Welcome to Beautiful Martha's Vineyard!

Transporting undocumented immigrants to a vacation destination may seem like a nutty thing to do, but it's all part of Ron DeSantis's plan to seize control of the GOP

Imagine my surprise on Wednesday night when I learned that my secret and now fully disclosed WFH location, was in the national news! If you know someone who is following this story, please:

Image credit: Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers collection/Wikimedia Commons

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We were going to bed on Wednesday night in Aquinnah, a Native American town on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Suddenly, I received a news flash from right-wing Twitter that two planeloads of migrants had just landed eighteen miles away at the Edgartown airport. Florida Governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis is claiming responsibility. However, since the migrants, mainly from Venezuela and Colombia, were actually recruited for this flight in Texas, this part of the story is unclear.

At first, I didn’t believe this was happening. Here? On Martha’s Vineyard? But a web search confirmed that other media were covering the story. Of course, this included the trusty Vineyard Gazette, which, for a small paper, keeps us up-to-date on the news on this island off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Usually, however, the top stories have to do with zoning board decisions, gifts to the land trust, or doings at the Agricultural Society. 

And suddenly, the Vineyard was at the center of a national debate.

If you haven’t heard the story, between three and four o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, September 14, two planes loaded with almost fifty migrants from Venezuela and Colombia landed at the Edgartown Airport about ten minutes apart. The group included seven children, one of whom was quite ill and was sequestered with her family. No one knew they were coming, least of all the migrants. Collected in Texas, they had been told (many by a mysterious person named Perla) that they would be taken to a place where there was housing and work: several said they believed they were going to Boston.

Instead, they were transported to an island that, back on Memorial Day, might have had plenty of jobs, but none now. And housing is so tight on the island that many Vineyarders are actually or functionally homeless. So was that part of the troll—to send homeless people to an island where 60% of the housing stock consists of second homes mostly unoccupied in September?