Columbia mayor criticizes Trump for diverting money from fixing canal broken in 2015
Usually it’s Donald Trump dishing out criticisms on Twitter.
But on Tuesday another politician made the president the target of criticism on social media.
Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin tweeted that Trump’s administration was the reason why the Columbia Canal has not been repaired.
It was damaged during the historic flooding of 2015, which ravaged South Carolina’s capital city.
Even though Trump was not elected president until more than a year after the flooding, Benjamin said it’s the Trump administration’s actions that are preventing the Columbia canal from being fixed.
Benjamin’s tweet included a link to a story saying the administration is diverting money set aside for FEMA to spend on issues on the southern border of the United States, along Mexico.
“To all who are perplexed as to why the Columbia Canal has not yet been repaired since the 2015 storms. The Trump administration is taking millions from FEMA to fund immigration courts & ICE jails,” Benjamin said on Twitter.
Of the $200 million the Department of Homeland Security is transferring to ICE, $155 million will be taken from FEMA’s disaster relief fund, according to the BuzzFeed article Benjamin shared.
That money would be used “to fund temporary locations for court hearings for asylum-seekers along the southern border,” NBC News reported. The money was slotted for FEMA to respond to natural disasters, like the flooding.
In October 2015, flooding caused debris from the Broad River to jam “open the dozen intake gates to the Columbia Canal,” swamping the canal’s sidewalls and blowing out a huge section, The State reported.
The canal has not been repaired, and only a temporary fix of a rock dam has allowed it to continue to function, according to The State. Columbia has been lobbying FEMA for three years for funds to make a permanent fix that would cost approximately $169 million.
With money being diverted to the border, the Columbia Canal is no closer to a long-term solution.
A short time later, Benjamin retweeted an NPR article on the same subject.
This is not the first time Benjamin has quarreled with Trump over border issues.
In 2018, Benjamin led a delegation of mayors from across the U.S. to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, calling the response to the Trump administration’s immigration policy “one of the defining moments of American character for the first half of the 21stcentury,” The State reported.
“This process is horrendous, inhumane and inconsistent with who we are as a people. And it should end,” said Benjamin in 2018, drawing parallels between the situation and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, as well as the world’s slow-acting response to the Holocaust.
In Thursday’s tweet, Benjamin included the names of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster. The Republicans are champions of Trump but might not be as supportive of the FEMA move if it potentially takes money away from South Carolina.
This story was originally published August 27, 2019 at 9:08 PM.
