r/EmergencyManagement • u/Smokey_tha_bear9000 • 3d ago

ICE at disasters

Hey friends,

There’s been some growing concern in my world from shelter managers becoming concerned about the potential for ICE to show up at Hurricane/emergency shelters. There was a Biden administration directive that was supposed to prevent immigration raids etc from occurring during natural disasters. Our local leadership has expressed the idea that this shouldn’t be a problem.

But with yesterday’s arrests of wildland firefighters AT a wildfire in Washington, it appears that nowhere is safe anymore.

Be safe out there and look out for each other and especially those that we serve.

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u/transham 3d ago

While freshly aggravated, this has long been a concern. My very first disaster response was over 20 years ago under FEMA. Another hurricane came through temporarily suspending the operations of my function and red cross shelters reopened. I switched hats and volunteered at one, but was specifically asked to not display any federal clothing or logos (other than leaving disaster assistance fliers at registration) so as not to scare the shelter population...

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u/Smokey_tha_bear9000 3d ago edited 3d ago

You are very right. That reminds me of my first major hurricane experience, back when I was a freshman in high school, probably 2 decades ago now as well. I went to a catholic high school and we collected a bunch of donations to bring out to part of our county that had been hit especially hard by that storm.

We set up at the local church to give out the donations and food etc, but after a few hours, no one had come by, which was weird given that this church was less than a mile from a devastated trailer park that was probably 90+ percent Latino immigrants, and most of those residents were parishioners. We couldn’t figure out why no one was coming by, when the adults in the room realized it was probably because the National Guard was billeting at the church. The people were probably terrified of coming up there at the time.

It was a very formative and eye opening experience for me.