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It was nearly a month ago when Sen. Ted Cruz started pushing a brazenly deceptive message about the Biden administration “importing illegal aliens” into the United States. The Texas Republican even sent out fundraising appeals, telling would-be donors that President Joe Biden has chartered “secret flights” as part of a scheme to fly “illegals into America.”
The fundraising message added, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Cruz, however, was making stuff up. In fact, pretty much every relevant detail of the GOP senator’s story was false. And yet, it hasn’t gone away.
Late last week, for example, conspiratorial billionaire Elon Musk used social media to claim that the Biden administration is “flying hundreds of thousands of illegals” into the United States using Americans’ tax dollars.
A few days earlier, Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee — the Republican chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, who really ought to have known better — pushed a related message. This came on the heels of similar claims from Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee.
A Washington Post fact-check piece took the GOP lawmakers to task.
Hagerty and Green are peddling a blatant falsehood here — that the Biden administration is paying for the flights of migrants from four countries in the parole program. In reality, the migrants must pay their own way. When challenged, their offices resorted to alternative explanations about the use of taxpayer dollars that strain credulity.
Speaking of Tennessee Republicans who got this wrong, it’s worth noting that Sen. Marsha Blackburn also condemned the Biden administration for what she described as a “secret flight program.”
The truth, as an Associated Press report recently explained, is rather benign. The Biden administration created a “humanitarian parole” program that allows Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to stay in the U.S. for two years, but participants — who have legal permission to be here — must apply online with a financial sponsor, and they must be screened, vetted, and authorized for travel.
There’s nothing “secret” about any of this: U.S. Customs and Border Protection has promoted the program and publicly disclosed the details on the agency’s website.
As for the idea that the administration is using Americans’ tax dollars to pay for these flights, in reality, participants in the program are responsible for paying their own way. What’s more, the migrants in question are required to arrange for their own travel on commercial flights.
If recent history is any guide, the right will continue to pretend their claims about the program are based in reality, but those who care about the facts should know better.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.