MIAMI, Florida — A Federal Emergency Management Agency employee has been fired after advising his disaster relief team to avoid homes with signs supporting the former president Donald Trump while canvassing in Florida in after Hurricane Miltonthe agency’s administrator said Saturday.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell called the employee’s actions “reprehensible” and said they have been removed from their positions.

“More than 22,000 FEMA employees every day adhere to FEMA’s core values ​​and are dedicated to helping people before, during and after disasters, often sacrificing time with their own families to help disaster survivors,” Criswell wrote in a post on X before describing the employee’s actions. “This is a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation.”

“This was reprehensible. I want to be clear to all of my employees and the American people, this type of behavior and action will not be tolerated at FEMA, and we will hold people accountable if they violate these standards of conduct,” he added it.

CNN reported Friday that the employee had been removed from his role and that the incident was being investigated. The agency did not identify the employee and said it believed it was “an isolated incident.”

“The employee who issued this guidance had no authority and was given no direction to tell crews to avoid these homes,” a FEMA spokesman said Friday.

The Daily Wire first reported about the incident, citing internal correspondence between the employee and home canvassers in Lake Placid, Florida, in which the employee instructed them to “avoid the homes advertising Trump.”

The agency is investigating how many homes were passed by the canvassing team as part of the Oct. 27 incident, the spokesperson told CNN. The agency on Friday deployed a new team to knock on doors in the affected area to contact those who may not have been contacted before.

The spokesman declined to provide additional information about the incident or detail how agency officials were notified of it, citing the investigation, but said in the statement that FEMA officials are “appalled that this has occurred and therefore they took extreme measures to correct this situation and we ensured that the issue was addressed at all levels.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said following reports of the incident on Friday that he had ordered state officials to investigate the matter.

“The blatant government harmonization by partisan activists in the federal bureaucracy is yet another reason why the Biden-Harris administration is in its final days,” said DeSantis, a Republican. wrote on X. “At my direction, the Division of Emergency Management is launching an investigation into the federal government’s targeted discrimination against Floridians who support Donald Trump.”

FEMA, the spokesperson said in their statement, “helps all survivors, regardless of their preferences or political affiliation.”

CNN’s Samantha Waldenberg contributed to this report.

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