Carlos Munoz reaches out to hug Larkin Stallings of Vineyard Haven, as the immigrants prepare to leave St. Andrews in Edgartown last year. (Ron Schloerb/Cape Cod Times via AP)
MSNBC documentary “Martha’s Vineyard v. DeSantis” puts a shocking political stunt front and center.
When 49 immigrants were flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in September last year, courtesy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, it grabbed international headlines.
The directing duo of David Heilbroner and Kate Davis, themselves Martha’s Vineyard residents, took a closer look at the incident in their MSNBC documentary “Martha’s Vineyard v. DeSantis,” airing on MSNBC Sunday and Peacock Monday.
Fox News and DeSantis wanted to paint Martha’s Vineyard as this “white, liberal, ultra wealthy island, which it certainly is for two months in summer,” Davis said in a joint Zoom interview. “We spend the winters here as well and have a feeling for the diversity of the island. This is not the little white place that Tucker Carlson portrayed.”
The film notes the island’s diversity: A quarter of the population’s language is Brazilian Portuguese, who’ve long lived alongside a Black and Native American population.
“We felt that we could go deeper with this story in the headlines. We’d met the four immigrants (spotlighted) because they were moving into a friend’s house and we thought that their personal story would cast a different light on the entire political picture.
“Because after all, each one of these 49 migrants, along with thousands across the country, each one of them is a human being and it’s easy to reduce them in one’s mind as part of a mass of people who can be devalued for political purposes by people who want a disruption here.
“I hope it drives home for audiences that what might look like an entertaining prank from the outside is actually an extremely calculated, complicated operation, using taxpayer money questionably on the part of government officials.”
Heilbroner pointed to, “The emotional toll that this took on them. They were really duped. After crossing through six countries in life-threatening conditions to arrive in United States a government-funded operation sent them a bill of goods to come along on this trip to Martha’s Vineyard.
“To get them on these private planes they were told they were coming to Washington state or Oregon to get jobs and housing. Then they were completely left to their own devices.”
A sign of the meticulous planning that went into this was that all 49 were legal. As Heilbroner noted, “At that time because the United States had an open border policy with a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, they were legal.
“And it is illegal to move so-called undocumented aliens because of federal trafficking laws. DeSantis declined or didn’t respond to requests for interviews or comments.”
Mark J. Terrill/ The Associated Press
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. His move last year to fly migrants to Martha’s Vineyard is the subject of an MSNBC documentary “Martha’s Vineyard vs. DeSantis.” (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
