The Florida Gateway: Data Shows Most Migrant Flights Landing in Gov. DeSantis’s Sunshine State
Smaller but significant numbers are landing in Texas, New York, and California
By Todd Bensman on April 1, 2024
One of Florida's busiest international airports in CBP's Miami Office of Field Operations where hundreds of thousands of presumed aspiring illegal border-crossers are flying in from foreign airports in Latin America and the Caribbean under a secretive Biden administration program. Photo by Todd Bensman.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refuses to publicly identify the dozens of U.S. international airports for which it has approved direct flights from abroad for certain inadmissible aliens. At least 386,000 migrants through February have been allowed to fly to interior U.S. airports as part of a legally dubious admissions program the administration launched in October 2022. The rationale for the program is to “reduce the number of individuals crossing unlawfully” over the southern border — by flying them over it directly into the interior and then releasing them on parole.
But a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analysis of available public information on U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) website, filtered to see Office of Field Operations (OFO) airport customs officer encounters with the nationalities chosen to receive this benefit, points out the airports that might account for most of the landings from abroad, if not necessarily the final destinations.
This early evidence suggests that a great many of these inadmissible alien passengers, probably a majority, initially land at international airports in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida. In fact, Florida turns out to be the top landing and U.S. customs processing zone for this direct-flights parole-and-release program, tallying at nearly 326,000 of the initial arrivals from inception through February.
https://cis.org/Bensman/Florida-Gateway-Data-Shows-Most-Migrant-Flights-Landing-Gov-DeSantiss-Sunshine-State
