Trump Gives FEMA Agents the Worst Reassignment of Their Life

A number of FEMA employees were told via email Tuesday night that they would be reassigned to ICE.

Sources familiar with the matter say that those who received the email were probationary employees who had been on administrative leave for months after the Trump administration attempted to fire them, according to The American Prospect.

The email told FEMA employees that they would be reassigned to ICE “due to the mission requirements of the Department [of Homeland Security].” The DHS houses both ICE and FEMA.

The kicker: If the workers don’t accept the new position, they could be fired.

Showering ICE with resources has become a central feature of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. Congress has just awarded $170 billion toward immigration enforcement, with ICE getting an unprecedented $75 billion of that sum. Meanwhile, ICE agents are complaining about the unrealistic quotas placed on them by deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller and wondering why they’re spending so much time “arresting gardeners.”

And FEMA, which provides crucial services to Americans experiencing natural disasters, is already in dire straits: While Texans were overwhelmed by flooding, the agency didn’t answer two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, reported The New York Times. As climate catastrophes become more and more common, the president wants to eliminate the agency meant to respond to them altogether.

The priorities of the Trump administration have never been clearer: Remove immigrants at all costs, disasters be damned.

Donald Trump claimed he’s been left out of the loop by his own administration regarding its handling of the Epstein case yet again.

Speaking with reporters at the White House Tuesday, the president said that the Justice Department had left him in the dark about the decision to transfer Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security prison after the convicted sex trafficker sat down for interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“Were you aware of, and did you personally approve the prison transfer for Ghislaine Maxwell that your Justice Department—” asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

“I didn’t know about it at all, no,” Trump answered. “I read about it just like you did.”

Trump further claimed that the transfer is “not an uncommon thing,” but legal analysts strongly disagree. Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN that the move was “so unusual” because Maxwell did not meet the DOJ’s typical standards for consideration as a “cooperating witness.”

Honig explained that a “cooperator” is a person who has been “thoroughly vetted, deemed to be credible, and somebody who DOJ has brought actual prosecutions based on their testimony.”

“She’s done none of those things,” Honig said. “So she’s already gotten a substantial benefit, yet without doing the things that you would ordinarily require of what I would consider a proper cooperating witness.”

Honig further underscored that it would take a “special exemption” from a higher authority to move a convicted sex offender from a maximum-security facility to a minimum-security “camp.”

“It certainly appears as if she’s being given some benefit for what she told Todd Blanche,” Honig told the network.

Maxwell has directly appealed to the president and the Supreme Court in pursuit of a pardon. A senior Trump administration official told CNN last week that Trump was not considering clemency for the convicted sex trafficker, though Trump emphasized to reporters just days prior that he was “allowed” to give her one.

Trump similarly purported last month to have no idea that his own administration was planning to meet with Maxwell, a woman whom he had met and interacted with several times over the last three decades, as she was his “bud” Jeffrey Epstein’s closest confidant.

Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking in 2022, when she was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in the pedophile network, helping Epstein abduct and abuse underage girls over the span of a decade.

DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, a.k.a. “Big Balls,” was jumped in Washington, D.C., earlier this week—and his former boss, Elon Musk, is using the attack to call for a federal takeover of the District.

The billionaire wrote that Coristine heroically stopped “a gang of about a dozen young men” from assaulting a woman in her car at night. He said that Coristine ran over to defend the woman and saved her in spite of being “severely beaten to the point of concussion.” Musk ended his retelling by calling for the federal government to take control of D.C. 

Trump used the attack on Big Balls to echo the same goal, calling for the federal takeover of D.C. and the mass criminalization of mostly working-class Black and Latino children. 

“Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control. Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens.… The Law in D.C. must be changed to prosecute these ‘minors’ as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. “Washington, D.C., must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the World to see. If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore. Perhaps it should have been done a long time ago, then this incredible young man, and so many others, would not have had to go through the horrors of Violent Crime. If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City.”

The Metropolitan Police Department’s report states that officers saw a group of around 10 young people surrounding and assaulting Coristine. He told police that he had pushed his “significant other” into the car as they were being surrounded. Two 15-year-old suspects were detained and charged with unarmed carjacking. 

Fearmongering is a common tactic for Trump and other conservatives, especially around events like these. But Washington, D.C.’s unique nonstate status has emboldened the president, as he has hinted at taking over the city countless times before. Everyone deserves to feel safe in the city they live in, but Big Balls getting jumped is not a valid excuse to start rounding up kids and revoking the little autonomy the city has.  

This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the police report about the attack.

Miss United States doesn’t want to be within 100 yards of Representative Cory Mills.

Lindsey Langston, a Florida Republican state committeewoman and the current titleholder for the Miss United States beauty pageant, has filed a restraining order against the Republican lawmaker, reported DropSite News. The pair dated from November 2021 until February of this year.

The Columbia County committeewoman reported Mills to local and state law enforcement for “harassment, threatening to release sexual videos, and to harm future boyfriends,” according to DropSite.

After dating for almost three years, Langston and Mills began living together last summer when Langston moved into Mills’s Florida home. But that all came to an abrupt end in February when Langston learned—via national news reports—that Mills not only had a second girlfriend but had also been accused of assaulting her at his D.C. condo. (The second girlfriend, Sarah Raviani, later denied the report.)

But ending the relationship didn’t translate to an end in communication, according to Langston, who told DropSite that Mills continued to harass her for months despite her telling him repeatedly to leave her alone.

“The threats from Cory intensified over time,” she told DropSite. “From emotional manipulation, to physical violence against whoever I date in the future, to threats of having me stripped of the Miss United States crown … something I worked extremely hard for and a dream that was placed in my heart long before I even knew who Cory Mills was.”

Langston shared troves of time-stamped evidence with local and state investigators, as well as DropSite News, to back up her allegations.

On May 19, Donald Trump signed into law the bipartisan “Take It Down Act” to curb revenge porn. That same day, Mills—a self-styled MAGA Republican who had voted in favor of the anti-intimidation legislation—sent another timely message to Langston, threatening to blow up her future yet again by weaponizing sexual images he had of her.

“Let him put his actions behind his mouth,” Mills wrote, referring to someone he believed to be Langston’s new partner. “I can send him a few videos of you as well. Oh, I still have them.”

The Trump administration is on a pro-Confederacy roll, with two monuments brought back in 24 hours.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that a Confederate memorial would be reinstalled in Arlington Cemetery after the statue’s removal in 2023 by Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, the country’s first Black defense secretary.

“Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture—often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’—will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth wrote on X.

The statue is likely more often referred to by the name it’s had since its construction in 1914: the Confederate Memorial.

“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it,” Hegseth continued.

The memorial featured a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy” and included “highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to Arlington Cemetery’s website. The statue also had a Latin inscription that characterizes the South’s secession as a “noble ‘Lost Cause.’”

The Confederate Memorial is the second monument honoring the pro-slavery South that the Trump administration has recently resurrected. The National Park Service announced Monday that it would restore and reinstall the statue of Confederate General Albert Pike that was toppled during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

NPS describes the statue as a tribute to “Pike’s leadership in Freemasonry,” leaving out his Confederate background. The move is part of Trump’s “Executive Order on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

It’s yet another instance in which the Trump administration is actively revising the past. Whether scrubbing mentions of queer and transgender Americans from the Stonewall website or quietly removing references to Trump’s impeachments from a Smithsonian exhibit (which the museum now says will be restored “in the coming weeks”), it’s clear that the administration is committed to promoting its version of the nation’s history—“truth” and “sanity” notwithstanding.