It’s interesting how when all is said and done Follow The Money is the great rule which governs so much of political life. Once you know what the pecuniary slant is on any given situation, you can see a lot of veils of deception lift automatically. Marcy Wheeler has a blog called Emptywheel which is always good but on occasion publishes some real doozies. That is the case today, where she reports that Brad Lander’s travesty in the Immigration Court in New York City was not his first go round with ICE. It’s no wonder they roughed him up, on these facts.
Back when DOGE and DHS clawed back $80 million awarded to New York City to house migrants, Lander was the guy who called them out — and insisted on suing.
New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander said the abrupt decision was an illegal diversion by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency of money used to house asylum-seekers admitted to the U.S. under President Joe Biden.
“President Trump and his crony Elon Musk illegally executed a revocation of $80 million in congressionally-appropriated FEMA funding from New York City’s bank accounts,” Lander said in a statement. “This highway robbery of our funds directly out of our bank account is a betrayal of everyone who calls New York City home.”
Lander’s statement came after the Trump administration claimed the city had received disaster relief funds to house migrants in luxury hotels. Musk posted that his DOGE “discovered” the funding on Monday, calling it “a gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.”
The funds were administered by FEMA, a subagency of the Department of Homeland Security. A 2024 report from Lander’s office found that the city paid an average rate of $156 a night for hotel rooms booked through an agreement with the Hotel Association of New York City.
The seizure of funds could result in cuts to city services.
“We can’t recover money we already spent on shelter and services for asylum seekers, so it would require cutting $80 million of some other city expenses,” Lander said.
This happened the very week that Eric Adams was cozying up to Tom Homan — which Dale Ho judged was evidence of a quid pro quo.
Lander took a shot at Mayor Eric Adams for not standing up to Trump, saying that “If instead Mayor Adams continues to be President Trump’s pawn, my Office will request to work in partnership with the New York City Law Department to pursue aggressive legal action.”
Adams said Wednesday that he is in talks with the White House about recovering the money, and that he’s requested an emergency meeting with FEMA to resolve the matter. “The Corporation Counsel is already exploring various litigation options,” he added, in a statement on X.
Adams is scheduled to meet Thursday with Trump border czar Tom Homan, who demanded cooperation from the Democrat during a radio interview Tuesday, saying, “Either he comes to the table or we go around him.”
Adams didn’t insist on getting the money back. On the contrary, Trump’s Administration has continued to steal from New York City.
In fact, the day before Kristi Noem’s goons detained Brad Lander on his third visit accompanying migrants, New York’s lawyers amended their complaint about the theft — to update the Acting FEMA Administrator, to capitalize the words, “Money Grab” (to distinguish it from several other newly alleged harms), to describe the further arbitrary attempts to justify stealing the funds, first by terminating the program six weeks after DOGE took the money, then by launching an onerous investigation.
20. Then, with the purported compliance review apparently uncompleted, FEMA announced on April 1, 2025, that it was terminating SSP entirely. FEMA stated that it was terminating the City’s SSP award for the entirely different reason that the grants “no longer effectuate [] the program goals or agency priorities” (quoting 2 C.F.R. § 200.340(a)(2) (2020)). But the regulation FEMA cited does not permit a federal agency to cancel a grant program funded by Congressional appropriation simply because it has changed its mind and now opposes the program.
21. Not only that. While FEMA’s termination letter provides for a closeout process at the end of which FEMA will determine whether any additional SSP grant funds are owed the City, all SSP funds that were awarded the City and that would have remained available to make any such payment were apparently zeroed out on USASpending.gov more than six weeks earlier.
22. Collectively, these events make plain that Defendants determined to overturn the Congressional appropriation, deny the City SSP funds, and re-take any funds they could find a way to lay their hands on.
This is the lion’s share of the article. Go read the entire thing. The watchword in Trump world, as always, is money. And anybody who knows how to play Follow The Money and who has followed the money to MAGA, is going to be dealt with accordingly.
And this part you will love: there is a pattern here. Emptywheel says, “Lander’s detention thus bears a third similarity with that of Ras Baraka: both men had sued DHS, both arrests constituted — per Emil Bove’s representations to Dale Ho — election interference, and in both cases, Noem’s goons premeditated the arrest.”
This is Trump’s America. People who are resisting election interference AND suing DHS for anything at all, are targeted. At this point it would seriously be a good idea to make a list of who falls into that category because I think it is a good bet that if you had a list of people with those two qualifiers, that would be the same list of names that ICE has on its rough up sheet.
Sobering. Very sobering, to say the least.
The facts and the situation under the Trump regime are indeed sobering and, I would add, scary to say the least. Without a functioning Congress to protect us from a Fascist administration, all that’s left are the courts and some brave individuals. Our final resort may well be a popular uprising, well beyond mere demonstrations, if the current dismantling of our government continues.