The Patriot Post® · Joe Biden's Killer Night Flights

“A single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.”

Although that quote is often attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, there’s no good proof that he ever said it. Still, the quote is useful. How so? Let’s consider the tragedy of a single death caused by our own Uncle Joe, whose willful disregard for the security of our southern border has created the greatest illegal immigration catastrophe in U.S. history.

The man whose mugshot you’re looking at is Yery Noel Medina Ulloa. He’s a 24-year-old illegal immigrant from Honduras. What’s he doing here? Ask President Joe Biden, whose responsibility it is to protect our nation’s borders.

Never mind. It’s too late. Or, more precisely, it’s too late for Francisco Javier Cuellar, 46, a father of four, who took in Ulloa, believing he was a destitute 17-year-old. Cuellar also gave him a job at his family business, the La Raza Mexican Store. And how did Ulloa repay Cuellar for his kindness? According to home security cameras and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, he did so by “stabbing the victim numerous times and repeatedly hitting him with a chair.”

But wait. What was the name of that family store? La Raza? Literally translated, La Raza means “The Race,” and the “race” it refers to is that of Hispanics and Latinos, although these are ethnicities, not races. The term also forms the root of The National Council de La Raza, which has since rebranded itself as the sweeter-sounding and less-threatening Unidos US, but which is still the nation’s largest Latino civil rights open-borders advocacy organization. In any case, the name of Cuellar’s store, and his actions as a sponsor of illegal immigrants, indicate that he was certainly sympathetic to the plight of illegals and that he was likely a supporter of Joe Biden’s disastrous open-borders policies. As Kurt Vonnegut might’ve said, “So it goes.”

As for the murderer Ulloa, he entered the U.S. illegally several months ago through Texas while pretending to be an unaccompanied minor. The feds then put him on one of Biden’s midnight planes to who-knows-where, whereupon he met up with his sponsor in Florida. And then murdered him.

Why didn’t our Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency stop this guy at the border, before he got on that plane? Maybe because it’s overwhelmed. Or maybe because the Biden administration has essentially told ICE agents: “Don’t do your job.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has had enough. By his count, more than 70 of Biden’s middle-of-the-night flights chock-full of illegal immigrants have taken off at the southern border and landed in Jacksonville in recent months.

“Over 70 air charter flights [on] jetliner airliners coming from the southwest border have landed at Jacksonville International Airport,” said Larry Keefe, DeSantis’s public safety czar. “On average, there’s 36 passengers on each of these flights. And that has been going on over the course of the summer through September.”

On Wednesday, DeSantis floated the idea of sending these illegals to Biden’s home state of Delaware. “If they’re going to come here,” said DeSantis, “we’ll provide buses. I will send them to Delaware and do that. If he’s not going to support the border being secure, then he should be able to have everyone there.”

DeSantis also told Tucker Carlson that he’s looking at a range of other options, including targeting the companies that are enabling the flights. “We’re looking at what we can do,” he said. “I think that they use these private contractors. So what we’re looking at is how can we fight back against the contractors. We can obviously deny them state contracts, which we will do. Can we deny them access to Florida’s market generally? Can we tax them? Can we do things to provide disincentives so they can’t do it?”

Let’s hope so.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Florida has gotten redder in recent years. So it’s no surprise that Biden and his fellow leftists would try to rearrange the state’s demographics.

As is always the case with the Left, it’s not about principle. It’s about power.