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Barletta web video highlights his leadership in demanding answers on “ghost flights”
A new web video spotlights the recent flurry of “ghost flights” – secret charter planes of illegal immigrants sent to Pennsylvania by the Biden administration while Gov. Tom Wolf and Attorney General Josh Shapiro do nothing to protect the citizens of the Commonwealth. The video, titled “Biden Air,” from former mayor and congressman Lou Barletta, the leading Republican candidate for governor, comes as Wolf and Shapiro are misleading the public by claiming the passengers are only children and include no adults.
“Illegal immigrants have been flown in. We have people coming into our communities with no idea where they are, what schools any of the children will be going to, and no idea if they’ve been vaccinated or not,” Barletta says in the video in a clip from an appearance on Fox News. “We’re getting no answers at all.”
“We need a governor here who will protect the people here in Pennsylvania,” Barletta continues. “That’s the governor’s responsibility, not to just have blind faith in the Biden administration that they’re doing all these checks on people before they come into our communities. And that’s what they’re get when I’m the next governor of Pennsylvania.”
On Thursday, FoxNews.com reported that Pennsylvania lawmakers are responding to Barletta’s exposure of the ghost flights by drafting legislation to send the illegal immigrants to President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, as Barletta pledged in December he would do once he becomes governor. Gov. Ron DeSantis is proposing to do the same in Florida.
In the story, a spokesperson for Wolf repeated the erroneous assertion that state elected officials have no role in protecting the health and safety of Pennsylvanians, and falsely claimed that none of the flights contained adults flown in by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite clear evidence to the contrary.
“These were not ICE flights,” the Wolf spokesperson said.
Yet a secret charter flight landed in Harrisburg on Monday, January 10, adult illegal immigrants, not children, despite repeated assurances from Gov. Tom Wolf and Attorney General Josh Shapiro that the transport of illegal immigrants to Pennsylvania involved only unaccompanied alien children.
Barletta has produced proof of that secret charter flight, along with photographs provided by eyewitnesses, to show that a plane full of adults was met by buses at Harrisburg International Airport with the passengers transported to the former Moshannon Valley Correctional Facility near Philipsburg, which is now being used as an ICE detention center
FlightAware.com screenshot with charter flight confirmation
GEO Group buses transported illegal immigrants from Harrisburg International Airport
to an ICE detention center near Philipsburg
As he did on December 23, 2021, when news of the initial wave of flights carrying minors surfaced, Barletta wrote a letter to Wolf and Shapiro demanding answers about the adults now being imported into Pennsylvania.
Even though illegal immigration is primarily a federal issue, Barletta reminded Wolf and Shapiro that protecting the people of Pennsylvania is very much in their own job descriptions.
“As the chief executive of the Commonwealth and the chief law enforcement officer of the Commonwealth, respectively, you each have the duty to diligently protect our citizens and keep them informed of developments such as this,” Barletta wrote. “[I]t is disturbing to think that you purposely characterized all flights of illegal immigrants into Pennsylvania as carrying children, when surely you had knowledge that planes carrying adults were part of the Biden administration strategy for clearing the overflowing detention centers near the border. If you did not have knowledge of that, then it is an even more serious problem that you appear to be unconcerned about what the federal government is doing right here in our own Commonwealth.”
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