requests

WASHINGTON — Cameron Hamilton, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency, pledged to senators Wednesday to be “fair and reasonable” in assessing requests for disaster aid as he seeks to run an agency roiled by the administration’s threats to dismantle it.

Hamilton appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs at a hearing where lawmakers assessed a group of 10 nominees for administration posts.

“My focus will be to ensure that FEMA is objective, is fair and reasonable, follows the law, and is consistent” in how it reviews disaster declaration requests, Hamilton told Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the committee. Peters had asked about partisanship in granting major disaster declarations.

Hamilton had a brief tenure as FEMA’s temporary leader early last year but was ousted after defending the agency’s existence. At a House hearing in May 2025, he said he did not “believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate” FEMA. He was fired the next day.

His nomination comes as the Republican administration has increasingly signaled it is backing away from promises to dismantle an agency that the president has heavily criticized.

If confirmed, he would be FEMA’s first permanent administrator in Trump’s second term. He will need to lead FEMA through what is expected to be a busy summer disaster season, while answering to Trump, who is likely to expect major changes after a council he appointed recommended sweeping moves at the agency that is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Hamilton distanced himself from some FEMA controversies

Nominees did not give opening statements, but Hamilton received the bulk of lawmakers’ questions while appearing with four others in the first half of the hearing.

His answers suggested a departure from some of the more aggressive policies considered and enacted during Kristi Noem’s turbulent leadership at DHS. FEMA’s workforce has been worn down by mass staff departures, policies that hamstrung operations and a protracted DHS shutdown.

Hamilton expressed faith in the FEMA staff and praised the recent opening of 350 positions to counteract some of the cuts. He said that if confirmed by the Senate, he would do what he could to speed up disaster declaration decisions and reimbursements to states, tribes and territories.

“We owe you answers, I think, much faster,” he told Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo), adding that many FEMA processes needed to be simplified.

Hamilton disavowed a recommendation he included in an April 2025 memo to quadruple the threshold of financial damages a state needed to prove to receive FEMA public assistance. He also noted the importance of resilience funding, despite halting billions in resilience grants during his previous tenure.

Republican and Democratic senators at the hearing expressed support for FEMA’s mission, despite Trump’s early threats to eliminate it. “I think what your agency does is hugely important,” Hawley told Hamilton.

But multiple Democrats echoed Peters’ concern that Trump was approving far more disaster declaration requests from Republican states than Democratic ones.

Of the state disaster declaration requests Trump answered through the end of May, he approved about 82% from states that voted for him in the last election and 44% from states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris, according to an analysis of public FEMA data by Andrew Rumbach, senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Urban Institute.

Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, has never worked as a state or local emergency manager and has publicly criticized FEMA in the past. He has held positions at DHS and the State Department related to emergency response.

No senator questioned Hamilton’s suitability for the position.

Federal law requires the FEMA administrator to have “a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security” and at least five years of “executive leadership and management experience.”

Criticism over hearing format

Peters criticized the committee chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), for scheduling so many nominees at once, saying that made it more difficult for senators to properly screen them.

“The lineup today severely limits our ability to have transparency for the American public,” Peters said. He noted that Hamilton was among two nominees whose FBI background investigations were not yet complete, and that two others had not submitted their financial disclosure reports.

Others who appeared included Trump’s pick for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Hal Duncan, and administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, David Cummins.

Paul said the committee would only vote on the nominees when their financial and background checks were complete.

Washington, DC – Requests for legal support related to pro-Palestine advocacy remained high in the United States last year, as President Donald Trump threatened activists and universities with penalties.

In an annual report released on Tuesday, Palestine Legal, an organisation that “supports the movement for Palestinian freedom in the US”, said it received 1,131 queries for legal support in 2025.

The figure is below the record 2,184 requests the group received in 2024, when pro-Palestine protests swept US campuses — and were regularly met with crackdowns from both school administrators and law enforcement.

Despite universities enacting new restrictions on protests across the country, the figures from 2025 show that pro-Palestine advocacy has persisted, according to Dima Khalidi, the executive director of Palestine Legal.

“Our 2025 year-end report shows that while universities have largely cowered and caved to coercive pressure from the Trump administration and its pro-Israel supporters, student activists for Palestinian and collective freedom remain a model of moral conviction and courage,” Khalidi said.

“Even when facing punitive consequences for speaking out, they are holding the line of dissent against injustice from the US to Palestine, because they understand the cost of surrender for all of us.”

Palestine Legal said that the “overwhelming majority of requests” for legal support came from university students and faculty in 2025, but a growing number, 122, were categorised as “immigration and border-related”.

The group received 851 requests from people or organisations targeted for their Palestine-related advocacy, as well as 280 more asking for legal guidance on conducting advocacy.

Despite the drop from 2024, the rate of complaints last year remained 300 percent higher than in 2022, the year before Israel began its genocidal war in Gaza on October 7, 2023.

Since then, at least 72,560 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

Pressure campaigns

In 2024, Trump campaigned for a second term in the White House in part on a pledge to crack down on the pro-Palestinian protest movement, which sought to shine a light on the human rights abuses unfolding during the war.

He has framed such protests as anti-Semitic, and since his inauguration in 2025, he has led a campaign to penalise schools that played host to pro-Palestinian activism.

To date, five universities have struck deals with Trump after he threatened to withhold billions in federal funding. They include Columbia University, where a pro-Palestine encampment and resulting police crackdown drew international attention.

Columbia eventually reached a $200m settlement with the Trump administration and moved to make several policy changes it said were aimed at combatting anti-Semitism.

Rights groups have condemned such policies as conflating pro-Palestine advocacy with anti-Jewish sentiment. They also warn that Trump’s actions risk dampening free speech, a protected right under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

All told, nearly 80 of the students who took part in Columbia’s protests faced serious academic discipline, including expulsions, suspensions, and degree revocations, as of July 2025.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration used immigration enforcement to target pro-Palestine protesters and advocates, including scholars like Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Badar Khan Suri and Mahmoud Khalil.

To date, the deportation proceedings against Ozturk, who was in the US on a student visa, and Mahdawi, a US permanent resident detained at his citizenship hearing, have been abandoned.

Ozturk has since voluntarily returned to her native Turkiye after completing her doctoral studies at Tufts University.

The government is still proceeding with deportation efforts against Khan Suri, a Georgetown University researcher, and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and permanent US resident.

Separately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided five homes connected to pro-Palestine activists at the University of Michigan in April 2025, sparking outrage. Federal authorities seized properties, but no arrests were made.

Legal victories

Despite the restrictive climate across the country, Palestine Legal hailed a string of legal victories in 2025 that upheld the right to pro-Palestinian protest.

Last August, for instance, a federal court dismissed a complaint that sought to penalise UNRWA USA, a non-profit that supports the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), under the Antiterrorism Act of 1990.

A separate lawsuit launched by Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) charged that the University of Maryland had tread on the free speech rights of students by banning Students for Justice in Palestine (UMD SJP). That case resulted in a $100,000 settlement.

Meanwhile, federal judges have sided with Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in their challenges to the Trump administration’s defunding efforts.

“The fights that Palestine Legal and our partners have waged affirm that the Trump administration, universities, and Israel advocacy groups cannot, without consequence, run roughshod over growing demands to respect and protect Palestinian rights,” Palestine Legal said at the conclusion of its report.

“The developments throughout 2025 made crystal clear that if we allow our right to stand for Palestinian freedom to be trampled, all of our fundamental rights will be in jeopardy in the face of an authoritarian slide.”