by Bethany Blankley
The Biden administration is advancing immigration policies that are harming children, Gov. Ron DeSantis, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez, and Attorney General Ashley Moody say.
The statewide elected officials met Monday with Cuban Americans who came to Miami as children as part of the 1960-62 era humanitarian operation Peter Pan (“Pedro Pan”). Over a two-year period, more than 14,000 Cuban youths arrived alone in the U.S. in what was at the time the largest recorded exodus of unaccompanied minors in the Western Hemisphere fleeing from the communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
At the roundtable event Monday in Miami, DeSantis said that Florida didn’t “want to be facilitating very harmful policies … but also the treatment of people who are basically being trafficked as what is effectively the largest human smuggling operation in American history.
“If you look at the absolute explosion of illegal migrants coming across the southern border, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” he added. “No one knows who a lot of these people are.”
Attempts to compare the border crisis to Pedro Pan by some in the media and by Miami’s Archbishop Thomas Wenski, DeSantis said, “is quite frankly, disgusting.”
“It’s wrong. It’s not even close to the same thing. We had people who were coming because they were fleeing a communist dictatorship. If Cuba wasn’t a communist country we never would have accepted communist refugees. We were doing it because it was the right thing to do but it was also in our national interest in fighting communism.”
In President Joe Biden’s first year in office, more than 107,000 unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors were released into the U.S. The majority were purportedly between the ages of 15 and 17, and males. The agencies responsible for them in the first five months of last year couldn’t account for the whereabouts of 45,000 of them. That trend was only expected to increase.
Catholic Charities and other religious and nonprofit groups throughout the U.S. have collectively received hundreds of millions of dollars through the Office of Refugee Resettlement to place unaccompanied minors with sponsors and family members who haven’t been vetted by the federal government.
Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski penned an editorial attacking DeSantis, entitled, “Why is governor going after children?” comparing Pedro Pan refugees to the unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors arriving at the southern border.
Those in law enforcement have repeatedly pointed out that the roughly 18,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived every month during the height of last year’s illegal border crossings didn’t travel thousands of miles by themselves through multiple countries without the involvement of the Mexican cartels. Human smuggling is a $100 million a week business, officials say.
Maximo Alvarez, a Pedro Pan refugee who attended the event, said in a broken voice holding back tears and pointing his finger to the camera, “Don’t you dare ever compare what is happening now” to what he experienced. He said he was shocked by what he read of the comparisons being made.
“They are using this program to convince people that this is similar to what is happening today. Not even close. This is the way that communism works, remember the ends justify the means. What is happening right now, you see some of the children are being used as merchandise. These cartels are using these kids as merchandise for personal gain. When I came, we came directly into the hands of the church, and we were treated like family.”
Pedro Pan “was an organized, pre-planned program administered with visas and flight manifests to specifically rescue children from an oppressive Communist regime,” DeSantis said at the event held at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora.
“While the flights of Operation Pedro Pan were designed to be hidden from the Cuban regime, the Biden administration operates its clandestine human smuggling flights in the dark of night to be hidden from the American people. The current UAC process smuggles in illegal immigrants from many different countries with no vetting, no transparency, and no consideration for child and public safety.”
Nuñez pointed out that Pedro Pan was approved by the government “to bring refugee children from Cuba to the U.S. in a lawful, controlled, vetted, and organized manner, breaking no immigration laws at the time.
“By contrast, the chaos at our southern border means that in the last year alone, about 2 million migrants from all over the world have crossed our border illegally,” Nuñez, a Cuban-American born in Miami, and Florida’s first Latina lieutenant governor, said. “President Biden’s reckless open-border policies have incentivized a mass influx, in which murderous drug cartels, gang members, and human traffickers are smuggling individuals across the border or worse yet, posing as children.”
The acts of human and drug smuggling “are plain evil,” Nuñez said. “And for the federal government to shirk its responsibility, ignore the laws of this country, it’s important that Florida is leading the way to push back and to make sure that we protect our citizenry and our children. They like to use children as a pawn in this game. But from our perspective we are protecting children from the heinous scourge that is human trafficking.”
Moody said Florida is a “pro-immigration state. Florida welcomes legal immigrants who’ve made this state what it is. But we are anti-trafficking. We are anti-crime. We are anti-chaos. We are anti-cartel.”
Referring to flights bringing in illegal immigrants into Florida in the middle of the night, she said, “We had to sue our own government to get information about who they are bringing into the state of Florida. Then we started learning that not only are there open borders but they are building new programs totally outside of federal immigration laws,” referring to the CAM program, over which Florida sued. “They are doing this in violation of public safety immigration laws and Biden is endangering American lives.”
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Bethany Blankley is a contributor to The Center Square.
Photo “Governor DeSantis Meets with Operation Pedro Pan” by Governor Ron DeSantis.
