and fires in Southern California, the United States experienced relatively few major disasters last year. Even so, Noem’s restrictions on FEMA spending has also slowed payments to local governments still recovering from past catastrophes. The reimbursement backlog has reached $17 billion, according to the New York Times—more than the agency spends on such things in a typical year.
Delays have also affected FEMA’s efforts to reduce the impact of future catastrophes. A Grist analysis found that the agency’s net spending on resilience grants declined over the past three quarters, even as climate-driven disasters intensified nationwide. The nonprofit news outlet NOTUS identified a $1.3 billion backlog of such allocations, the primary source of federal funding for states and cities seeking to harden infrastructure. FEMA terminated another climate resilience program last year, though a court has ordered it to reinstate that program.
Former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen Jr. said Noem’s departure could ease the logjam. “I don’t see another secretary coming in that is going to want to review every single grant,” said Coen, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “I would think that most executive leaders…are gonna find that that is micromanagement.”
“There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”
Beyond Noem’s leadership lie other questions about the agency’s direction. The Trump administration has yet to nominate a permanent administrator, leaving Karen Evans, a former cybersecurity official, in charge since Richardson departed in November. Agency leaders have suggested firing more than 11,000 employees, many of them contract workers involved in local response and recovery efforts.
The Trump administration’s touted “review council” was set to produce a report on FEMA’s future, but Noem reportedly pared the council’s final report to a fraction of its original length. The panel abruptly cancelled its plans to present the findings in December, and its deadline has been pushed to March.
“I think whether she stays or goes, there are huge issues that have been created in the last year at FEMA that have to be resolved quickly ahead of hurricane season,” Labowitz, said, referring to the season to come.
Noem appeared to soften her approach last week. The agency paused its planned terminations, and Noem hosted her first in-person briefing with agency employees, whom she attempted to rally ahead of Winter Storm Fern. She also appeared to respond to mounting criticism on Thursday when she announced the release of $2.2 billion in disaster response funds.
The money will reimburse states and local governments for repair costs associated with events like Hurricane Helene, the 2023 floods in Vermont, and coastal erosion in Louisiana. A press release frames the allocation as “additional” recovery money, but recipients told Grist that FEMA is merely following standard procedure in granting reimbursements.
“We were all quite surprised yesterday when we were informed that the payment was coming as quickly as it came,” said Joe Flynn, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Transportation. FEMA told his agency that it would provide $22 million to help rebuild a fleet garage destroyed in the 2023 floods. “There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”
The offer was less than the state had requested, but Flynn accepted it given uncertainty about future funding. “With everything going on in the federal government, an adequately granted award is a bird in the hand,” he said.
The press release appeared to have been composed in haste. It contained multiple typos, including a misspelling of Louisiana as “Louisianna.” The director of the Greeneville Water Commission, after confirming that FEMA will reimburse the cost of rebuilding infrastructure lost to Helene, noted that her own town’s name was spelled wrong as well.
“By the way,” said commission director Laura White, “they spelled Greeneville wrong!”
