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The pinnacle of the US company coordinating aid efforts for Hurricane Helene attacked “harmful” disinformation as she rejected claims by Donald Trump that there was no cash for storm victims as a result of it had been spent on unlawful migrants.
“This sort of rhetoric isn’t useful to folks,” mentioned Federal Emergency Administration Company Administrator Deanne Criswell in an ABC interview.
“You realize, it’s actually a disgrace that we’re placing politics forward of serving to folks and that’s what we’re right here to do.”
Criswell mentioned rampant misinformation had created “a very harmful narrative” that instils “worry” each in these attempting to assist and people in search of it.
“Individuals want assets, and we want them to get into the system,” mentioned Criswell. “It’s simply, , a disgrace that persons are sitting — sitting residence on their comfy couches — whereas we’ve hundreds of individuals right here on the bottom which have left their very own households to have the ability to assist these in want.”
Hurricane Helene has ravaged the south-east of the US and left a minimum of 227 useless, based on the Related Press. Fema says it has already spent $110mn in federal help to supply meals, water and electrical energy to victims.
Kamala Harris and Trump have travelled to Georgia and North Carolina, two essential swing states devastated by Helene, to witness restoration efforts.
The Republican presidential nominee has in contrast these efforts to the broadly panned response by the George W Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that killed 1,392 folks.
Trump instructed a crowd in Pennsylvania on Saturday night time that Helene was Harris’ “Katrina” second.
At a rally in Michigan on October 3, Trump mentioned the Biden/Harris administration “stole the Fema cash identical to they stole it from a financial institution, so they may give it to their unlawful immigrants that they wish to have vote for them.”
“That is the worst response within the historical past of hurricanes.”
Truth-checkers on the Washington Put up famous that in 2019 the Trump administration drew $271mn from Division of Homeland Safety programmes, together with $155mn for catastrophe aid, to pay for providers for asylum seekers.
In a plea for added cash from Congress, Homeland Safety Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas mentioned this week that Fema would meet “instant wants” however that the company he oversees didn’t come up with the money for to make it by means of hurricane season.
Criswell on Sunday mentioned that Fema is “completely prepared” for the subsequent storm; Tropical Storm Milton is forecast to “intensify” to be “at or close to main hurricane power” when it hits Florida this week, based on the Nationwide Hurricane Middle.
The Trump marketing campaign has claimed that Fema spent a lot paying for migrant housing that it might solely afford to offer $750 to catastrophe survivors.
“They’re providing them $750 to folks whose houses have been washed away and but we ship tens of billions of {dollars} to international international locations that most individuals have by no means heard of,” mentioned Trump on the marketing campaign rally Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, the place he survived an assassination try in July.
Fema has arrange a “hearsay web page” to reject the declare, urging folks to use each for Severe Wants Help, which supplies that money, and others.
Trump has additionally claimed with out proof that North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has steered help away from Republican areas.
Elon Musk, a Trump backer who spoke on the Butler rally, has echoed Trump’s falsehoods on his platform X. He lately instructed his 200mn followers that Fema has dedicated “treason” utilizing “up its price range ferrying illegals into the nation as a substitute of saving American lives”.
Josh Hallgreen, a Trump supporter who attended the rally, mentioned that when the candidate was president “issues have been taken care of a hell of quite a bit faster.”
He criticised the Biden/Harris administration’s “lack of response to the disasters . . . between the wars which might be occurring abroad and the hurricane”.
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