Why the GOP's migrant transportation tactic is 'a combative style of political theater': report

11 October 2022

A new report is shedding light on the origin of Republicans' tactic of transporting migrants to Democratic-run states.

The New York Times' Maggie Haberman and Michael C. Bender laid out their arguments in a new piece. They noted the series of events that have transpired over the last several weeks.

"In recent weeks, the three governors — Greg Abbott of Texas, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Doug Ducey of Arizona — have been criticized for treating desperate migrants fleeing Venezuela and other countries as political pawns," Haberman and Bender wrote. "Migrants have been sent to blue cities, states, and even vacation spots where local officials were caught by surprise and lacked a support network for people seeking refuge."

“The immigration policies of the Trump administration are now the baseline even for Republican congressional leadership and Republican candidates across the country,” said former Trump administration official, John A. Zadrozny.

The writers pointed to a political practice that dates back to the 1960s.

"Trump routinely pushed his administration to exceed the bounds of what the law would allow," they wrote, adding, "The practice of shipping humans across the country to score political points — an echo of the Reverse Freedom Rides of the early 1960s, when Southern segregationists sent Black families to Northern cities as a racist stunt — underscores how far to the right Republicans have shifted on immigration since Trump’s rise, often with a callousness that they believe appeals to their voting base."

However, they also noted the seemingly "murky" circumstances surrounding the origin of the practice. Although it was mainstreamed by the former president, the writers also noted that former Alaska Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) also "publicly floated similar ideas while he was running for president."

"At the time," they wrote, "refugees from the Syrian civil war were arriving in the United States. Huckabee suggested sending them to politically sensitive spots, including Chappaqua, New York, where Hillary Clinton owned a home; Burlington, Vermont, where Sen. Bernie Sanders had been mayor; and the Obama White House."

“You got a lot of people out there on the left who think that that’s what we ought to be doing,” Huckabee said in an appearance on CNN in November 2015. “Fine. Let’s put them in their neighborhoods.”

"The former president’s influence on the Republican Party can be measured not only in the electoral victories and losses of the candidates he endorses but also in the nativism that has come to define the party’s immigration politics," they also noted. "The Republican governors of Arizona, Florida, and Texas turned an abandoned Trumpian notion into action, inspired by his hard-line immigration policies as well as his taste for a combative style of political theater."

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