MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Jeff Merkely
Interview
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MADDOW: Hurricane Hugo in 1989 killed dozens of Americans, cost billions of dollars in damage.
Today at a hurricane briefing at the White House, the director of FEMA called Hurricane Florence, the one that is bearing down on the Carolinas right now, quote, very similar to Hurricane Hugo, as FEMA director urged residents in the storm`s path to listen to local authorities and evacuate if you`re told to.
Hugo is not the most recent category 4 hurricane to hit this country, though. The last category 4 hurricane to hit this country made landfall less than a year ago in Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria roared into Puerto Rico with winds over 150 miles an hour, demolished thousands and thousands of wood frame homes and building in Puerto Rico, left the island reeling with flash floods and mudslides.
It plunged all 3.5 million U.S. citizens on Puerto Rico into total darkness. The island`s entire electric grid failed. Residents started rituals of standing in line for hours to try to get gas or diesel for power generates. Cell phone service collapsed across the island as Maria took out cell phone towers.
People also began waiting in lines for water, including people setting up makeshift water stations at streams and springs that opened up in landslides after the storm, which led to all kinds of health problems down the line, right? Much of the running water, houses that still had it, their water was contaminated anyway. People did what they had to do.
A week after Maria hit, the U.S. Defense Department said nearly half the population of Puerto Rico still didn`t have drinking water. You cannot live without drinking water. There was a deadly outbreak of the bacteria Leptospirosis on the island from contaminated water and soil. The Lepto outbreak alone may have been responsible for dozen of deaths.
Most of Puerto Rico`s hospitals did not have enough fuel to keep their generators running. People in the intensive care unit started dying. The U.S. government finally dispatched a medical ship to the island, but it didn`t arrive until nearly two weeks after Maria hit, and it never ran at anything close to capacity. Despite the need on the island, they never got people on to the ship.
A week after the hurricane, thousands of containers of supplies were sitting at port because nobody bothered to organize drivers to truck those supplies out of the ports and out to needy communities all over the island, despite the supposed massive federal response and coordinating effort run by the Trump administration.
There was also no clear effort to clear the roads so those trucks could get through if they did have drivers for them. Reporters on the ground describe an air conditioned convention center where officials from FEMA and other government agencies were milling around, unsure what to do while communities in the interior of the island remained just completely cut off, literally out of food and water indefinitely.
Puerto Rico`s electric power authority claimed to have finally fully restored electricity just last month, although some residents say even now it`s still not completely restored. And after nearly a year of holding the official death toll for Maria at just 64, two weeks ago, following a study commissioned by the island`s government, Puerto Rico finally raised the official death toll attributed to the storm to 2,975. That puts it almost exactly at the death toll of Americans killed 17 years ago today in the attacks of 9/11.
And tonight, BuzzFeed news reports that of more than 2,000 Puerto Ricans who applied to FEMA for funeral assistance for loved ones who died as a result of Maria, FEMA approved just 75 of those more than 2,000 funeral assistance applications. In a letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren, FEMA Director Brock Long wrote, quote, as of July 30th, his agency had received 2,431 requests for funeral assistance for Puerto Ricans related to Hurricane Maria. FEMA approved just 75 of those requests, meaning 97 percent were either rejected or haven`t received a decision yet almost a year after Maria hit the island.
FEMA`s funeral assistance is intended to help people who lost loved ones in disaster situations, to help them pay for funeral costs including caskets, mortuary service, burial plots, and cremations. Although FEMA Director Brock Long did not give a specific reason in his letter for the rejections, he pointed to FEMA requirements for funeral assistance. To qualify, Puerto Ricans had to provide a death certificate or letter from a government official. That, quote, clearly indicates the death was attributed to the emergency or disaster either indirectly or directly.
But getting that information was of course impossible for many families because as the Puerto Rican government recently admitted, officials until now weren`t correctly counting hurricane-related deaths.
Today in the Oval Office, as his FEMA director briefed him on Hurricane Florence currently barreling towards the United States, President Trump was asked by a reporter how he will apply the lessons he took from Puerto Rico. The president replied, quote, I think Puerto Rico was incredibly successful. I actually think it was one of the best jobs that`s ever been done. I think that Puerto Rico was an incredible unsung success.
Nearly 3,000 American citizens died.
And now on that front, we have some breaking news. Tonight, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon has gotten his hands on a document that has never been seen publicly before which appears to show that Donald Trump`s Department of Homeland Security requested to transfer about $10 million out of the budget for FEMA this year and into the coffers of ICE to support ICE`s detention and deportation programs for immigrants.
Senator Merkley`s office believes the transfer of these funds happened this summer just in time for hurricane season. Senator Merkley will join us live in just a minute. But I want to show you the document that his office has obtained. I have it here. I think we can put it on screen. Thank you.
It`s titled, as you can see, Department of Homeland Security fiscal year 2018, transfer and reprogramming notifications. In other words, this is the whole list of money that Homeland Security took from one agency and moved to another.
And the practice of transferring monies between agency, that is not unusual in itself, but it is unusual to see in one of these documents a whole column full of money being deleted from the FEMA budget less than a year after Hurricane Maria on the cusp of this year`s hurricane season, apparently to bolster the government`s ability to lock up and deport immigrants. Nearly $10 million taken out of FEMA, almost all of it going
to ICE in order to fund more detention beds and ICE`s transportation and removal program.
Again, this is all according to this budget document obtained by Senator Jeff Merkley`s office. Senator Merkley is on the Appropriations Committee. He is not on the Homeland Security Subcommittee there, so he doesn`t necessarily have direct oversight here, but Senator Merkley`s office tells us tonight they believe this document is authentic. They believe these budget transfers out of FEMA instead to ICE, that these budget transfers they believe did happen this summer.
Just before air time, the Department of Homeland Security, in our efforts to independently verify this document, we did finally get a response to them, and they all but confirmed that Senator Merkley is right here. Just a few moments ago, Department of Homeland Security just confirmed to us that these monetary transfers out of the FEMA budget were made.
A DHS spokesperson didn`t dispute the authenticity of the document to us, and instead told us that the money didn`t come from any of our disaster response and recovery efforts. But again, it appears that it did come from FEMA. We couldn`t get any elaboration on that. The spokesperson said that`s all they could tell us on such short notice, but we`re happy to at least have that.
Joining us now is Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon. He is a member of the Appropriations Committee.
Senator, thank you for joining us tonight.
SEN. JEFF MERKLEY (D), OREGON: You bet, Rachel.
MADDOW: Thank you for letting us know you received this document. We`ve been doing our own due diligence, trying to sort out what this means.
What`s your understanding of what this means, bottom line?
MERKLEY: Well, it means that just as hurricane season is starting, because it generally starts June 1st, the administration is working hard to find funds for additional detention camps, and, of course, this is all part of the child separation policy. And that`s how this information came into my hands, because of my work on this issue of trying to stop the child
separations.
But in fact, so $10 million comes out of FEMA when we`re facing a hurricane season, knowing what happened last year, and then look what we`ve had since, a hurricane just barely missed Hawaii. A tropical storm that almost became a hurricane hit Mississippi, and now we have this Hurricane Florence bearing down on the Carolinas. I find it extraordinary.
And by the way, Rachel, the chart you put up is the same chart I have in my hand right here. It says that money came from response and recovery right on it. So, I would dispute the statement that this has no bearing on addressing the challenges from hurricanes.
MADDOW: I am looking at the same document as you said that you are, and you`re right. The list of -- the list of areas from which it comes -- from which the money comes includes response and recovery. And then response and recovery, recovery and response from recovery response, also preparedness and protection, mission support, mitigation, regional operations, all areas that FEMA has apparently partially defunded in order to instead send the money to ICE.
Now, as you mentioned, Senator, this document and your understanding about what this means comes in part from your work on the family separation policy. You did groundbreaking work exposing that to the public. You were the first person to come out and say that you`d been able to get into one of these facilities and seen kids in cages.
Is it your understanding that the Trump administration`s policy to start separating families, to start taking kids away from their parents, to start that new effort that they did this year, that that might have necessitated this increase in funds because they didn`t otherwise get that funded by Congress?
MERKLEY: Yes, absolutely. It seems very connected because it was in a speech in May 7th that Jeff Sessions announced this new policy. It actually started a little bit earlier, a month earlier. But clearly, they were saying, if we`re going to start arresting as a criminal matter and detaining people, we need to have much bigger detention camps. Oh, well, we better -- we better get some more money into that.
And now, the administration has just put out a draft regulation in which they intend to establish internment camps so that to lock up children behind barbed wire. So, we`re going from the horrendous policy of ripping children out of their parents` arms, and of course, we`re still trying to reunify all those families, to a new strategy of building internment camps that would be funded through the same account that these funds would go through ICE.
MADDOEW: Internment camps for kids who have been accused of crimes? Of kids who are in trouble in the judicial system because of some criminal behavior, or simply kids who are immigrants?
MERKLEY: Kids who simply are part of a family. So this is family internment camps. And we haven`t done anything like that since World War II.
It`s absolutely comes from a dark and evil place in the heart of this administration. They`re going from one strategy of inflicting trauma on children to another a new strategy that they`re trying to implement to inflict trauma on children, all to send, as Jeff Sessions says, a message of deterrence to discourage people who are fleeing persecution from ever considering arriving on the shores of the United States of America.
MADDOW: Senator, let me ask you one sort of technical question here, but one that may be important to the future of what happens next now that you have exposed this document. And again, what this document indicates and what homeland security is confirming to us tonight is that nearly $10 million has been taken out of the budget of FEMA right in advance of hurricane season, and instead transferred to ICE for who appears to be detention programs for immigrants.
Are there potential legal issues here? I mean, I know there is some flexibility in budgeting and that`s sort of baked into the way the government runs. But is there a legal problem here of Congress specifically appropriated Homeland Security funds instructing the administration on how to spend money in this area, and then the administration ignored those instructions and decided to spend this money on something else?
MERKLEY: I believe that this movement of funds is within the flexibility the administration has. They have to do a report to Congress. And if the amount is over $5 million, they have to notify the chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee, in this case the Homeland Security Subcommittee. And I believe that the committee chair has to sign off, though I`m not 100 percent clear on that.
But essentially, this is the notification document that would have come to the Appropriations Committee, specifically, to the chair of Homeland Security. And that apparently was done. I think this is probably within the law.
MADDOW: Senator Jeff Merkley, a member of the Appropriations Committee -- thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing this document with us so we could tell people this is happening.
MERKLEY: Thank you so much, Rachel.
MADDOW: We would not have known that without you, sir. Thank you very much.
MERKLEY: You`re welcome.
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