'Ghost flights' are the latest GOP effort to weaponize immigration ahead of midterms

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/20/ [login to see] /rhetoric-around-ghost-flights-of-migrant-children-is-often-at-odds-with-the-fact
The number of migrant children crossing the southern border without their parents reached a record high last year — and the backlash is still growing.

Republicans accuse the Biden administration of organizing secret flights, carrying migrants from the border to communities across the country, that critics have branded "ghost flights."

But that rhetoric is often at odds with the facts.

"It's not secret, and it's not new," said Jennifer Nagda, policy director with the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights, a non-profit that works closely with unaccompanied children.

When children and teenagers from Central America cross the border alone, the federal government is required by law to care for them until they're reunited with a sponsor, often a parent or relative, or placed in a network of special shelters around the U.S.

To do that, federal officials sometimes fly those children on charter planes from the border to other parts of the country. For years, this was widely seen as normal, even routine.

Until it wasn't.