The Biden administration has been accused of flying thousands of illegal immigrants from the border to cities all over the country on secret nighttime flights.
At a news conference in November, Florida's governor said "Here's what happens with these flights" The state of Florida is not notified. Most of the time, these are done in the middle of the night. It is covert.
Rob Astorino, a candidate for governor of New York, released a video this month showing migrant teenagers disembarking from a plane in New York. He said that the citizens pay all the bills.
Mr. DeSantis resurrected the issue last week when he signed a bill into law that penalizes airlines that knowingly transport immigrants who are in the country illegally.
Critics are creating an aura of mystery around the issue of transporting large numbers of migrant children who have been crossing the border for several years since Mr. Biden took office.
Many of the children and teenagers are flown to licensed shelters around the country before being released to family members. Thousands of such flights have been a regular part of immigration operations in the United States for decades.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement planes sometimes land at late hours of the night, but they also operate during daylight hours, and they do not constitute covert or secret operations.
Child welfare advocates say politicians are using migrant children to inflame passions over immigration.
Most children crossing the border alone are from Central America, and they usually carry with them contact information of a parent, relative or friend who is expecting them.
Under anti-trafficking legislation passed with bipartisan support by Congress, the children are kept in the custody of the U.S. government until a sponsor is found.
Since Mr. Biden took office, the number of these children has gone up.
In the first eight months of the current fiscal year, agents have encountered about 100,000 under the age of 18 traveling alone, compared with nearly 150,000 in the previous year.
Migrants under the age of 18 are placed in deportation proceedings. Legal protection that can result in permanent residency in the United States can be applied for by lawyers.
The law states that children can't stay longer than 72 hours in border processing centers, which are often overcrowded and lack basic amenities.
The young migrants need to be taken to places where they can be properly cared for before they are released to a guardian.
Young migrants are typically housed in shelters across the country for a few weeks. Capacity constraints at shelters located near the border lead authorities to put children on planes to get to shelters in the interior.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which operates shelters for migrant children, said that it is their legal responsibility to care for them until they can be placed with a family member.
The statement said that travel may include flights from different locations with stops in different airports.
Many of them originate in Texas and Arizona. Some children are taken to shelters by bus or van after being taken into custody. Some of the states where there are licensed facilities are New York and Florida.
There have been more flights as children arrive.
Privacy, security and shifting logistics are some of the reasons that states don't get advance notice of flights.
The flights are part of a process that took place under the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.
Both Republican and Democratic administrations have used charter flights to safely transfer children from the border to shelters.
She said that the claim that these flights are new is baseless.
According to right-wing media, planeloads of migrants are being secretly flown in the dead of night to keep Americans from knowing how many are arriving in the country.
Government officials say that flights leave at all hours of the day and night, depending on a number of factors, including the number of children, air space restrictions and weather conditions.
The more fundamental concern expressed by politicians who keep talking about ghost flights is the issue of what they see as an insecure border and uncontrollable immigration with impacts on states across the country.
The drugs that are coming in affect us and then there is the sheer number of people.
He said that if the president allowed all these people in, it would cause a lot of schools and other public services to be overwhelmed.
Gang violence in Central America caused a large number of migrant children to travel alone to the southern border.
The senior director of policy at Kids in Need of Defense said that a lot of them had fled life threatening dangers.
Experts say that a perception that the Biden administration would be more welcoming to migrant children than the Trump administration was the reason for the increase in unauthorized migrant crossings.
Critics are blaming the Biden administration for allowing human traffickers to profit from the desperation of migrants. A petition to the State Supreme Court was one of the new measures outlined by the Florida governor last week.
The issue of ghost flights continues to be seized on by anti immigration groups. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization that lobbies to curb all immigration, announced a new series of digital ads last week that it said were designed to expose the magnitude of the Biden administration's illegal immigration transportation program.
The "ghost flights" issue is being called a cynical attempt to use vulnerable children for political advantage.
Ms. Mukherjee of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic said that weaponizing these kids is cruel. The politicians use the kids as a campaign tool.
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