Edgartown, Massachusetts CNN —
After sharing hugs and tearful goodbyes with roughly 50 migrants who had unexpectedly arrived by plane on this affluent vacation island, volunteers who hosted them at an Episcopal church carried tables and chairs, packed food into trucks and folded portable cribs .
By Friday afternoon, a familiar stillness had descended on the tree-lined center island of Martha’s Vineyard, where Jackie Stallings, 56, couldn’t stop thinking about a young Venezuelan woman, who was 23 but looked 15, who sat with her at St. Andrew’s. Parish House the night before.
The asylum seeker showed Stallings’ cellphone video taken during the journey through a remote Central American jungle, pointing out 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 bodies and mothers with babies trying to get through the mud that was like clay.”
“The heartbreaking part is watching these beautiful girls become desensitized,” said her husband, Larkin Stallings, 66, an Oak Bluffs bar owner who serves on the nonprofit’s board . “For them, they just turn around and show you a picture.”
The stops cut him off.
“She was like, look, this one died, part of her original party. And she died and this one died. Mud is how to get here,” he said Friday in the shade of the parsonage porch, pointing at his thigh. “And you see them, they have to lift their legs literally through the mud. They die because they get stuck.”
During their whirlwind 44-hour visit this week, migrants like the young Venezuelan 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 small children, boarded buses Friday morning around the corner from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.
Days of uncertainty on the tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts and a massive effort by locals to provide for them ended with a new odyssey: a ferry ride and then another bus caravan to temporary housing in the Joint Base Cape Cod.
The asylum seekers, mostly from Venezuela, had been moved from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday under deals made by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as part of a series of measures by Republican governors to transporting migrants to liberal cities to protest what they describe. such as the failure of the federal government to secure the southern border.
Martha’s Vineyard wasn’t expecting 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 lawyers who vowed legal action on grounds they said migrants were lured north with promises of jobs, housing and help with immigration documents and ultimately were misled about 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 received a package that included a map of Martha’s Vineyard. “It’s obvious where they were going,” he said, adding that the move was voluntary.
Lisa Belcastro, winter shelter coordinator for the nonprofit organization Harbor Homes, was close to tears an hour after the migrants left the island Friday, with volunteers beginning to clean the parsonage and room of the church where the new arrivals slept.
“I want them to have a good life,” she 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 be embraced. They all want to work. And I just want their journey to have a happy ending “.
On Thursday night, a group of young male migrants congregated on the narrow street outside the church, just blocks from the glitzy shops, restaurants and upscale art galleries of Edgartown’s main street. An asylum seeker, in his 20s, ventured down the street to explore at one point. He asked about the price of a hamburger at a fancy restaurant. When told it was $26, he pointed out that it was much more than he made in a month in Venezuela when he was able to find work.
Through a front window of the parsonage, small children could be seen in a playroom filled with books and stuffed animals.
Juan Ramirez, who is 24 but looks younger, stood outside the vestibule of the 123-year-old church, where 18 of the men slept on portable cots and air mattresses under donated blankets for two nights. He wept as he spoke of the family he left behind in the western Venezuelan state of Táchira when he embarked on his journey in late July with his phone and $400 in cash.
“My friends thought I was crazy to leave, that I would never make it. I just want a better future for my family,” she said of her parents, grandparents and favorite niece at home. “I try, but it’s hard not to think about them.”
The cash was long gone and his phone was stolen when Ramirez reached northern Mexico and the U.S. border, he said.
Ramirez and other migrants said they were released by US immigration authorities with an order 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 assistance with immigration papers. The migrants were housed in a hotel until about 50 of them gathered for the flight to Massachusetts.
“When we landed there was no one waiting for us,” he said. “No one knew we were coming. We realized we had been lied to. But fortunately, we have met good-hearted people who have supported us with everything we need.”
Pedro Luis Torrealba, 37, said he left the Venezuelan capital of Caracas with his wife in mid-July. His two children, aged 6 and 11, stayed with relatives.
The pair started the roadless passage on 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 trek through the 60 miles of jungle and rugged mountains, he said. Some fell off the cliffs, others were swept away by the flood waters.
These deaths come at a time when record numbers of undocumented migrants are overwhelming 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 remove his two gold teeth.
They finally arrived via the US and 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 jobs. Torrealba did not receive treatment for the injuries to his mouth and jaw until they reached Martha’s Vineyard.
Another Venezuelan, David Bautista, 26, said he left San Cristóbal, the capital of Táchira state, at the end of July. More than a month later he crossed the Rio Grande to Eagle Pass, Texas, from the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras. He said he was released by US immigration authorities after eleven days in detention. He was given documents for an immigration hearing in Washington, DC.
At a migrant shelter in San Antonio, he too was 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 anything else because I don’t know any 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.”
Beside Bautista, a 52-year-old man named Osmar Cabral, who said he is from Portugal and has been living on Martha’s Vineyard for four months, handed the migrant a $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 migrants and offer advice.
“You have to show up for your immigration hearing or you will be deported,” Pierre told Bautista and other youths gathered around him. “You come here after the busy summer season and it’s hard to find a job. And the winter is very cold, sometimes it’s 10 degrees below zero. Imagine that and not having a job.”
At one point Thursday night, a group of lawyers who had interviewed the migrants told reporters outside the rectory they were exploring legal action, arguing that due process and civil…