A Free Trip to Martha's Vineyard!

Trying to make sense of DeSantis's PR stunt

I’ll stipulate some things right off the bat. First, details of the DeSantis Martha’s Vineyard story are coming out even as I write this. Second, we need a serious policy conversation about our immigration laws and their operationalization. Third, it’s hard to get actual detail about what our current border status is (I really think anti-immigration hardliners like it that way).¹ Fourth, I’m not an expert on immigration law.

The DeSantis sends migrants to Martha’s Vineyard story starts, surprisingly in San Antonio.² There in San Antonio, a woman purportedly addressed a number of Venezuelan migrants first with offers of food at the nearby fast-food restaurant and then suggested that they could get to Boston where jobs and migrant assistance were readily available. For those who were interested, she offered airplane transportation from a charter company.

Once aboard the plane, they were given maps describing their route and a brochure touting Massachusetts’ level of support from migrant resettlement.

According to some reports, they were told that they were headed to Boston. After a brief stop in Florida, the plane took them to Martha’s Vineyard.³

Another thing that’s part of the story. It appears that the Venezuelans had been allowed to make humanitarian asylum claims in light of the atrocities happening in their country since the beginning of the Moduro regime. And because we don’t have diplomatic relations with Venezuela, simply returning them to their country of origin was not possible.⁴

Asylum seekers report to US authorities and make an initial claim of asylum. They are then scheduled for an initial hearing, provide a local address, and wait (often as much as a year) for their adjudication to occur. But as long as they keep in touch with authorities, they are here legally. So any reports you’ve read from DeSantis talking about dealing with “illegal immigrants” are flat out wrong.

An immigration lawyer gave a statement in Martha’s Vineyard today outlining not only that they were misled in terms of what was happening, but that they were made to attest to false addresses given them by DHS authorities. These errors in address increases the likelihood that they will fail to meet required court dates and thereby lose their asylum-eligible status.

To recap, people who had travelled from their native Venezuela to the United States had legally asked for humanitarian asylum. They were then conned into getting on a plane that took them to Martha’s Vineyard, where they were dumped without warning. In the process, officials increased their risk of violation and subsequent deportation.

Charlie Sykes identified the issue with the DeSantis stunt in his newsletter this morning. I read it every day and highly recommend it.

In DeSantis’s case he’s using Florida tax dollars to fly Venezuelan refugees fleeing communism from Texas to Massachusetts (which has a Republican governor). But don’t get hung-up on the details, because this is priceless political theater that supremely owns the libs, whose tears are the sweet, sweet aphrodisiac for the base.

A political stunt that will echo on Fox News for months. I guess that Tucker Carlson had suggested a Martha’s Vineyard dump some time back, either because the Obama’s had a place there or Vineyard residents were mean to Alan Dershowitz, or both.

Why did the Venezuelans come? The conditions in their own country in terms of the economy and public safety had become so oppressive that traveling 2000 miles sounded like a good deal. And the news media had been broadcasting non-stop about low unemployment rates, quiet quitting, and difficulties of employers filling positions.

A sane immigration policy would create pathways whereby people like this could flee their dangerous situations and work in the US. Doing so would require a massive investment in immigration courts to eliminate the no-mans zone of waiting for court dates. It would distinguish between those who cross at legal points of entry and those who cross elsewhere. It would not demonize every person entering the country as a potential drug smuggler or human trafficker.

There are solutions to these issues, especially if we took the time to triage them into relevant categories. But too many in our political and media worlds are much more interested in make performative plays. It makes the immigration issue the problem of the Biden administration (during the Trump years it was all about Democratic lawmakers). But as Sykes observes:

Abbott and DeSantis have every right to raise questions about border policies; they can make speeches, hold press conferences, run ads, raise money off anti-immigrant outrage, and even stage political events to highlight their positions.

And there is nothing inherently awful about political stunts, especially in our media-besotted political environment.

But this one is different, because they chose to use people — including vulnerable children — as their pawns and props.

Responsible people could reach policy deals to ameliorate our struggling immigration system. But they’d rather play public relations games. And fifty people brand new to the country, who could contribute mightily to our well-being, suffer the price.

Thankfully, churches and residents of Martha’s Vineyard provided a much different set of images for the Venezuelans to remember.⁵

1. For example, I tried to do some research this morning using CBP data. It tells me the total number of border crossers each month and year to date, including a caveat that repeat crossers are in the mix. But there is no breakdown I could find on where they crossed, their status when crossing, or the non-duplicate number of crossers. All of those would be valuable pieces of information if we wanted to do anything other than scream Border Crisis.

2. For the geographically challenged, that’s in Texas not Florida.

3. For those geographically challenged, Boston is three hours from Martha’s Vineyard.

4. For the geographically challenged, Venezuela is 2000 miles from San Antonia

5. They’ve now been transported to a joint military base on Cape Cod.