Former chief of staff to Mike Pence Marc Short said Sunday during ABC's "This Week" that Gov. Ron DeSantis', R, Fla., decision to send migrants to Martha's Vineyard is highlighting the "hypocrisy" and the "fake outrage" coming from Democrats and the media.
"Do you feel comfortable with this idea of, I mean, you used to work for somebody that lived in the vice president's residence. Fo you think this is a good idea, just dropping busloads of people including last night there was a one-month-old baby on a busy street," ABC's Jonathan Karl asked.
Short said that it was not happening during the Trump administration because they "secured the border."
"I think that what this is doing is this is highlighting the hypocrisy and in many cases fake outrage by those on the left and some in the media. The migrants in Florida, they aren't arriving on the shores of Florida. They're not walking across the Florida/Georgia line. They’re being flown in by the Biden administration, so somehow it's okay to fly them across the interior of the United States, everywhere across the United States, but it's wrong for the governor to then send them to one of the wealthiest communities in America. I think it’s highly hypocritical," he said.
"There is a difference in doing it in a coordinated fashion and just showing up at Martha’s Vineyard," Karl added.
Short said that if people were really concerned about a "humanitarian crisis," then they would be working to solve the crisis at the southern border.
"There’s 200,000 migrants every month, and they estimate 50 percent of the young women are either raped or sexually molested making that long journey from Peru and Columbia up there. If we actually had a policy in place and returned migrants to Mexico while they waited for their asylum appeals, as happened in the Trump-Pence administration, you wouldn't have the same humanitarian crisis we have today," he said.
Karl also criticized Gov. Greg Abbott earlier in the episode, who sent two buses with migrants on them to Washington, D.C. They arrived outside of Vice President Kamala Harris' Naval Observatory residence on Friday.
Karl said Abbott's decision to send migrants to the vice president's residence in D.C. was a "stunt pure and simple."
"Beyond the political gamesmanship and cynical use of human beings as pawns is something all too real. America is in the midst of an immigration crisis," he said. "The Biden administration seems to have no real plan to address the crisis."
President Biden said the GOP was "playing politics."
"Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props. What they’re doing is simply wrong, it’s un-American, it’s reckless," Biden said on Thursday, reacting to the move by DeSantis and Abbott.
