Florida's Governor is sounding off about sanctuary cities and his controversial migrant flights, saying that those people taxpayers paid to fly from Texas to Massachusetts boarded the flights to Martha's Vineyard of their own free will and without better options.
In Sanford, Gov. Ron DeSantis said "everyone who gets on the transportation signs a form saying that they know what they're doing, they're consenting."
"This is not something that's being done against anybody's will," he added, before further justifying a move hammered as "human trafficking" by critics.
"These folks really had nothing and they had an opportunity to go to a sanctuary jurisdiction, which had advertised itself as being a place where everyone could come and that nobody is illegal. And yet when they got there all hell broke loose on that island, they called out the National Guard. It was like a five-alarm fire and, you know, you know, they didn't put their money where their mouth is," DeSantis vented.
The Governor made the comments in response to a question about a federal Judge's decision in Massachusetts earlier this month that held the feds did "not have jurisdiction over the other Defendants" in state government, but did "support the inference that torts were committed and (charter flight operator) Vertol aided and abetted their commission."
That leaves the contractor as the sole defendant facing potential sanction for the flights in an action brought by Yanet, Pablo and Jesus Doe and Alianza Americas.
It remains to be seen how much free will the migrants had, and how much they were responding to false promises made by agents of the DeSantis regime.
Central to the scheme was a Texas woman named Perla Huerta, who recruited migrants from Texas to fly under the promise of help with immigration claims and job services.
DeSantis again on Monday repeated his claim that Martha's Vineyard was a sanctuary jurisdiction in the interview, one adjudicated by fact checkers in 2022 as "misleading."
"These folks signed forms saying that that they were going to do, and they had opportunities that they didn't want to do, and the vendor treated them very well from what I've seen in the reports, providing food, lodging, all this other stuff," DeSantis said, condemning the case as "frivolous" and suggesting that Vertol likewise shouldn't be subject to litigation.
DeSantis has offered a series of dismissive comments about the flights over the years, which cost taxpayers roughly $35,000 per traveler. He described in 2022 the migrants as "basically destitute" and "put in a situation where they could have succeeded" in Massachusetts, where Martha's Vineyard "virtue signaled" that the government was willing to help.
More recently, he also suggested that Haitian arrivals may be subject to similar big-dollar flights at the expense of Florida taxpayers.
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