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Michael Moss
Foreign hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter, so I will be reading it in her place. July 12, 2025 On July 5, the day after the Texas floods hit, the Federal Emergency management agency, or FEMA, received 3,027 calls from survivors and answered 3,018 of them, about 99.7%, according to Maxine Joselo of the New York Times. But that day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not renew the contracts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff at the centers were fired the next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or about 35.8%. On Monday, July 7, FEMA received 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, around 15.9%. In a statement, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said, when a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA's Disaster Call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance. Marcy Wheeler of Empty Wheel notes that one reason Noam has been cutting so ferociously at FEMA is because she has run through the money Congress allocated for HHS with her single minded focus on immigration. In May, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, called out Noem's expenditure of $200 million on an ad campaign pushing Trump's agenda and $21 million to transport about 400 migrants to Guantanamo Bay, only to have many of them transferred back out. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, told Noem, you are spending like you don't have a budget. You are on track to trigger the Anti Deficiency Act. That means you're going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has provided enough money to ICE or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you have been given or to invent money. And this obsession with spending at the border has left the country unprotected elsewhere. Noem responded to Blumenthal that she was fulfilling a mandate. She told him, the American people overwhelmingly in the last election said, we want a secure border. We want to make sure no longer are the scales of justice tipped in the favor of criminals. A recent video posted to Facebook reels by the Department of Homeland Security makes it clear Noem's justification was cover for a violent Christian nationalist vision in which ICE and the Border Patrol are enforcing God's commandments. A dark film invokes Isaiah 6, 8, the Bible verse in which God asks, whom shall I send? And Isaiah answers, here am I, send me. The exchange is widely interpreted to show volunteers willing to do God's work. A poll released Friday makes it clear that the American people do not support such a vision and and did not in fact expect a Trump administration to deport undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record and have lived in the US for years. A Gallup poll released yesterday shows that the administration's draconian policies toward immigrants have created a backlash. A record 79% of adults say immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad as that change has been driven primarily by a shift in Republicans, 64% of whom now agree that immigrants are good for the country, up from their low of under 40%. The percentage of American adults who say immigration should be reduced has dropped to 30%, down from 55% in 2024. The Gallup poll shows that US opposition to immigration was rose from 2021 to 2024, the years in which the booming economy in the US attracted immigrants pushed out of South American countries whose economies were foundering. Trump falsely tagged that surge as proof that former President Joe Biden was permitting immigrant criminals to flood the country. Sentiments now look like they did in 2021 before that campaign. The poll shows that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of immigration, while 62% disapprove. There is a strong enthusiasm gap in those numbers 21% strongly approve, while 45% strongly disapprove. Among independents, 14% strongly approve of Trump's handling of immigration, while 45% strongly disapprove. Those numbers are unlikely to improve for the administration in light of yesterday's ICE raids at two licensed cannabis farms in Southern California. Agents used less lethal ammunition and tear gas in the raids. A number of people were injured, one critically. Agents arrested 200 people, including George Reddes, a 25 year old disabled veteran and and US citizen who worked at one of the farms as a security guard. Agents claim Reddes was a protester. His family has been unable to locate him, telling Josh Haskell of the local ABC affiliate that the local sheriff's office and local police departments all said they do not know where he is. More information coming out about the conditions of immigrant detention are also unlikely to increase support for the administration's policies. Today, at least five members of Congress and about 20 state legislators toured the new ICE detention center in the Everglades. The tour was planned rather than unexpected, enabling staff to prepare for it. Nonetheless, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat of Florida, said, these detainees are living in cages. The pictures you've seen don't do it justice. They are essentially packed into cages wall to wall humans, 32 detainees per cage. There are three tiny toilets that have a sink attached to it so they get their drinking water and they brush their teeth where they poop. In the same unit. 900 men are currently in the facility. And yet, even as the public sours on its policies, the administration is continuing its attacks on immigration after the Supreme Court said it could implement mass layoffs while a lawsuit against them proceeds through the courts. It fired more than 1300 employees from the State Department on Friday. It closed the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, which was created in 1977 to help advance individual liberty and and democratic freedoms around the world and has stood against cooperation with dictators who, as Michael Crowley of the New York Times writes, grossly abuse human rights. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also shuttering the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, which he claims enabled mass immigration to the United States. By Saturday afternoon, the websites for both bureaus had been taken down. Astonishingly, the crisis in Texas and growing opposition to his immigration policies are not the biggest problem for the administration today. That pride of place goes to MAGA fury over the Justice Department's statement that accused sex trafficker of young girls Jeffrey Epstein, who died in his prison cell in 2019, did not keep an incriminating client list. It also said it would not release additional evidence. The department's investigators have accumulated evidence that includes photographs and more than 10,000 videos. MAGA influencers, egged on by media figures like Dan Bongino insisted that the Justice Department under Biden was hiding information about Epstein's clients to cover up for Democratic leaders, and they insisted it would implicate. In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi told the Fox News Channel that the list was sitting on her desk awaiting review. Now, though, the department has done a 180. Maga is furious. Bongino, who led the frenzy, is now the deputy director of the FBI and reports say he has turned on Bondi over the change, threatening to quit. Philip Rotner at the Bulwark makes the astute observation that wording of the announcement from Department of Justice is deliberately opaque, as many of their obfuscating documents are, and leaves open the possibility that there is in fact incriminating evidence, not just in the form of a specific document with the words incriminating client list at its top. Bondi is a fierce Trump loyalist, and for all that MAGA is pinning the blame for the COVID up on her, she is almost certainly following Trump's instructions. The fight has put back into the news that one of Epstein's closest companions was none other than President Donald J. Trump, a relationship documented in pictures, videos and interviews in 2002. According to New York Magazine, Trump said, I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. Last night, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland, the top ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said he will be asking Chairman Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, to call for a hearing where we will subpoena the Attorney General and Dan Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel to come in and tell us everything that we know about the Jeffrey Epstein files. Because this thing is really spinning out of control at this point, and there's one way to put it to rest, which is to come clean, as President Trump promised he would do during the campaign. Just before 10 o' clock this morning, Trump lashed out in what seemed to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative, hitting as many MAGA talking points as he could with an attack on comedian and talk show host Rosie O', Donnell, who has relocated from her native U.S. she was born in New York to Ireland, and out of concern for her family in Trump's America. Because of the fact that Rosie o' Donnell is not in the best interests of our great country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her citizenship. She is a threat to humanity and should remain in the wonderful country of Ireland if they want her. God bless America. The President's suggestion that that he has the power to revoke the citizenship of a natural born American. He does not escalates his authoritarian claims. It comes after a federal judge on Thursday barred the administration from denying citizenship to US Born children of undocumented immigrants, giving the administration time to appeal. O' Donnell responded on Instagram, Hey Donald, you're rattled again. 18 years later and I still live rent free in that collapsing brain of yours. You call me a threat to humanity, but I am everything you fear. A loud woman, a queer woman, a mother who tells the truth, an American who got out of the country before you set it ablaze. You. You build walls. I build a life for my autistic kid in a country where decency still exists. You crave loyalty. I teach my children to question power. You sell fear on golf courses. I make art about surviving trauma. You lie, you steal, you degrade. I nurture. I create. I persist. You are everything that is wrong with America, and I am everything you hate about what's still right with it. You want to revoke my citizenship? Go ahead and try King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan. I'm not yours. To silence. I never was. Joffrey is a monstrous, stupid, vicious king. In Game of Thrones, Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. Sam.