Florida’s Flights to Martha’s Vineyard Causing Cascade of Legal Consequences
Get up to speed about the ongoing fallout of Ron DeSantis’s scheme to fly recently-arrived migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in September.
"It was all a hoax" said one of the Venezuelan migrants that Florida governor Ron DeSantis tricked into accepting flights from Texas to Martha's Vineyard last month.1
Although the flights appear to be over, the consequences of these flights continue to unfold, including through a series of lawsuits and investigations.
See my first post about DeSantis's Martha's Vineyard flights here as well as my write-up on Venezuelans in the US immigration system here.
One important lawsuit against Florida comes from the Florida Center for Government Accountability, which filed two lawsuits against the Florida government for failing to release documents as required under Florida's transparency laws. It is crucial that we understand the full extent of the coordination that went into these flights as well as who was involved.
Already we have learned that Florida paid a private transportation company Vertol $615,000 for the first flight from San Antonio to Martha's Vineyard (what the state called "Project 1"), and $1.6 million in total. Interestingly, Bloomberg reported that the $615,000 came from "interest earned from federal Covid-19 relief funds," which I suppose rebuffs accusations that the flights directly cost Florida taxpayer money, but it does raise a deeper question about what Florida is doing with all that covid relief money they received.
I checked after I wrote this and, indeed, the Treasury Department has launched an investigation into whether DeSantis's use of the interest earned on money received through the American Rescue Plan was lawful.
Florida released text messages that showed senior DeSantis staff coordinating these flights. Vertol, for their part, donated to the Ron DeSantis campaign and have ties to others in the GOP--though it's hard to know what to make of this in this context, since this is generally true about any company seeking government contracts.
See an important thread here on Twitter that includes first-hand accounts of migrants on Martha's Vineyard.
When the Martha's Vineyard flights first came to light, there was considerable speculation online about what laws DeSantis and Florida might have broken: kidnapping, trafficking, etc. Attorneys weighed in on Twitter, mostly to caution against rushing into uninformed legal theories about what crimes might have taken place.
Just Security published what I thought was a sober and helpful article on the range of possible criminal and civil consequences of the flights, concluding that it would be mainly up to Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar to determine whether and how to proceed since any alleged criminal activity took place in his jurisdiction. (San Antonio sits entirely within Bexar County, Texas. Salazar, a Democrat, has been sheriff since 2017.)
Migrants who were flown to Martha's Vineyard have filed a civil lawsuit against DeSantis as well as the State of Florida and several named individuals working in Florida's government, including Florida's Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue. One of the attorneys in the suit, Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, travelled to the borderrecently with a team on a fact-finding mission that illustrates the connections between what happens at the border with cities like Boston far from the border.
Governor DeSantis claimed that he was doing migrants a favor and shared copies of consent forms that migrants signed before being flown to Martha's Vineyard. Having just finished Ben Kafka's book "The Demon of Writing", I can't help but find the production of these consent forms to be a frankly fascinating example of bureaucratic subterfuge.
On top of the civil lawsuit, Sheriff Salazar certified that the 50 migrants flow to Martha's Vineyard are victims of crimes, setting those migrants up to possibly obtain a U visa which could put the migrants on a path to citizenship. (Learn more about U visas here.) Perhaps DeSantis was right: maybe he did do the migrants a favor.
Last but not least, one of the two people that recruited migrants in San Antonio, a man named Emanuel (the other was Perla), was apparently not authorized to work in the United States. Several news outlets and people online have already pointed out the obvious contradiction here: Ron DeSantis, who has railed against hiring undocumented and even documented immigrants used an unauthorized worker to perpetrate a possibly criminal scheme.
We'll have to wait to know for sure what will come of the various pending civil lawsuits as well as any criminal investigations. But that brings us up to speed on what to watch for going forward.
In addition to the legal issues, many commentary's on the situation have emerged. Rather than work through each of them, I'll just post them here as a reference list if you want to read more:
Jonathan Chiat for NYMag. DeSantis’s Reverse Freedom Ride Allegedly Violated Laws
Jelani Cobb for the New Yorker. When Migrants Become Political Pawns
Masha Gessen for the New Yorker. Why Ron DeSantis Thinks Weaponizing Asylum Seekers Is a Winning Strategy
Dara Lind for the New York Times. Ron DeSantis Is Making an Asylum Crisis of His Own
Greg Sargent for the Washington Post. Ron DeSantis's odious Martha's Vineyard stunt outdoes Greg Abbott in cruelty
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The entire linked article is a first-person account of a Venezuelan migrant, not just a quote. Worth the read.
Thanks for the update. I sure hope they can charge Mr. DeSantis with a crime or ten.