Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) has made headlines yet again, this time for his decision to fly 48 illegal immigrants to the affluent, liberal-leaning hotspot, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. A far more pointed criticism than previous flights and shuttles delivered to cities like Chicago or New York, DeSantis unequivocally demonstrated that the left, particularly its most powerful elements, don’t much care for the consequences of their own policies.

Predictably, the island’s residents went berserk, going as far as to declare a “humanitarian crisis” over a group of migrants small enough to easily fit into a university lecture hall. Embellishments ranging from sanctimonious cries of “playing politics with people’s lives,” as California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) put it, to even laughably absurd lawsuits alleging “human trafficking,” quickly dominated the media.

Soon after the people of Martha’s Vineyard promptly dispatched their visitors to other destinations, CNN published a puff-piece bloviating about how the illegal immigrants “enriched” the community and “left an indelible mark.”

These activists and their allies in the mainstream press would like you to forget about the strain placed on border towns by illegal immigration. In comparison to the grand total of 48 arriving at Martha’s Vineyard, the El Paso border sector has been utterly overwhelmed with a relentless stream of approximately 1,300 migrants per day, according to NBC News.

Curiously, the Biden administration has reportedly moved to send border-crossers to interior cities hundreds of miles away, per NBC. According to the same report, officials within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have jokingly dubbed the strategy “the Abbott plan,” after Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), who implemented a similar policy.

The same critics who just finished accusing Governor DeSantis of “human trafficking” will doubtlessly claim that it’s different when they do it.

Cities across the U.S. could be spared this problem altogether if President Joe Biden and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas bothered to address the problem at hand, rather than speeding along as many illegal immigrants as possible into the nation’s interior.

Border crossings have spiked under Biden’s leadership, with the Texas Tribune reporting that encounters at the southern border hit 2 million this year for the first time ever (and it’s only the beginning of October). Biden and Mayorkas’ disastrous border policies, of which there are too many to name, are undoubtedly exacerbating this crisis.

Among their most destructive choices is the removal of the Trump administration’s effective Title 42 policy, and, per the DHS’s website, the implementation of a new rule in March giving individual asylum officers, rather than judges, the authority to bypass immigration courts and admit migrants into the country.

While a group of almost 50 illegal immigrants leaving for Massachusetts is unlikely to make a statistically significant dent in this problem by itself, DeSantis’s action has brought an unprecedented amount of attention to the horrific situation unfolding at the border. A reality check for our insulated, woke elites may just wind up forcing them to consider this crisis more seriously.