George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley has written that if it is illegal, as some Democrats have alleged, for GOP governors to move migrants across the country, then President Joe Biden is the “biggest ‘coyote’ in history.”
The term “coyote” refers to the smugglers who work for Mexican cartels and who are paid thousands of dollars per migrant to move human beings from points in Central America across the U.S. border, sometimes assaulting and robbing them en route.
Turley published a column Monday in response to calls by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to have Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) arrested for kidnapping after he flew 50 migrants to the wealthy liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard last week.
Other Democrats and liberal pundits made similar calls for DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who bused migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington, DC, arrested for similar crimes, including “human trafficking.”
Turley notes that these calls are legally spurious, especially because the Biden administration has been busing migrants from the border to locations throughout the U.S. for several years — without complaint until they were sent to Democrat-run cities:
The Biden administration has transported thousands of migrants across the country with little public notice, including late-night flights denounced by Republicans as clandestine “ghost flights.” Those transfers have been defended by Democrats and others as standard practice in the past three administrations. This, as thousands of migrants regularly overwhelm border towns despite administration officials — including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and, most recently, Vice President Kamala Harris — insisting the border is secure.
The trips arranged by the three Republican governors have been denounced as a political stunt. And, indeed, they are — but they are not criminal acts, absent new evidence of compulsion or fraud. There are reports of some migrants demanding to be allowed off buses en route to New York, and some migrants are quoted as saying they were induced with promises of opportunities or care in sanctuary cities. Yet there is no evidence of systemic fraud or misrepresentation. Moreover, even if there was misrepresentation, it would not constitute some of the crimes being claimed on cable television, including Hillary Clinton declaring that it constitutes “literally human trafficking.”
…
In theory, public interest groups arranging for transportation or individuals giving rides to migrants could be prosecuted on the same basis under Section 1324. In reality, if transporting undocumented migrants after they are released into the country is to be judged criminal, then the Biden administration would be the largest “coyote” in history.
Read Turley’s full column here.
In his own column Monday, Byron York of the Washington Examiner notes that the controversy over Martha’s Vineyard obscures the fundamental problem: how to secure the southern border against illegal crossings.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.