WTF Just Happened Today

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

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1/ The Trump administration is pulling $155 million from FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund to temporarily pay for court hearing locations for asylum-seekers along the southern border who have been forced to wait in Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security will also lose $116 million previously allocated for Coast Guard operations, aviation security, and more in order to fund nearly 6,800 more beds for immigrant detainees. Combined with existing space, the funding would allow ICE to detain nearly 50,000 immigrants at one time. The Trump administrations sent the allocation changes to Congress as a notification rather than a request. Puerto Rico is currently under a hurricane watch, which Trump complained about as "yet another big storm" before overstating how much money Congress allocated for recovery in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017. (NBC News / Washington Post / CNN / BuzzFeed News)

2/ The attorneys general for 19 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration to block a new rule to indefinitely detain migrant families who cross the border illegally. The new rule would terminate the Flores agreement, which puts a 20-day limit on how long children can be held in immigration detention. (Reuters)

• ???? Day 924: The Trump administration will terminate the 20-day cap for detaining migrant children and allow the government to indefinitely detain migrant families who cross the border illegally. The new regulation, announced by acting Department of Homeland Security chief Kevin McAleenan, requires approval from a federal judge before it can go into effect and could be in defiance of the 2015 Flores agreement, which limited the time families could be detained to 20 days. Trump and Republicans have repeatedly blamed the 20-day rule for encouraging migrants to arrive at the border with their children expecting to be released. Administration officials claim the new rule will serve as a deterrent against migrant families. The Trump administration proposed a similar rule in September 2018 that would have allowed the government to detain migrant children for longer periods of time, so long as they were treated with "dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors." (ABC News / Washington Post / Wall Street Journal / NBC News / New York Times)

3/ Homeland Security plans to launch a program aimed at protecting voter registration databases an...

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