Since yesterday afternoon the arrival of about 50 migrants, mostly of them originally from Venezuela, in Martha’s Vineyard has been one of the biggest stories in the country. The sentiment on the left has been entirely predictable. DeSantis has been vilified for “flinging” these poor migrants at one of the nicest resorts in the United States.

Deeply deeply sick and dehumanizing to fling human beings somewhere vindictively.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 15, 2022

Some on the left are suggesting the Gov. may have committed a crime.

The Department of Justice needs to investigate Governor DeSantis for using fraud and deception to lure people out of state only to abandon them without fulfilling his false promises. Same for Greg Abbott.

They’re engaging in human trafficking. https://t.co/5kX26LBuQf

— Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) September 15, 2022

Others have praised the residents of the Vineyard for their Christian response.

The hurling migrants at liberal cities and towns thing is narrowly funny in a meta way only because it’s premised on the assumption that everyone is as xenophobic and cold hearted as the governors and officials doing the hurling, and I don’t think they’ve once been proven right

— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24) September 15, 2022

MAGA world seems less angry about immigration and more pissed that DeSantis's expensive and hateful stunt of sending people to an off-season island didn't own the libs, who instead did the Christian thing and took in the strangers and made sure they had food and shelter.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 15, 2022

As you can see, it’s not just a few individuals. Each of these tweets has thousands of likes. There was a particularly vivid version of this take published at the Bulwark earlier today.

Let’s put aside the theology of immigration. Let’s pretend, just for a moment, that Jesus would have nothing to say about whether or not the state should seek to discourage undocumented migrants as a high-level matter of government policy.

Those planes were filled with actual human beings. People with dignity. People with hopes and dreams, problems and challenges. People with names and families.

And this Christian man used them as props. He didn’t clothe the naked or feed the hungry. He literally did the opposite: Evicted them—and not because he felt that he had to, because it was a requirement of the law. But because he saw that he could use them as a means to the ends of his personal ambition.

In the midst of all of this vocal moralizing about the treatment of migrants, another story that was published yesterday afternoon has been almost completely overlooked.

As border crossings have soared to record highs, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is quietly pressing Mexico to accept more migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela under a COVID-19 expulsion order that the White House has publicly sought to end, seven U.S. and three Mexican officials said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised concerns about an escalating number of crossings by migrants from the three countries during a visit on Monday to Mexico City, two U.S. and two Mexican officials told Reuters, but Mexico did not promise any specific actions…

The U.S. effort to pressure Mexico on these three particular nationalities illustrates the depth of concern within the Biden’s Democratic administration about their border crossings. Most migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela who cross into the United States are allowed to stay to pursue asylum claims, since they are difficult to deport due to frosty diplomatic relations with their governments…

Biden officials are also exploring ways to push responsibility to other nations beyond Mexico, sources said.

For example, the White House wants Panama to accept deported Venezuelans if they passed through the Central American nation en route to the United States, two of the U.S. officials said.

So the Biden administration is publicly in favor of ending Title 42 expulsions but privately they are begging Mexico to accept some of the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants because they now make up about 25% of the migrants showing up at the border. They are also hoping to send the Venezuelans back to Panama. The story ends by noting that the Biden administration had been flying migrants to the Dominican Republic. This story is from Feb. of this year.

President Joe Biden’s administration has been deporting Venezuelans by way of a third country despite condemning former President Donald Trump for doing the same.

In the midst of the tight 2020 presidential race, Biden blasted Trump for using what Biden said were “stealth deportations” through third countries to send Venezuelans “back to the oppressive Maduro regime.”

Trump had used Trinidad and Tobago, also in the Caribbean, to deport Venezuelans, a practice revealed by Noticias Telemundo Investiga in March 2020. In that fiscal year, ICE deported 193 Venezuelans through third countries.

From Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 31, 2021 — eight months of which fell under the Biden administration — ICE deported 176 Venezuelans, agency data obtained by Noticias Telemundo Investiga showed.

The practice has apparently been ended since then but I’m guessing most people expressing deep concern about the morality of flying Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard aren’t aware that the Biden administration had been flying them to the Dominican Republic, or that it is currently pressuring Panama and Mexico to take them back.

And let’s not pretend that the Biden administration’s motives are anything less than political. The border crisis is a concern for them and they are doing what they can, quietly, to make it go away. If that means “flinging” migrants to some other country rather than clothing them, feeding them and taking them in here, they are more than eager to do that. Just something to keep in mind at the media runs wild over Gov. DeSantis’ lack of Christian morality.