Nearly a month after news broke that the Biden administration is quietly resettling migrant children in Tennessee, more questions than answers remain.
“I’m pushing hard for transparency on this and the Biden administration is blocking us,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said in an interview with Fox News. “You notice they move these planes in the dead of night. They’re coming in both by commercial airlines as well as private air, and the planes that we’ve found out about at least, are landing after midnight. They’re dispersing the people coming in. We’re hearing they’re unaccompanied minors. They could be adults.
“We’re asking these questions right now. Are these people vaccinated? Have they been vetted? What sort of people are moving through the state? What sort of people are residing in the state?” he said.
In late May, Hagerty sponsored a bill called the Migrant Resettlement Transparency Act, meant to answer such questions about the illegal aliens being brought to the state.
“The Biden administration will not tell us how many people they are shipping into Tennessee and I’m sure this is the case across the nation,” he continued. “But there is clearly a plan in place, there’s clearly a distribution network in place to distribute the people they are processing in droves across the border into the interior of the United States and as I said, this border crisis is turning every town into a border town today.”
Gov. Bill Lee (R) previously declined the Biden administration’s request to house unaccompanied minors in the state.
The White House insists that migrant children are not residing in the state, but rather they’re traveling through Tennessee, which it insists is only a halfway point because of its geographic location.
“[O]ur objective is to unite these unaccompanied [migrant] children – children under the age of 18 – with families, with sponsor families. So children traveling – were traveling through – have been traveling through Tennessee,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in May. “They’re simply on their way to unite with relatives and sponsors – to meet sponsors in the state, or just traveling through Tennessee until they reach another destination to unite with family members or legal sponsors. As you know, geographically, it’s right in a place where it – you know, there’s a lot of states around it, so it’s a place where some flights have gone through as children are moving to other destinations.”
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to dabroscareports@gmail.com.