Will the secret New York migrant flights ever stop?
As illegal migration at the southern border breaks new records, the Biden administration has upped the frequency of its secret flights on an industrial scale.
Migrant flights into New York have ratcheted up in recent weeks to almost one per night, and now a new airport is being utilized to handle the overflow, in an apparent bid by the administration to avoid images of border chaos before the November midterm elections.
New York Stewart International Airport, in the Hudson Valley, is taking up the slack for Westchester County Airport, according to video provided to The Post by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Rob Astorino.
“It’s just an expansion of this program and a second airport no one thought they would go through, either to be clandestine or because of a need for another runway,” says Astorino.
The former Air Force base in Newburgh is a Port Authority airport under the control of Gov. Kathy Hochul, and is still used as a military airfield for the New York Air National Guard and the United States Marine Corps Reserve.
“This directly links to the governor,” says Astorino, one of the few Republicans sounding the alarm about the border crisis.
“She is not willing to do anything to stop these flights. In fact, she is encouraging them because she keeps giving money and goodies to everyone.”
The Post has viewed video of two flights arriving at Stewart from El Paso, Texas, via Jacksonville, Fla., at 10:59 p.m. May 17 and at 12:13 a.m. May 22, with about 100 to 150 migrants on each plane.
New video evidence
The footage shows the same conveyer-belt operation previously observed by The Post in Westchester, in which migrants alight from the planes late at night and are transferred to waiting charter buses to be deposited at residential complexes or highway rest stops around the tri-state area.
As with the flights into Westchester since last summer, the majority of migrants appear to fit the cheap labor demographic: Hispanic males in their late teens or early 20s.
Astorino’s footage shows each passenger leaving the aircraft carrying large white boxes and strolling past parked Port Authority vehicles to waiting buses, which have had their company insignia covered over, although they appear to be the same charter operator that has been meeting migrant flights in Westchester.
The planes landing at Stewart were operated by an airline that hasn’t previously been associated with migrant flights, Omni Air International, which joins World Atlantic Airways, Avelo and iAero raking in millions of taxpayer dollars ferrying passengers into New York from the Texas and Arizona border, via Jacksonville and, more recently, Charleston, SC.
In recent months, The Post has tracked buses from Westchester to locations including the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Newburgh, and Bridgeport and Danbury in Connecticut.
In April, a bus was recorded disgorging migrants in Yonkers and the Bronx, including into an affordable housing complex owned by the city.
New York is just one piece of the vast operation conducted by the federal government to disperse illegal migrants from the southern border to a town near you. Under President Biden, every town has become a border town.
Hochul has laid out the welcome mat in New York, recently boasting that undocumented arrivals would be eligible for Medicaid: “If you’re undocumented … over the age of 65, we’ll pick up that tab regardless of your status.”
As if it were not obvious that Democrats have flung open the border in order to usher in millions of future supplicant voters, in January, the New York City Council passed a law allowing more than 800,000 noncitizens to vote in municipal elections.
Mayor Eric Adams didn’t even try to veto the law.
This is despite an Atlantic/Leger poll in December that found most Americans are opposed to giving noncitizens the vote.
The US Border Patrol reported a record 234,088 migrants crossed the southern border in April, up from 221,444 in March. Around half are released into the country, with few expected to be seen again.
Last month, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from ending Title 42, a pandemic-era border protection, which only would have made things worse.
The administration is appealing the decision, but the planned repeal already had lured an additional 50,000 migrants to the border last month in expectation of even easier entry into the country, according to Axios.
But the court decision was a blessing in disguise for Biden, preventing a surge of double or triple the number of daily border crossings expected after the repeal of Title 42.
Dems’ election concern
The border crisis has taken a back seat for voters who have become more concerned about inflation. But illegal migration looms as a problem for Democrats at the midterms.
A recent ABC News poll put support for Biden’s handling of the issue at 37%, and a YouGov poll found 68% of voters think the country is on the “wrong track” when it comes to immigration.
That includes 45% of Democrats, 82% of Republicans and 68% of independents. Among Biden voters, 47% believe the country is on the wrong track on immigration, compared to 27% who are content.
It’s the same story with Hispanic voters.
Hence the superhuman effort to spirit illegal migrants away from the border as quickly as possible in the dead of night.
The Biden administration is relying on nonprofit organizations around the country, funded with Federal Emergency Management Agency grants, to manage the influx of migrants, in order to “stave off politically explosive images of chaos and disorder ahead of the November midterms,” the New York Times reported last month.
Out of sight, out of mind is the Democrats’ hope. But not if Astorino can help it.
Navarro is no threat, Dems are
There was no need to handcuff former Trump adviser Peter Navarro and drag him off a plane on Friday, or shackle him in leg irons in John Hinckley Jr.’s jail cell.
The cruel and disproportionate punishment was a thuggish display of unchecked power by goons in service to Nancy Pelosi and her band of partisan Democrats.
They treated the slight 72-year-old like a violent felon over a charge of contempt of Congress, because he has resisted appearing before the Jan. 6 committee’s star chamber. That’s all the Democrats have left in the toolbox — to demonize Donald Trump and his supporters.
But, on the bright side for Navarro, his upcoming book, “Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back,” soared in the Amazon charts on the back of his arrest.