Trump fires top FEMA staffer over claim NYC spent $59M on 'luxury hotels' for migrants

The Trump administration on Tuesday fired a top FEMA staffer and three others for making what a spokeswoman said were "egregious payments to luxury NYC hotels for migrants," claims city officials have disputed. 

The firings came after billionaire Elon Musk, head of a quasi-official initiative to cut federal government, posted using similar wording on X Monday that his team “just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.”

A New York City spokeswoman on Tuesday said in an email the city had received a $59.3 million payment from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to care for migrants, but that it was a reimbursement of money the city had already spent. The money had been appropriated by Congress and was not part of a disaster grant, said the spokeswoman, Liz Garcia. Only $19 million went toward direct hotel costs, with $26 million for services like food and security and $13 million for congregate shelters and services. The city has never paid luxury-hotel rates, she said. Garcia said the city hadn’t been notified of any pause in funding and has millions more in outstanding reimbursements.

“We continue to see hundreds of migrants entering the city’s care every week, with over 46,000 still in our shelter system and emergency-contracted hotels,” she said. “In all instances, we have worked to minimize the costs of this crisis and have negotiated service costs to ensure that we are not wasting taxpayer dollars.”

Since 2022, she said, more than 184,000 migrants have left the city’s shelters. City taxpayers spent $7 billion responding to the migrant influx, with only $237 million allotted by the Biden administration to reimburse those funds. The $59.3 million was reimbursement for city costs from Nov. 16, 2023, to Oct. 29, 2024, she said.

New York City’s right-to-shelter mandate, dating back decades, requires the city to provide room and board to anyone in need, although the city and advocates agreed last year to time limits for stays by certain categories of migrants. In addition to housing migrants temporarily in hotels, the city has also used tent complexes.

Most migrants stay outside Manhattan and the government has paid on average $152 a night for rooms, according to a 2024 city comptroller report. Five-star hotels in Manhattan for the coming weekend run from $400 a night to over $1,000.

Confirming the FEMA firings, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA's parent agency, did not agree to an interview request or answer written questions but said in a statement that the terminations, "effective immediately," included FEMA's chief financial officer, two program analysts and a grant specialist. "Under President Trump and [Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's] leadership, DHS will not sit idly and allow deep state activists to undermine the will and safety of the American people," McLaughlin said. 

With AP