This week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shipped two planeloads of migrants, mainly from Venezuela, to Martha’s Vineyard. The 50 migrants, including children, had apparently been staying in a shelter in San Antonio, Tex., when they were offered transport to Boston. They were first flown to Florida, then North Carolina, and finally the posh New England vacation spot. DeSantis is just the latest Republican governor to treat human beings as pawns and ship them around the country in an attempt to score political points. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott has been shipping migrants to New York; Washington, D.C.; and Vice President Kamala Harris’s house.
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Can you imagine being deposited in a strange town, full of strange people, thousands of miles from where you started in a country that is bigger than you could reasonably imagine, not being fluent in the language, carrying only the vague promise that the strange people were going to be nice?
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I do not know why treating brown people like unwanted garbage so titillates the Republican MAGA base. I do not know how white media pundits at major publications and outlets can refer to this situation as a “policy debate.” I do not know what the specific defect is in the MAGA Republican psyche that allows them to order, authorize, or support forced or coerced relocation as one option among many. All I know for sure is that treating children as sub-creatures who can be bused cross-country for the sole purpose of trolling the opposition party is what makes Abbott and DeSantis the actual sub-creatures.
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Forced or coerced relocations have a long history in the United States, and the white people who make the rules always have made those relocations “legal” at the time. The forced relocation of the Cherokee was “legal.” The internment of Japanese Americans was “legal.” Even “Greyhound therapy,” in which cities (often Democratic) give homeless men and women one-way tickets out of town on Greyhound buses was, and still is, technically legal.
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Our human trafficking laws, at both the state and federal level, only criminalize relocating people and children for the purposes of sex or some other labor. Sending people across state lines to have a laugh with your good ol’ boys at the next KKK or NRCC rally is not illegal under our relevant human trafficking statutes; it’s just deeply fucked up.
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Where the governors might be more exposed is with federal kidnapping laws. It is a crime to kidnap somebody and transport them across state lines, and that crime includes tricking people (the legal term is “inveigle”) to go “voluntarily.” NPR reports that at least some of the people who ended up on Martha’s Vineyard were told that they would be going to Boston, and that in Boston they would be able to get expedited work papers; Rolling Stone reports that they were also promised housing.
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[T]he goals of Abbott and DeSantis are not to find places that will treat new residents decently; their goals are to find places that will snap under the weight of unexpected guests. If Martha’s Vineyard shows that it can handle a sudden influx of new people—as Boston can, as D.C. can, as New York can (despite the pathetic and swaggerless mewling of Mayor Eric Adams)—the Republicans will just find somewhere else to send people.
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Republicans like Abbottt and DeSantis never stop trying to hurt people. They have to be made to stop. The DOJ must try, and if that doesn’t work, then Congress must expand the human trafficking laws to prohibit shipping people across state lines for political gain.
We can’t fix the malfunction in the MAGA heart that allows them to treat children as political pawns, but we can fix the loophole in our laws that allows them to get away with it.
Elie Mystal @ The Nation
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