Whoo Boy… DeSantis Snagged Migrants from TX to Ship to Martha’s Vineyard. Human Trafficking Much?

And this shit keeps getting worse and worse

Not surprisingly DeSantis told people what he was planning to do before he did it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told the Republican Party’s top donors last weekend he was considering transporting migrants to places like Martha’s Vineyard — just days before he secretly started the flights to the Massachusetts island.

“I do have this money. I want to be helpful. Maybe we will go to Texas and help. Maybe we’ll send to Chicago, Hollywood, Martha’s Vineyard. Who knows?” he said to applause in a speech Friday evening at the Four Seasons in Orlando, where hundreds of the party’s top donors gathered to hear him, according to a detailed account by a person in the room.

The account was confirmed by a second person present for the speech. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the private event.

As usual…when THEY’RE TELLING YOU who they are pay attention.

And then there is this. From Twitter

This means these were not Florida immigrants at all and that they were manipulated and lied to by someone who refused to give them any identifying information.

And then there’s this….

Oh and this… “Just for reference. Here’s the chartered flight arriving in Martha’s Vineyard on 9/14. It flew from San Antonio, TX to Spartanburg, SC, and then from Spartanburg to Martha’s Vineyard.” https://twitter.com/ThomasHeaney6/status/1570613019855695873/photo/1

Question. How did DeSantis manage to fly 50 undocumented illegal immigrants across state lines? He used government funds to transport people under false pretenses across the country with no security checks. That sounds like human smuggling to me, how about you?

And now this…

And the cherry on top..DeSantis stating that Biden isn’t sending him immigrants anymore so he can’t bus them elsewhere.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has not yet started busing undocumented immigrants from Florida to other parts of the country, in part, he says, because the Biden administration has stopped sending them.

During the 2022 legislative session, DeSantis championed a proposal to take migrants sent from the southern border to Florida as part of a long running program through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. The $12 million proposal was tucked in a larger immigration bill that was among the most contentious of the legislative session.

Oh, and they also just pulled this crap.

Two buses carrying migrants and asylum seekers have arrived near the home of United States Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, DC, in what critics have denounced as an effort by Republicans to use migrants as “political pawns” ahead of midterm elections.

Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, said in a statement on Thursday that 100 migrants from Colombia, Cuba, Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama, and Venezuela were dropped off near Harris’s residence.

But to tie this all together…let’s go back in history, shall we?

Red States have done this shit before…with black people.

Fuming over the civil rights movement, Southern segregationists had concocted a way to retaliate against Northern liberals. In 1962, they tricked about 200 African Americans from the South into moving north. The idea was simple: When large numbers of African Americans showed up on Northern doorsteps, Northerners would not be able to accommodate them. They would not want them, and their hypocrisy would be exposed.

The Reverse Freedom Rides have largely disappeared from the country’s collective memory. The scheme almost never appears in history books and is little-known even in Hyannis, the primary target of the ploy. But some hear echoes of that segregationist past in America’s present. And for the families that came to the North based on a lie, the journey has cast an enduring shadow on their lives.

The Citizens’ Councils attempted to cloak their racism in respectability, Webb said. They held meetings in fancy downtown hotels and wore suits and ties.”They could be members of the police force,” said Webb. “They could be bankers, businessmen and the like.”

These men masterminded an advertising effort, with flyers and radio commercials, to attract African Americans to accept bus tickets, bought with money the councils had raised. Their ideal recruits were single mothers with many children, and men who had gotten entangled in the criminal justice system.

“They targeted people who were either welfare recipients or prison inmates,” said Webb. “People who were placing a burden, as they saw it, on public resources.”

Then, they sought media attention. George Singelmann of Louisiana, who claimed credit for the original idea, had once worked in a newsroom. He made sure to alert the press.

“Negro ‘Ride’ Plan Stirs New Furor” read a front-page headline in The New York Times. The Boston Herald added, “14 More Jobless Negroes Sent North.” As spring rolled into summer and then fall, nearly daily articles chronicled the scheme as it unfolded.

Relishing the coverage, Guthridge said in an interview, “If it takes two weeks, two months, two years, five or 10 years, we will continue it until the white people up there … tell those politicians we are tired of using the American Negro for a pawn just for their votes.”

………………………………………………

Hearing media reports that more Reverse Freedom Riders were on their way, religious leaders, the local NAACP chapter and a few concerned residents teamed up to help. The group was half black, half white. They divided the tasks and gave themselves a name: The Refugee Relief Committee.

“We called them refugees. They represented what we feel a refugee is. They were homeless, broke, tired and afraid. We had to help them,” Rev. Kenneth Warren, a Unitarian minister who was the chairman of the committee, said to a reporter at the time.

That summer of 1962, Moseley carried the bus schedule with her. Among her many duties, she was in charge of greeting the new arrivals.”Most of the people who came had only a shopping bag with perhaps one change of clothing,” said the late Moseley in an interview with Tales of Cape Cod in 1994, three years before her death. The Reverse Freedom Riders arrived with “no money, knowing nobody.”

Moseley remembered one of the children who arrived asking, “Where are the cotton fields?” She told him there were no cotton fields. She said this news came as a terrible blow. She recalled the child saying, “Well, what am I going to do to find employment? I can chop cotton. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

The committee scrambled to help, convincing the local community college to open its dorms to the new arrivals. The local jail provided the bedding. And when the summer semester started and students came back to the dorms, they got the governor to lobby for nearby Otis Air Force Base to open its barracks.

Anyone else feeling deja vu?

What all of this shows is that nothing has changed in the Red States with regard to racism and their oversized toddler way of dealing with issues. Conservatives have NOT EVOLVED in decades, the GOP party is still filled with selfish racist power-hungry narcissists who have no empathy or the least bit of human feeling. They are just repeating the same stunts, the same talking points, and the same racist behavior that they always have.

Perhaps, at some point, we as a society need to stop treating people that show these tendencies with any hint of respect and stop thinking we can just “use logic” to talk them out of their positions or “name and shame them” to try to get them to change. They have no shame, as is quite evident on a daily basis.

Let me smack down another GOP talking point. Biden secretly bussing or flying immigrants to Red States in the dead of night…Bullshit.

For generations, some migrants arriving at the border who are apprehended by the Border Patrol have been released into the United States and permitted to attend court hearings outside of detention. And the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has occasionally assisted migrants with transportation. DHS will sometimes arrange flights to the location they will wait in before attending court or help their family members purchase plane tickets for them before they’re released. This process has occurred under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, including Bush, Obama, and Trump.

Even though this practice has been carried out across multiple administrations, people have claimed that the Biden administration is trying to keep these flights off the radar. But migrant releases and transportation under the Biden administration have been not very different than under the Trump administration. And even though DHS has never provided public notice of such flights before they occur, they are hardly a secret; the agency will readily acknowledge the flights and explain their destination and purpose when asked.

For decades, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) has had a national network of shelters for migrant children who arrive at the border. If a child arrives at the border and the only space available is a shelter far from the border, ORR will put the child on a plane rather than a multi-day bus trip. Rather than being a conspiracy, the flights are simply normal practice for ORR across multiple administrations. The shelter in Westchester has been there for years and there are even videos from 2018 of similar flights carrying migrant children into the New York area.

In recent years, ORR has also sometimes helped transport children to their family members after they get sponsored out of government custody. This common-sense measure has allowed children to get into the arms of a loved one faster than if the parent drove across the country to come pick them up. In all those cases, the child has a right to remain in the United States while they go through the court process. The government agency is simply smoothing out the process for them.

Similar situations with adult migrants have also occurred for years. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) often chooses to release some percent of people at the border or from a detention center on bond or an “alternatives to detention” program such as electronic monitoring.

If the person is being released far from their ultimate destination, then ICE will make sure the person’s sponsor (usually a family member) has bought them a plane or bus ticket so they can get to their destination in safety. Under both Obama and Trump, it was routine to see migrants being dropped off at the San Antonio bus station with Greyhound tickets. Even in 2019, during the height of Trump’s anti-asylum policies, ICE was contracting with private companies to drop migrants off at shelters.

And the slant on this story cracks me up…they start out by making it sound like all of these people are being transported on the public dime and are somehow being just let loose into the country with no place to go….and then they go on to explain that the immigrants are duly processed and have to pay for every damn cent of their transportation.

You see, the Feds bus immigrants from Texas all the time, but they do it in a way that makes sure the immigrants have places to go lined up, help, etc. They don’t just dump them off in the middle of a city for political points purposes. So DeSantis and Abbott, are once again, full of shit. The Feds are helping plenty with the immigrant issue, but that doesn’t score political points with Desantis and Abbot’s base to admit that.

According to Ortiz, Burrow, Border Patrol agents, and several migrants, many turn themselves into Border Patrol voluntarily after their illegal crossings, knowing well the good things that will follow.

They are taken to a Border Patrol processing facility on the outskirts of town, where their fingerprints and identifiers are registered.

In the first months of November, December, January, and February, no one was getting tested for Covid. But after a public outcry, DHS contracted a private company to conduct Covid-19 tests inside the Del Rio area Border Patrol facility. Every immigrant is now tested, Burrow said.

DHS then provides many immigrants with an administrative document titled “Order of Release on Recognizance”, which grants them the legal right to be present inside the United States, according to two such documents that immigrants on the buses agreed to share. These require the immigrants to self-report to a deportation officer in their destination cities by a specific date provided.

One Nicaraguan migrant showed CIS a DHS document titled “Interim Notice Authorizing Parole”, which grants him a renewable one-year term to live legally inside the country.

Most will likely use their time to apply for asylum, a lengthy, back-logged process that allows for work authorization and Social Security cards during an adjudication process that can drag on for years.

In Del Rio, at least, the immigrants are then dropped off at Burrow’s Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition. She and her staff of unpaid volunteers help the immigrants contact relatives or friends, figure out how to get bus fare paid or money wired in, and then the transportation part. Organizations like hers operate in other border towns doing the same work.

The immigrants have to pay the entire bus fare, Burrow said, and receive no government assistance for travel. Some arrive with some money. Almost everyone seems to know someone, a relative or friend, willing to wire money or buy bus tickets and incidentals.

Oh, and as I mentioned in my other article on immigration, Biden is asking for a 700% increase in funding to deal with the backlog in processing asylum requests, green cards, etc. This means fewer wait times for these people.

And while Abbott and DeSantis act like their states are the only ones dealing with illegal immigration issues, Cali is over here with the most amount of undocumented immigrants in the country and not complaining about it all, as a matter of fact, they’re doing everything they can to take care of them and seems that the negative impact of illegal immigrants on the 5th largest economy in the world is negligible at best.

New York also has plenty of undocumented immigrants, they’re not throwing shit fits either.

Who is? Racist southerners. That’s who.

And one last thing. DOJ and Biden are not going to take all this bullshit stunt playing from Abbot and DeSantis lying down either.

Cabinet heads and White House officials will meet Friday morning to discuss a range of pressing immigration issues — including “litigation options” to respond to GOP governors transporting unauthorized immigrants from the border to other parts of the country, according to planning documents viewed by Axios.

Why it matters: News that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis chartered two planes to fly roughly 50 migrants — mostly Venezuelan — to Martha’s Vineyard has triggered a wave of backlash from Democrats and immigration advocates, with many condemning the move as political and inhumane.

Driving the news: One asylum-seeker, Katiuska from Caracas, Venezuela, told Axios Boston co-author Steph Solis — who spent today on the ground in Martha’s Vineyard — that she was told the group was going to New York City. Others said they believed they were heading to Boston.

To Sum Up: Abbott and DeSantis are coercing people onto planes and buses using false promises, not following any guidelines to get these people into any system that would allow them to become legal citizens in the future, and not notifying anyone in the states where they are dumping them while using taxpayer money to transport them.

Then dumping them into states that ALREADY TAKE IN millions of undocumented immigrants as it is, to prove some sort of “point” that FL and TX can’t deal with the immigrants flooding their borders. This is weird as the federal government already spends billions to process immigrants while making sure they have places to stay and money to pay for the transportation on their own so they don’t cost taxpayers more money to be transported.

And here’s the most disgusting part: Their voters are loving this because all conservatives respond to are theatrical tricks and talking points.

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