Miranda Devine: Secret planeloads of immigrants have been landing in New York
The Daily Telegraph’s columnist Miranda Devine witnessed two planes land in New York as part of Joe Biden’s immigration plan.
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The first act of the Biden presidency was to dismantle hard-won Trump-era border protection measures, including abandoning construction of the border wall with Mexico.
Australians know better than most what happened next, having lived through the Rudd era, when all the painstakingly crafted border protection measures of the Howard government were jettisoned.
An unprecedented surge of illegal migration inevitably followed, with all its attendant tragedy.
In the United States, we know the consequences of Joe Biden’s reckless folly: more than 1.5 million illegal migrants have crossed the Mexican border since he was sworn in and spitefully signed a slew of executive orders cancelling all of Donald Trump’s works.
That figure doesn’t even account for the “gotaways”, border crossers who never came to the attention of border patrol agents.
Those agents are so overwhelmed that they mostly have given up issuing the interlopers with a “notice to appear” — a slip of paper with a date to appear in immigration court.
At best the migrants receive a note requesting that they report to an immigration office within 60 days. The request is not worth the paper it is written on.
Most illegals will melt into the community to join the exploited shadow workforce that keeps the country humming.
But while we know that illegal migration in the US is at a record high, what we haven’t known is where the migrants go.
The New York Post pulled back the curtain on that mystery this week, with an exclusive report into a clandestine operation by the Biden administration to fly illegal migrants into a regional New York airport by private charter jets in the middle of the night.
Over the past 10 weeks planeloads of illegal immigrants have been flown into suburban New York under cover of darkness as part of an effort by President Biden’s administration to quietly resettle them in communities across the country.
The charter flights mainly originate in the border town of McAllen, El Paso or Houston, Texas, where the ongoing border crisis has overwhelmed local immigration officials.
They have been under way since at least August, at a rate of about three per week, according to sources familiar with the situation.
The cost per flight is estimated by aviation experts to be more than $100,000, based on an hourly charter rate of $15,000.
A Post analysis of online flight-tracking data suggests that around 2000 migrants who were apprehended after sneaking into the US from Mexico have arrived at the Westchester County Airport at White Plains on 21 government-chartered flights since August 8.
Sources say the flights began as early as April into the quiet suburban airport which is about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan.
More than half the planes touched down between midnight and 6:30am — when a voluntary curfew is in effect — with two arriving from Houston at 2:13am and 4:29am on August 20.
The clandestine nature of the operation raises questions about how the White House is dealing with the hundreds of thousands of migrants who’ve surged across the border since Biden was inaugurated.
Last week, I watched with a photographer as two planes landed at White Plains airport late at night from El Paso, via Jacksonville, Florida. Both times, about 100 passengers — some of whom appeared to be teenagers and some to be men in their 20s — piled into waiting buses and were given a silent police escort out of the airport.
On Friday night, we followed one bus as it barrelled down the Hutchinson River Parkway.
At about 12:30am on Saturday, it stopped in a quiet hamlet in Long Island, at a former orphanage run by Mercy nuns which now is a non-profit with a federal contract to deliver residential services to “immigrant youth”.
Later that day, a similar scene played out in Jacksonville, Florida, where most of the flights from Texas have touched down before continuing on to Westchester.
Around 10:30pm on Saturday, the New York Post watched a group of between 10 and 15 people wearing matching white baseball caps and carrying duffel bags get off a Boeing 737-700 near a dormant cargo terminal at Jacksonville International Airport where local cops stood by as they were escorted onto a charter bus.
After a two-hour drive, the group arrived at a juvenile detention centre near Tallahassee, where staffers were waiting to open a gate topped with barbed wire.
The workers declined to answer any questions or let the migrants be interviewed but repeatedly demanded to know how The Post located them.
Reports and flight logs indicate that similar flights are occurring by stealth across the country, using the same methods.
The governors of Tennessee and Iowa have raised concerns about large numbers of illegal migrants being flown into Chattanooga, and Des Moines and then dispersed to unknown locations by bus.
Last Wednesday at 10:49pm, The New York Post watched another migrant plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83, land at the White Plains airport and saw about 100 passengers loaded into two buses.
Both buses stopped at a rest area off the New Jersey Turnpike, where the migrants got off around 12:45am.
Over the next two hours, they were driven away in cars by people who met them there — without anyone appearing to have to show identification to the officials overseeing the operation.
Former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, a Republican candidate for governor, said he learned about the flights from concerned citizens upset by violations of the voluntary curfew at the White Plains airport.
When he held an August 16 news conference about the flights, he said a plane arrived carrying migrants who got onto a bus that pulled up close to the air stairs and partially blocked the view of the passengers.
Astorino said he spotted at least 50 to 75 migrants, most of whom appeared to be men older than 20.
“No one has explained where they’re going and who they are,” he said.
“The Biden administration is systematically spreading the southern border crisis to communities all around the country, often shrouded in secrecy and under the cloak of darkness.”
No one can blame the migrants from seeking a better life, and as far as they are concerned, Joe Biden has laid out the welcome mat.
But the Biden administration is facilitating what can only be descried as a soft invasion and is doing its best to hide it from the American people.
It’s hard to imagine the Rudd government getting away with a similar outrage.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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