Who says crime doesn't pay?
Break into someone else's country, accept a free plane ride to a rich man's vacation playground, take the free food and shelter, and all of a sudden, you've got a work permit and a U-visa as a pitiful victim of a crime, with a green card on the way.
That's Joe Biden for you, twisting a small federal law about protecting crime victims into a political tool to stick it to Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, who flew a planeload of illegals to Martha's Vineyard to bring the border to the sanctuary cities of the left. That's something every city, red and blue, is doing now, shifting migrants on a voluntary basis to control costs.
According to National Review:
Some of the illegal immigrants that Florida governor Ron DeSantis flew to Martha’s Vineyard in September 2022 now qualify for crime-victim visas, allowing them to legally work in the U.S.
At least three of the 49 immigrants applied for U-visas last year, claiming to be victims of a crime. They allege DeSantis and other Florida officials tricked them into taking part in the flight operation two years ago with false promises of work and housing. The two charter flights took off from San Antonio, Texas, and made a pit stop in Florida before reaching their final destination at Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts.
Immigration attorney Rachel Self said three of the original group of 49 Venezuelan nationals received “bona fide determinations” for their U-visa applications, meaning they can find jobs and stay in the U.S. without being deported while waiting for their special visas to come through.
So now they're creatively-interpreted victims of a 'crime' as if the flight itself that they willingly accepted was a criminal operation, done by the governor of Florida.
Where's the prosecution for this 'crime'? (A judge threw the matter out, actually, though the migrants were allowed to civilly sue the private charter plane company.)
Considering all the cartels and coyotes these illegals may have paid thousands to for their illegal passage into the U.S., calling this the 'crime,' even though nobody was mistreated, flights and meals were free, and the island advertised itself as a sanctuary is absurd.
A contract may have been violated, but the only people who breached the contract here are those who sent them packing from their sanctuary, the denizens of the wealthy island itself, who sent them free of charge to Boston for more free stuff.
Now that all states and cities are doing this to get the migrant costs off their hands -- New York, Chicago, and more -- it's pretty clear the migrant-moving was never a crime.What is an actual crime is that the unvetted migrants broke and entered illegally into this country.
Commit that crime, and Joe Biden is going to reward you.
Let's just say what this really is: Joe Biden is now granting de facto amnesty to illegal lawbreakers in order to Get De Santis. Biden loathes Republicans and their quest for rule of law, their willingness to expose leftist hypocrisy, and their politically embarassing him in the course of that, which is why he's doing this. The law for Biden is just a tool for achieving his own political ends. And that political end is to replace Republican voters with those in his political debt.
That's why he'll use anything he can to bring more illegals in and incentivize more to follow.
By Biden's logic, anyone victimized by crime, legal or not, is eligible for a U-visa. Word of that will get out and suddenly, all of them will be victims of crime, and don't think he won't hand out millions of U-visas in response.
He's done this before, so he knows the ropes. Biden already has blatantly abused parole authority to enact catch-and-release for millions of illegal migrants, all of whose entry into the U.S. is "in the national interest" or a special "humanitarian" consideration. Parole for illegal border crossers is supposed to be used extremely sparingly, but Biden has made it stamp-and-go standard operating procedure, gumming up all Border Patrol operations.
Now he's doing the same with U-visas, granting them to illegal migrants, supposedly because they are victims of crimes. That should include all of them, every child laborer laboring in factories, every human trafficking victim including those who signed up willingly, and every military-aged young foreign national who has paid a cartel to cross illegally, and now especially, every migrant who got onto Ron De Santis's flight.
This, too, has been part of his playbook. Recall how he attempted to pay out $200,000 payments to migrant families separated at the border after breaking the law a couple years ago until word got out among the public. More rewarding of lawbreaking here, in this case, to Get Trump and paint him as a criminal.
The ultimate message of this playbook is that anyone resisting Biden's open borders is now a criminal, and they shouldn't cross him; he'll whip out the amnesty in two seconds if they do and paint them as 'criminals.'
Never mind the fate of the country. For Joe, his continued grip on power is his real game and these outrageous visas show it.
Image: Screen shot from 60 Minutes video, via YouTube