Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and Colombia had been abruptly flown on a personal chartered jet to California and dropped off exterior a Catholic church constructing in Sacramento on Friday, state officers stated, prompting an investigation into whether or not they had been transported from exterior a Texas migrant heart underneath false pretenses.
Whereas it remained unclear on Sunday who had approached the group of migrants exterior El Paso and orchestrated their flight from New Mexico to California, the episode mirrored an aggressive tactic utilized by hard-line Republican governors to protest President Biden’s immigration insurance policies by dispatching dozens of migrants to Democratic-led states and cities with little warning or rationalization. Most of the migrants advised a nonprofit group that they had no thought they had been going to California.
On Sunday, a spokeswoman for California’s lawyer basic, Rob Bonta, stated the migrants had been carrying paperwork that talked about the Florida Division of Emergency Administration and the state’s “voluntary transportation program.” The paperwork additionally named Vertol Techniques Firm Inc. because the contractor for the Florida program and the one finishing up the transport.
That was the identical firm used for transport within the fall when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida directed two planeloads of South American migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Winery, a Democratic-leaning Massachusetts island.
Representatives for Mr. DeSantis, a Republican who has made immigration a serious theme of his marketing campaign for president, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. On the marketing campaign path, he incessantly highlights his choice to ship migrants to Martha’s Winery.
Mr. Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, each Democrats, met with the migrants on Saturday, pledging to care for them whereas they remained within the state and to start an inquiry into how they had been dropped at California and whether or not they had been misled. In separate statements, each males didn’t rule out the potential of pursuing legal or civil costs for these concerned in transporting the migrants.
The state, together with town of Sacramento and native nonprofits, will work “to make sure the individuals who have arrived are handled with respect and dignity, and get to their meant vacation spot as they pursue their immigration instances,” Mr. Newsom stated in an announcement. A number of nonprofit organizations in Sacramento additionally confirmed that that they had spoken with the migrants.
The 16 migrants had been approached exterior a migrant heart close to El Paso, by individuals who stated they had been there on behalf of a personal contractor and will assist them get to a middle the place they’d obtain help securing a job, shelter, clothes and different requirements, in response to state and nonprofit officers.
The migrants had been then transported to New Mexico and brought on a chartered flight to Sacramento, the place they had been pushed to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento. Left exterior an administrative constructing for the church, the migrants had backpacks of belongings, little details about the place they had been and a promise that somebody could be coming to get them.
“Those that I’ve spoken to — they really feel they’ve been lied to; a few of them have stated they had been deserted,” stated Cecilia Flores, who works with Sacramento ACT, a group group. “They couldn’t perceive why anybody would do one thing like that.”
The group, she stated, didn’t embody kids and gave the impression to be made up of younger men and women underneath the age of 40 who had joined collectively exterior the migrant heart. A lot of them had been searching for asylum in the US, however not one of the migrants, to her data, had meant to go to Sacramento.
Sacramento ACT and different organizations are working to search out them safe housing and to assist with their subsequent steps. A number of of the migrants have court docket appointments elsewhere within the nation.
“We’ve all made the remark that that is one thing we by no means have seen or anticipated,” Ms. Flores stated. “One other massive query is, Is that this going to maintain occurring?”
Mayor Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, a Democrat, stated he was “heartened” by the investigation, including that “whoever is behind this should reply.”
The episode is at the very least the second time in latest months that migrants have been transported to Sacramento from Texas. In September, a smaller group of Venezuelans who had crossed the border in Laredo, certain for New York, Florida and Utah, confirmed up exterior a Catholic Charities constructing in California’s capital metropolis.
They’d paperwork directing them to the native workplaces of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however officers had been unable to find out who had despatched them. A number of had walked the ten miles from the Sacramento Worldwide Airport, some with out footwear.
Knowledge from FlightAware, an internet site that tracks flights throughout the nation, exhibits one direct flight between Deming Municipal Airport in Luna County, N.M., and Sacramento McClellan Airport that landed on Friday simply earlier than 11 a.m. after roughly three hours. A consultant for Berry Aviation, a constitution service based mostly in San Marcos, Texas, advised The Sacramento Bee that the flight was “one thing that the federal government ran,” however didn’t remark additional.
Vertol, the corporate that was stated to have introduced the migrants to Sacramento, is an aviation agency and protection contractor based mostly in Destin, Fla. It has ties to Republican leaders in Florida, in addition to to certainly one of Mr. DeSantis’s prime aides, Larry Keefe, a former U.S. lawyer who beforehand represented the agency in lawsuits after which spearheaded the state’s migrant flight program. (The corporate didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
Like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican who despatched buses of migrants to Washington and New York final yr, Mr. DeSantis made a degree of sending dozens of South American migrants to a Democratic-leaning state in an effort to attract consideration to an inflow of migrants on the southern border on the time. Mr. DeSantis focused Martha’s Winery, the place former President Barack Obama has a trip dwelling, and thought of a separate flight to an airport close to Mr. Biden’s Delaware dwelling. (That flight to Delaware was referred to as off.)
The 49 migrants on the Martha’s Winery constitution flights, run by Vertol, stated they had been tricked into getting on the planes with guarantees of assist that will be ready for them once they landed. However nobody on the bottom knew they had been coming, sending native officers scrambling to supply meals and shelter and prompting fierce backlash throughout the nation.
The migrants, lots of whom had been among the many hundreds of thousands of people that have fled a devastating financial disaster in Venezuela, later sued Mr. DeSantis and different state officers in a lawsuit that’s nonetheless pending. These flights price at the very least $1.5 million in taxpayer cash, state information present.
However Mr. DeSantis and his Republican allies in Florida have since doubled down. Lawmakers voted to increase the state’s migrant flight program this yr, authorizing a $12 million finances, and the state not too long ago employed three personal contracting firms, together with Vertol, to arrange this system.
Mr. DeSantis has a $3,300-a-plate fund-raiser scheduled in Sacramento on June 19 and has publicly traded barbs with Mr. Newsom over immigration. As he barnstorms the early nominating states of the presidential marketing campaign, his recounting of the migrant flights has generated a few of his greatest applause traces.
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