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.

Elon Musk appears to be greatly exaggerating the extent of the attack on former DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, a.k.a. “Big Balls,” who was jumped in Washington, D.C., earlier this week. 

The billionaire claimed 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 inaccurate, made-for-Fox News sentiments, 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,........

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