FEMA employees were abruptly placed on administrative leave Tuesday—just 24 hours after they signed an explosive open letter warning Donald Trump that the agency is being dragged back to its pre-Katrina dark ages.
The letter, signed by 191 current and former FEMA staffers, was sent to Congress and top officials on Monday. Its message was blunt—the people now running FEMA are inexperienced, politically driven, and dismantling the very programs that keep Americans safe when disaster strikes.
The writers warned that, left unchecked, the agency could stumble into catastrophe. By Tuesday evening, FEMA’s administrator’s office had fired back with suspension letters.
The employees were told they would remain in “non-duty status” but keep their pay and benefits, effectively being benched for speaking out.
The letter also cited decisions made by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem as a reason the agency could fail to manage disaster responses.
FEMA confirmed that multiple employees were placed on immediate leave, though the exact number remains unclear. Of the nearly 200 signatories, only about 36 revealed their names publicly, The Washington Post and CNN reported.
“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo, who have forgotten that their duty is to the American people not entrenched bureaucracy,” a FEMA spokesperson told the Daily Beast.
“Under the Biden Administration, the American people were abandoned as disasters ravaged North Carolina, and needed aid was denied based on party affiliation in Florida. Our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems. Under the leadership of Secretary Noem, FEMA will return to its mission of assisting Americans at their most vulnerable.”
Former President George W. Bush was heavily criticized for his administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina particularly in New Orleans, where much of the city was left underwater. In its aftermath, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (PKEMRA), which added safeguards to prevent another botched response.
The letter from FEMA employees warns that the Trump administration is rolling back those protections and calls on Congress to intervene. Their demands include shielding FEMA from “further interference” from the DHS, stopping “illegal impoundments of appropriated funding,” and protecting FEMA workers from “politically motivated firings.”
Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, was already under fire in July over the response to flooding in Texas that left about 135 people dead. Critics blamed a new rule she insisted upon, which required her personal sign-off on any contract or grant over $100,000, which delayed the deployment of an Urban Search and Rescue team by at least three days.
At least two FEMA staffers placed on leave had been part of that Texas flood response, The Washington Post reported.
Jeremy Edwards, a former FEMA press secretary who signed the “FEMA Katrina Declaration,” said the number of signatories “signifies the severity of the problem.”
“They are that scared of us being so inadequately unprepared. It speaks a lot to the situation right now,” Edwards told The Post.
The Trump administration also placed about 140 Environmental Protection Agency employees on leave in July after they signed a letter protesting the agency’s management and the treatment of federal workers.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Immigration advocates gather like clockwork outside Seattle’s King County International Airport to witness deportation flights and spread word of where they are going and how many people are aboard. Until recently, they could keep track of the flights using publicly accessible websites.
But the monitors and others say airlines are now using dummy call signs for deportation flights and are blocking the planes’ tail numbers from tracking websites, even as the number of deportation flights hits record highs under President Donald Trump. The changes forced them to find other ways to follow the flights, including by sharing information with other groups and using data from an open-source exchange that tracks aircraft transmissions.
Their work helps people locate loved ones who are deported in the absence of information from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which rarely discloses flights. News organizations have used such flight tracking in reporting.
Tom Cartwright, a retired J.P. Morgan financial officer turned immigration advocate, tracked 1,214 deportation-related flights in July — the highest level since he started watching in January 2020. About 80% are operated by three airlines: GlobalX, Eastern Air Express and Avelo Airlines. They carry immigrants to other airports to be transferred to overseas flights or take them across the border, mostly to Central American countries and Mexico.
Cartwright tracked 5,962 flights from the start of Trump’s second term through July, a 41% increase of 1,721 over the same period in 2024. Those figures including information from major deportation airports but not smaller ones like King County International Airport, also known as Boeing Field. Cartwright’s figures include 68 military deportation flights since January — 18 in July alone. Most have gone to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The work became so demanding that Cartwright, 71, and his group, Witness at the Border, turned over the job this month to Human Rights First, which dubbed its project “ICE Flight Monitor.”
“His work brings essential transparency to U.S. government actions impacting thousands of lives and stands as a powerful example of citizen-driven accountability in defense of human rights and democracy,” Uzrz Zeya, Human Rights First’s chief executive officer, said.
The airlines did not respond to multiple email requests for comment. ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which would not confirm any security measures it has taken.
La Resistencia, a Seattle-area nonprofit immigration rights group, has monitored 59 flights at Boeing Field and five at the Yakima airport in 2025, surpassing its 2024 total of 42.
Not all are deportation flights. Many are headed to or from immigration detention centers or to airports near the border. La Resistencia counted 1,023 immigrants brought in to go to the ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington, and 2,279 flown out, often to states on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“ICE is doing everything in its power to make it as hard as possible to differentiate their contractors’ government activities from other commercial endeavors,” organizer Guadalupe Gonzalez told The Associated Press.
Airlines can legally block data
The Federal Aviation Administration allows carriers to block data like tail numbers from public flight tracking websites under the Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed program, or LADD, said Ian Petchenik, a spokesman for FlightRadar24.
“Tail numbers are like VIN numbers on cars,” Gonzalez said.
Planes with blocked tail numbers no longer appear on websites like FlightRadar24 or FlightAware. The tracker page identifies these them as “N/A – Not Available” as they move across the map and when they are on the tarmac. Destinations and arrival times aren’t listed.
Carriers have occasionally used LADD for things like presidential campaigns, but in March, FlightRadar24 received LADD notices for more than a dozen aircraft, Petchenik said. It was unusual to see that many aircraft across multiple airlines added to the blocking list, he said. The blocked planes were often used for ICE deportations and transfers, he said.
Of the 94 ICE Air contractor planes that La Resistencia was tracking nationwide, 40 have been unlisted, Gonzalez said.
Similar things happened with the call signs airlines use to identify flights in the air, Gonzalez said.
Airlines use a combination of letters in their company name and numbers to identify their planes. GlobalX uses GXA, for example. But in the past few months, the ICE carriers have changed their regular call signs, making it more difficult to locate their immigration activates, he said.
https://apnews.com/article/ice-deportation-immigration-flights-f61941d31adf43a6a01cccc720f3bb01
Donald Trump and his administration suffered two major legal setbacks as federal judges in California and Rhode Island ruled against key policies pursued by the White House.
In California, U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer Thurston ordered the release of Salam Maklad, a Syrian national from the Druze religious minority, who had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers earlier this summer.
In Rhode Island, Senior District Judge William Smith blocked the administration from imposing new restrictions on domestic violence funding programs connected to the president’s recent executive order targeting what he described as “gender ideology.” Details of both rulings were shared by Politico’s legal affairs reporter, Kyle Cheney, on X.
With Republicans in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, the judiciary has become a critical check on Trump’s agenda. Courts have previously halted efforts to penalize law firms representing cases against Trump, blocked attempts to revoke protections for Haitian migrants and struck down sanctions aimed at employees of the International Criminal Court. The California case centered on Maklad, who entered the United States in 2002 without valid documentation and applied for asylum. Court records show she later married a man who was granted asylum, which her legal team argued made her eligible for legal immigration status. ICE recently detained her after she attended what she believed was a routine “check-in” meeting and subsequently placed her in expedited removal proceedings and threatened her with deportation. Thurston emphasized Maklad’s clean record and lack of flight risk, writing that “the balance of the equities and public interest weigh in favor of Ms. Maklad.”
The judge ordered her release and barred authorities from rearresting her without “compliance with constitutional protections, which include, at a minimum, pre-deprivation notice — describing the change of circumstances necessitating her arrest — and detention, and a timely bond hearing.” Thurston further ruled that “Respondents are PERMANENTLY ENJOINED AND RESTRAINED from rearresting or re-detaining Ms. Maklad absent compliance with constitutional protections. … At any such hearing, the Government SHALL bear the burden of establishing, by clear and convincing evidence, that Ms. Maklad poses a danger to the community or a risk of flight, and Ms. Maklad SHALL be allowed to have her counsel present.”
On the same day, Judge Smith ruled against the administration in a case tied to President Trump’s Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The directive, issued earlier this year, declared that sex is an “immutable biological classification as male or female” and instructed federal agencies to “prioritize investigations and litigation to enforce the rights and freedoms” tied to this definition.
Following the order, the Office on Violence Against Women revised its grant policy in May 2025 to prohibit funding for “inculcating or promoting gender ideology.” A coalition of 17 nonprofit groups challenged the restrictions, arguing they undermined their work with survivors of domestic violence. Judge Smith sided with the organizations, ruling that the new requirements “could result in the disruption” of critical services for victims of sexual and domestic violence. Together, the rulings marked another day of judicial pushback against the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape immigration enforcement and federal gender policy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-pushes-baseless-autism-claim/vi-AA1LgS75
