Conservatives are firing back at Joe Biden over reports of federally-contracted chartered jets carrying primarily minor-age illegal aliens into Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The secretive flights, which have been arriving late at night without passenger manifests being made available, began on December 11 and are set to conclude December 30. It is believed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already flown hundreds of illegal aliens into the Keystone State on such flights since they began.
Jim Gallagher, president of Aviation Technologies Inc., said the so-called ghost flights are believed to have originated in Texas, with some stopping in Cincinnati.
Gallagher told the press he witnessed mostly young men who did not speak English get off the planes and then board buses that had been parked near the airport hangars.
The flights were handled by KaiserAir, iAero and World Atlantic Airlines.
“We don’t know their status,” Gallagher added. “It seems that all of the vetting should take place at the border, but it appears that there isn’t much transparency there. More information needs to be provided. There needs to be more control.”
Representative Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) penned a letter to ICE director Tae Johnson and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in which he demanded answers.
“It is my understanding that a total of 130 immigrants, 118 minors and 12 adults, arrived aboard an iAero charter flight on Friday, Dec. 17, and were subsequently transported on buses from a private hangar…. This flight seems to have occurred without airport officials receiving notice or a passenger manifest,” Meuser wrote.
Flights were recorded as having arrived on 11 and 17. Two even arrived on Christmas Day, and one is set to land on December 30.
“The lack of communication and transparency surrounding this process is unacceptable,” Meuser further wrote. “Your agency failed to notify me or any other local officials of these activities, leaving us unable to answer the concerns of constituents in the communities we represent. Pennsylvanians deserve to know about these decisions affecting their community.”
Republican gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta, a former congressman, wrote a letter of his own in which he stated:
I asked Gov. Wolf and Attorney General Shapiro a series of straightforward questions about these flights, and they haven’t provided any answers. Now we see evidence of more flights on Christmas night, and people want to know if illegal immigrants are being transported to our community, whether they’ve undergone background checks and health screenings, and why no one was notified that this was happening.
Other states face similar circumstances as the Biden regime flies in the surplus of illegal migrants that have come into the country in the wake of the border surge.
In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has suggested taking aim at the contractors who work with the federal government to transport illegal aliens to the state.
“We’re looking at what we can do. I think that they use these private contractors. So what we’re looking at is how can we fight back against the contractors? We can obviously deny them state contracts, which we will do. Can we deny them access to Florida’s market generally? Can we tax them? Can we do things to provide disincentives so they can’t do it? So we’re going to do whatever we can to do it,” he told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
Elsewhere, the attorneys general of Texas and Missouri have partnered to sue the federal government in order to compel it to complete the border wall started under the Trump administration.
In Texas, in fact, Governor Greg Abbott recently inaugurated the “unprecedented” first stretch of border wall built by the state.
Back in June, Abbott announced that the state would build a wall along the Texas-Mexico border by using a combination of state funding and private donations. The office of the governor appropriated $250 million of state money as a down payment for wall construction, while the legislature appropriated an additional $750 million for border barriers during one of the legislative sessions this year.
The Texas Tribune notes:
As of Dec. 13, the state has collected $54 million in private donations, mostly coming from one single donor: Timothy Mellon, the chair of Pan Am Systems, a privately-held transportation and freight holding company. Mellon has previously donated to immigration enforcement efforts in the past.
In total, the state now has at least $1.05 billion for its border barriers.
That would fund between 31 and 183 miles of barrier construction, based on the per-mile costs of the contracts initiated by the Trump administration, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. The contracts, which were halted by the Biden administration, ranged from $6 million to $34 million per mile for wall construction.
If the federal government is not only failing to stop illegal immigration, but is openly abetting it, then it is up to the states to protect their people from invasion.
