They descended the cruise ship’s gangplank at the Port of Palm Beach looking like refugees from a war zone. Some carried babies and small children; others clutched small bags of possessions snatched hastily from the rubble of their ruined homes; most had just the clothes they stood in.

For the 1,435 weary Hurricane Dorian evacuees from the Bahamas who disembarked the Grand Celebration liner and stepped on to the dockside at the weekend there were the pressing concerns of where they would find immediate shelter.

But while the Red Cross spoke of how they had received offers from across Florida to help accommodate them, their longer-term situations, and the willingness of the US to offer shelter to more of the tens of thousands of homeless survivors have quickly became politically sensitive questions.

On Monday, Donald Trump weighed in, claiming without evidence that “very bad people” including gang members and drug dealers were probably among evacuees seeking entry to the US.

The president’s comments also followed an episode on Sunday in Freeport, the capital of the island of Grand Bahama that was torn apart by the category 5 hurricane just days earlier, in which dozens of Bahamians without US visas were ordered off a boat to Fort Lauderdale even though they were admissible on humanitarian grounds without one.

The majority of those newly arrived from Freeport on Saturday to the Port of Palm Beach on the cruise liner slipped quietly away, collected by family members already in Florida, or to hotels or private accommodation that friends, relatives and benefactors had secured for them.

Of the 857 Bahamian nationals aboard, barely 60 got on buses for a Red Cross shelter set up at a recreation center in nearby Lake Worth on Saturday.

Red Cross officials spoke of how they were focused on their immediate needs.

“The county asked us to open the shelter temporarily for the people who are coming on this ship, but there is no rolling process, no ongoing process for additional people to be processed this way,” Craig Cooper, national spokesman for the American Red Cross, told the Guardian on Tuesday. “We need to dispel any belief or assumption there is going to be an ongoing situation or absorbing people who are coming over from the Bahamas.”

The Guardian