Last week, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas sent well over a dozen migrant children, including one as young as one month old, on highly controversial plane and bus trips to liberal locales across the East Coast.
The children were among the over 100 asylum-seekers, many of them Venezuelan dispatched to Martha’s Vineyard, New York City, and Washington DC.
On Friday, Florida chartered two planes that sent roughly 50 migrants, many of them waiting in Texas, for their legally protected asylum claims to process, to the wealthy island of Martha’s Vineyard.
The group included about a dozen children of elementary school age, Richie Smith, the island’s superintendent of schools, told the MV Times. Children as young as two were on the flights, reported NPR. Some of the kids were reportedly hula hooping as local officials scrambled to find emergency housing for the migrants.
One family told the Texas Tribune they and their 7-year-old daughter had endured abductions and beatings from a Mexican drug cartel as they made their journey from Peru to the US.
“When they told us that they were going to help us with the rent, to get a job, that was the only option left to us,” one of the migrants, Eduardo, said.
The White House condemned the flights on Friday.
“These were children. They were moms. They were fleeing communism. And what did Governor DeSantis and Governor Abbott do to them? They used them as political pawns, treated them like chattel,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press briefing on Friday.
Numerous asylum seekers say they were enticed to take the journey with false claims of work, housing, and social services allegedly offered by a mysterious woman only known as Perla.
Officials have condemned the flights as a form of “human trafficking.”
“Shipping vulnerable migrants across the country is not a campaign tactic. It is human trafficking,” U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, a former refugee herself, said on Thursday. “It is the abuse of dozens of human beings and a celebration of that abuse for political gain.”
Others have suggested that if migrants and their families were lured onto the flights under false pretenses, it could be grounds for a criminal investigation.
Multiple children were also photographed on a trio of buses carrying over 100 people that the state of Texas sent to vice-president Kamala Harris’s doorstep at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, on Thursday and Saturday.
Among the group was a…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…