Andrew McCarthy: 'Absurd' for liberal media to want trafficking charges against governors moving migrants

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Montage: Media, Dems call for DeSantis and Abbott to be investigated, say they engaged in ‘human trafficking’

Figures on MSNBC as well as a number of Democrats criticized the Republican governors for sending migrants to Dem-led cities.

Count former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy among those unimpressed with some liberal media members throwing around accusations of "kidnapping" and "human trafficking" at Republican governors who've transported migrants out of their states.

"I don't think there's any validity to the claim that this was kidnapping or human trafficking," he told Fox News Digital. "I find it amusing that that claim is made by a number of the same people who object when people say that, you know, 200,000 a month coming across the border is an invasion, they object to the word invasion. But now they're throwing around words like kidnapping and human trafficking, which I think is absurd." 

Democratic politicians and media figures on MSNBC have claimed that Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott’s decision to send migrants to major cities from Florida and Texas constitutes "human trafficking," with some even calling on the Department of Justice to prosecute the Republican governors. 

MSNBC FIGURES, DEMOCRATS CALL FOR DESANTIS, ABBOTT TO BE PROSECUTED OVER ‘HUMAN TRAFFICKING’ CLAIMS

Those making the accusations of such a crime include Hillary Clinton and Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist, as well as MSNBC hosts Ayman Mohyeldin and Joy Reid. Frequent MSNBC guest and far-left writer Elie Mystal called it "kidnapping" and said the Attorney General Merrick Garland should file charges.

DeSantis sending migrants to Martha's Vineyard, the ritzy liberal enclave in Massachusetts, touched off a media firestorm last week. The move infuriated liberals but delighted many conservatives, who thought it crystallized the illegal immigration issue as a distant, dismissible problem for many blue states until it showed up on their doorsteps. 

McCarthy said he saw nothing "materially different" from what DeSantis and Abbott were doing than the Biden administration flying migrants around the country – a practice defended by Washington Post writer Aaron Blake as the federal government fulfilling its responsibilities to unaccompanied children in need of sponsors.

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"They've done it without giving notice to the local governments on many instances," McCarthy said. "So, you know, for them to get on their high horse now that somebody else is essentially doing the same thing that they're doing, I find to be rich. And I must say, if you want to talk about fraud and those kinds of practices, we're talking about people who themselves come into the United States illegally, claiming asylum under circumstances where, well, upwards of 90% of the time they don't actually have an asylum claim. So they're coming in illegally and under false pretenses."

McCarthy said the trend of both sides of the aisle being more likely to call for criminal punishment of their political foes was one that had been happening for a long time. He noted the progressive delight at the New York Attorney General's civil fraud lawsuit against former President Trump this week that raised hopes of future prosecution of him.

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"We've gone from just using the criminal law as a way to describe your opposition as monstrous, to using the criminal law as an actual credential for public office, in the sense that if you get elected, you're promising you're going to use the law enforcement power against your political opposition," he said.

Fox News' Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.