On October 21 and 22, CNN News Central continued to debunk misinformation about FEMA that former President Donald Trump repeated at his October 21 visit to Swannanoa, North Carolina. 

During the visit, Trump addressed victims of Hurricane Helene, which devastated western North Carolina in late September, including Swannanoa. He falsely claimed that FEMA’s “rescue effort was almost non-existent” in the state and that the Biden administration “spent a lot of money on bringing illegal migrants … so they don't have any money for the people that live here.” 

Finally, Trump specified that the administration was spending money designated for rescue and recovery on “illegal immigrants … maybe so they could vote in the election.” Right-wing media have been amplifying these lies, and omitting the fact that in 2019, Trump used FEMA funds to respond to migrants at the border.  

The rhetoric appears to have resonated, as a new poll released by Harvard's Center for American Political Studies and the analytics firms The Harris Poll and HarrisX, found that “two-thirds of Americans think the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should not provide housing to undocumented immigrants.” FEMA funds have never been diverted away from hurricane aid for any other purpose, including housing for migrants.  

FEMA, local officials, and the White House have been responding to a flood of misinformation related to both the causes of the hurricane and FEMA’s response in the impacted areas. Driven in part by lies like the ones Trump has repeatedly amplified, such as claims that FEMA is willfully ignoring hurricane victims because they are Republican, threats against the agency, and other outlandish conspiracies have proliferated online. FEMA has faced at least two armed threats on the ground during its response to Helene, and the threats are ongoing.  

The Washington Post reported on October 23 that Veterans on Patrol, a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “hard-right” antigovernment militia run by a Christian nationalist, set up a distribution site at a grocery store to help residents of Lake Lure, North Carolina, but ended up intimidating them. 

One Lake Lure volunteer told the Post that she was afraid and not sleeping because of the behavior of the group's founder, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, after she questioned his intentions. “It turned into people calling me last night, like, be careful. Be careful. Really, he’s talking a lot about you,” she said. 

On October 21, reporting from Concord, North Carolina, correspondent Kristen Holmes told hosts Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanchez on CNN News Central that Trump promoted “disinformation around FEMA.” She called out the false and dangerous claim that Democrats purposely spent FEMA money on migrant housing rather than relief efforts because they “want migrants to be voting in this election.” The accusation comes as Project 2025 allies are actively organizing to steal the election. 

Holmes emphasized the network’s dedication to setting the record straight, saying that reporters had “fact-checked this before, we’ll fact-check it again.” She repeated that “we know that FEMA has different pots of money. They do have money that goes toward migrant housing, that does not come from disaster relief money.” She also added that while speaking with governors and state officials in places that Helene impacted, “None of them complained really about the federal response or about FEMA.”

 

The next day on October 22, CNN followed up with another fact check on Trump’s most recent tirade, where reporter Daniel Dale clarified that FEMA does still have disaster relief money, that there has been “no sign that anything inappropriate’s happening” with the allocation of FEMA funds, and finally, that “it is not true that the Biden administration ran out of money.” 

Doubling down on Trump and right-wing media’s assertions about where aid is going, Dale said that it’s “not true that FEMA improperly diverted disaster relief money to house migrants” and that “FEMA itself has already provided more than $100 million in individual assistance to North Carolina residents” as well as “more than $300 million to the state in general” from the Biden administration overall.