This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is calling out Joe Biden for his regime's disastrous failure to address properly the victims of the fiery inferno that hit, and mostly destroyed, Lahaina, Hawaii.
That raging blaze, in 2023, killed about 100 people and destroyed thousands of homes. It apparently exploded after a small brush fire broke out, firefighters doused it, and then hurricane-force winds hit the embers just as the crews left.
The flames roared into life and scorched down the hillside, far out of control.
DHS now has cited a documentary about the blaze and its aftermath from the Guardian, and charged.
"In the aftermath of the August 2023 Lahaina, Hawaii fires, a new report reveals FEMA's horrific neglect and mismanagement under the Biden Administration. The report highlights that 1 in 6 survivors were forced to engage in sexual acts in exchange for basic necessities like food and housing. These women — our fellow American citizens — were so desperate for food that they had to resort to such extreme measures just to feed themselves in our own country. While American citizens from Hawaii to North Carolina suffered, Biden and Mayorkas used FEMA as a piggy bank, spending hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to housing illegal aliens. This will never happen again under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem," the DHS said.
In fact, the report said, the need for "food, clothing and housing," pushed one in six female fire survivors into "sexual acts in exchange" for the basics.
"Immigrant women and other limited English speakers felt particularly isolated and unsafe in emergency shelters, with some sleeping with their children in vehicles – or engaging in 'survival sex' for a safer place to stay, according to the new report by Tagnawa, a Filipino feminist disaster response organization in Hawaii," the report said.
That organization shared its results exclusively with the Guardian.
The research noted Filipinos, who are the largest immigrant community in the state, made up 40% of the Lahaina population before the fire.
Researchers interviewed 70 who survived the blazes.
One of the problems identified was that authorities reopened west Maui to tourism only weeks after the fire, and that not only may have triggered "rage" and fueled domestic violence, but it also added to the residents' "sense of powerlessness" in the situation.
The resulting housing crunch left families separated, sometimes in hotels for months, and trapping women when the disaster aid was "organized around a male head of the household."
Calls to a crisis hotline for women doubled, and reports of sexual assault and more surged, the report said.
"Some men are trying to control anything they can control because so much is out of their control, especially with the current rebuilding of Lahaina. Anything they can control their money, kids, partner that's heightened. Tourism added another layer of things out of our control," Jordan Ruidas of Lahaina Strong explained to researchers.
The report said the findings overall suggest the fire and the response to it, "increased the number of people at risk of sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation by exacerbating known risk factors including domestic violence, substance abuse disorders, financial precarity and unstable living situations."
One of the aggravating factors, the report said, was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross, which handled much of the aid, "failed to adequately adapt their practices to local conditions or approach fire survivors through a culturally sensitive lens, in part because they rolled out a 'one-size-fits all' recovery package without adequately consulting local experts."
"The fact that in the richest country in the world women had to resort to any means necessary to meet basic human needs and survive a fire, is absolutely a critique of the entire American system – and the problem with having that system forced onto Hawaii," study co-author Khara Jabola-Carolus explained.
Even now, most survivors are displaced, with only 10 homes in the community already rebuilt, the report said.
The report said the "survival sex" problem was a result of the need for enough food, clothes, housing and shelter.
The report cited Biden's administration, which used hundreds of millions of American tax dollars to protect and house illegal aliens over the same time frame.
