Immigration has always been a hot-button topic for Americans, and opinions differ on how to handle it. On Wednesday, September 14th, 2 planes (50 people) filled with migrants unexpectedly landed in Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. They arrived around 3 pm without any warning, State Senator Julian Cyr told The New York Times. Julian Cyr is a Massachusetts Democrat representing Nantucket, Cape Cod, and Nantucket. Volunteers from the island “really moved heaven and earth to essentially set up the response that we would do in the event of a hurricane,” he told The New York Times. 

Florida Governor Ron Desantis sent the planes as a part of the governor’s effort to relocate immigrants to sanctuary destinations. The Governor’s communications director told Fox News Digital, “States like Massachusetts, New York and California will better facilitate the care of these individuals who they have invited into our country by incentivizing illegal immigration through their designation as ‘sanctuary states’ and support for the Biden administration’s open border policies.” 

Other Republican governors have been doing similar things. Starting in April 2022, Texas Governor Greg Abbott began bussing migrants to D.C in protest of apparent lax immigration enforcement by Joe Biden’s administration. Governors of Florida and Arizona have followed suit, claiming that Democratic cities should share the burden of accommodating migrants, which was being shouldered by the communities in their states. During the summer, Abbott included New York City and Chicago as his destinations for the migrants. On September 15th, Abbott started bussing migrants near Vice-President Kamala Harris’s house in D.C. Republican Governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, also began bussing migrants from his state to D.C. Still, his operation is not as large in scale as Abbot. About 13,000 migrants have been moved so far and it is an ongoing operation. As of right now, this is considered to be completely legal. There are questions about whether the migrants were coerced into being moved, but there isn’t enough evidence at the moment to support that.