The planes, filled with migrants, take off from states along the southern border, landing late at night in small airports, surprising local officials with a batch of new residents who will need aid from local resources and welfare programs, and add pupils to local school districts. These aren’t Governor DeSantis’ charter planes to Martha’s Vineyard. These migrant “ghost flights” have been a Biden administration mainstay, with nary a peep from Democrats.

The migrant flights reflect the jump in illegal border crossing under Mr. Biden, who stopped construction of President Trump’s wall and replaced his strict opposition to illegal migration with Obama-era laxity. By October, that led to a 656 percent jump in the number of “unaccompanied minors” found by the border patrol, the New York Post reports. That’s a drop in the bucket of 2.3 million illegal border crossers last year, according to CBS.

The Post contends the Biden administration was using the “secret flights to small airports” to filter these migrants into small communities across the country: “They don’t want voters to know just how many people are being waved right into the country.” Yet the Biden administration was waving off the press — nothing to see here, folks. That is a message reporters and “fact checkers” were all too happy to parrot.

The flights were at night “to protect the confidentiality” of the migrants, PolitiFact wrote, “and to guard against anyone who would interfere with the flights.” Asked about the migrant airlifts, a deputy assistant secretary for public affairs with Health and Human Services told NPR, “This is completely consistent with the law and our responsibilities,” noting the flights mostly carried “unaccompanied children” being delivered “to vetted sponsors.” 

Republican officials, like Mr. DeSantis, were the ones concerned about these secretive flights before. “There’s no warning,” he has noted, lamenting being woken up “in the middle of the night,” to be told “they brought a bunch of unaccompanied minors.” Other current and former Republican officials and candidates spotted the clandestine flights landing in states like Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Iowa, and Pennsylvania.

Yet when Mr. DeSantis, along with Governors Abbott of Texas and Ducey of Arizona, got into the migrant relocation business, the denunciations came fast and furious from the left. Even documentarian Ken Burns chimed in during an appearance on CNN to plug his Holocaust documentary, accusing Mr. DeSantis of following an “authoritarian playbook.” Meanwhile, Democrats are decrying the exploitation of today’s migrants for political ends.

Mayor Adams, who presides over a sanctuary city at New York, calls busing migrants “a humanitarian crisis created by human hands,” a view bolstered by the suicide of a migrant woman on Sunday at a shelter here. Senator Durbin calls the governors’ migrant moves “pathetic” and “taking advantage of these helpless people.” President Clinton, no stranger on Martha’s Vineyard, hailed the resort island’s “history of acceptance,” Politico reports.

Beyond that, the migrants were a potential boon for the tony island’s economy, our Scott Norvell reported last week. Martha’s Vineyard “has one the tightest job markets in the region,” he writes, with “dozens of businesses” featuring help wanted signs and ads for jobs filling the Vineyard Gazette’s classified section. “Many of the positions would be more than suitable for even low-skilled workers with limited English proficiency,” he wrote.

“I bet that they will make those people feel at home,” Mr. Clinton crooned. Well, not quite. The Post reports the ostensibly welcoming Vineyard residents were quick to pack Mr. DeSantis’ migrants onto a ferry for the mainland. The travelers are now cooling their heels at a U.S. military base. It’s too soon to say where they’ll go. It’s not too soon, though, to suggest that a greater display of left-wing hypocrisy is hard to recall.