After sharing hugs and tearful goodbyes with about 50 migrants who had unexpectedly arrived by plane on this wealthy vacation island, volunteers who housed them at an Episcopal church moved tables and chairs, packed food into trucks and folded portable cribs.
A familiar quiet had descended by Friday afternoon on the tree-lined block on Martha’s Vineyard, where Jackie Stallings, 56, couldn’t stop thinking about a young Venezuelan — she was 23 but looked 15 — sitting with her in St. Andrew’s. Parish house the night before.
The asylum seeker showed cell phone video Stallings took during the trip to a remote Central American jungle showing the migrants who died along the way.
“It was like he was showing me videos of cats, but it was really their journey and what they endured to get here,” said Stallings, a member of the nonprofit Martha’s Vineyard Community Services. “There were dead bodies and mothers with babies trying to get through mud that was like clay.”
“The heartbreaking part is watching these beautiful young ladies get desensitized,” said her husband, Larkin Stallings, 66, an Oak Bluffs bar owner who serves on the nonprofit’s board. “For them, they just flip over and show you a picture.”
Stallings cut him off.
“It was like, look, she died, part of their original party. And he died and he died. The mud is like up to here for them,” she said Friday in the shade of the porch of the parish house, pointing to her thigh. “And you see them, they literally have to pick their feet up out of the mud. They die because they get stuck.”
During their 44-hour visit this week, migrants like the young Venezuelan woman left an indelible mark on their accidental hosts in this isolated enclave known as a summer playground for former US presidents, celebrities and billionaires.
Guests, including young children, boarded buses Friday morning around the corner from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.
Days of uncertainty on the small island off the coast of Massachusetts and a huge effort by locals to secure them ended with a new odyssey – a ferry ride and then another bus camper to temporary housing at Joint Base Cape Cod.
The asylum seekers — most of them from Venezuela — had been flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday under arrangements made by Florida Gov. Ron DeSandis — part of a series of moves by Republican governors to move immigrants to liberal cities to protest for what they describe. as the federal government’s failure to secure the southern border.
Martha’s Vineyard wasn’t waiting for them, but a small army of activists mobilized to help people who had become pawns in the contentious debate over America’s broken immigration system.
DeSantis’ move was sharply denounced by the White House, Democratic officials and immigration advocates who vowed to take legal action on the grounds, they said, that immigrants were lured north with promises of jobs, housing and help with immigration documents and ultimately misled about the their final destination.
The governor of Florida denied that the migrants did not know where they were going. He said they had signed a waiver and were given a packet that included a map of Martha’s Vineyard. “It’s obvious that’s where they were going,” he said, adding that the move was voluntary.
Lisa Belcastro, winter shelter coordinator for the nonprofit Harbor Homes, was close to tears about an hour after the migrants left the island Friday, as volunteers began cleaning the parish house and church hall where the migrants slept. newcomers.
“I want them to have a good life,” he said. “I want the journey they went through and the hardships they went through to be worth it for them and their families. I want them to come to America and hug me. Everyone wants to work. And I just want their journey to have a happy ending.”
On Thursday night, a group of young immigrant men gathered on the narrow street outside the church, a few blocks from the glittering luxury shops, restaurants and art galleries on Main Street in Edgartown. An asylum seeker, in his 20s, took to the road to explore at one point. He asked about the price of a hamburger at a fancy restaurant. When told it was $26, he noted that it was much more than he earned in a month in Venezuela when he could find work.
Through a front window in the parish house, young children could see into a playroom filled with books and stuffed animals.
Juan Ramirez, 24 but looking younger, stood outside the 123-year-old church hall – where 18 of the men slept on portable cots and air mattresses under donated blankets for two nights. He teared up talking about the family he left behind in Táchira state in western Venezuela when he started his journey in late July with his phone and $400 in cash.
“My friends thought I was crazy for leaving, that I would never make it. I just want a better future for my family,” he said of his parents, grandparents and beloved niece back home. “I try, but it’s hard not to think about them.”
The cash was long gone and his phone was stolen by the time Ramirez reached northern Mexico and the United States border, he said.
Ramirez and other immigrants said they were released by U.S. immigration authorities with orders to return for a hearing. In San Antonio, they were approached by a woman who offered them a plane ride to a shelter in the Northeast, where there would be housing, jobs and help with immigration documents. The migrants were put up in a hotel until about 50 of them were gathered for the flight to Massachusetts.
“When we landed no one was waiting for us,” he said. “Nobody knew we were coming. We realized we had been lied to. But, fortunately, we met good-hearted people who supported us with everything we need.”
Pedro Luis Torrealba, 37, said he fled the Venezuelan capital Caracas with his wife in mid-July. Their two children – aged 6 and 11 – were left behind with relatives.
The pair started the roadless crossing at the border between Colombia and Panama – the deadly Darién Gap – with more than 60 other migrants, Torrealba said outside the parish house on Thursday night. Only 22 completed the 60-mile trek through jungle and rugged mountains, he said. Some fell off cliffs, others were swept away by the flood waters.
These deaths come at a time when record numbers of undocumented immigrants are flooding the US-Mexico border and dying while trying to cross.
In Mexico, Torrealba said, the couple and other migrants were briefly kidnapped by members of the Zetas cartel, a violent drug-trafficking organization. When he told them he couldn’t make the extortion payment to allow them to continue, he said, a cartel member used pliers to pull out his two gold teeth.
They finally made it in the US-Mexico earlier this month. In San Antonio, they met a woman who offered them a free flight to a place they had never heard of, along with a promise of immigration assistance, housing and employment. Torrealba did not receive treatment for his mouth and jaw injuries until they reached Martha’s Vineyard.
Another Venezuelan, David Bautista, 26, said he left San Cristóbal, the capital of Táchira state, in late July. More than a month later he crossed the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass, Texas, from the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras. He said he was released by US immigration authorities after 11 days in detention. He was given papers for an immigration hearing in Washington, DC.
At an immigration shelter in San Antonio, he was also offered the free flight and the benefits that supposedly came with it — including help changing the date and location of his immigration hearing.
“I can’t tell you more because I don’t know more,” he said. “We are all lost. We are all in this together. We just know that this is an island somewhere in the United States.”
Standing next to Bautista, a 52-year-old man named Osmar Cabral, who said he is from Portugal and has lived on Martha’s Vineyard for four months, handed the immigrant a folded $100 bill.
“I’ve never met him before,” Cabral said. “But I came here with a friend because I wanted to help. We are all brothers.”
His friend Franklin Pierre, a Venezuelan who has lived on Martha’s Vineyard since 2015 and works for a party rental company, was there to talk to some of the immigrants and give them advice.
“You have to show up for your immigration hearing or you will be deported,” Pierre told Bautista and other young men gathered around him. “You get here after the busy summer season and it’s hard to find work. And winter is very cold, sometimes reaching 10 degrees below zero. Imagine this and not having a job.”
At one point Thursday night, a group of lawyers who had interviewed the immigrants told reporters outside the parish house that they were exploring legal action, arguing that due process and the immigrants’ civil rights had been violated.
“This is one…
