Eight days before last month’s announcement that he’s running for the GOP presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a series of bills that he said would fight human trafficking in his state. He also released a statement arguing that “Biden’s Border Crisis” is “exacerbating human trafficking across the nation.”
Before last month’s announcement that he’s running for president, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a series of bills that he said would fight human trafficking in his state.
But officials in Texas and California and civil rights attorneys in Massachusetts are essentially accusing DeSantis of engaging in human trafficking himself. Last September, his administration ordered two planes to carry 49 migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. Then, the professed opponent of human trafficking did it again this month, when his administration arranged the flights that carried migrants from Texas to Sacramento, California.
What are those flights if not a state-sanctioned human trafficking operation, one that operates by feigning empathy for migrants, promising them help only to exploit them for crass political profit?
On Monday, a spokesperson for the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office in Texas announced the recommendation of criminal charges for the Martha Vineyard’s flights. In an interview with Jacob Soboroff on NBC’s “TODAY” show that aired Thursday morning, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said the Sacramento flights were criminal and his state will investigate. The Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR), had already filed a class-action lawsuit against DeSantis, other Florida officials and the vendor contracted by the state to manage the flights to Martha’s Vineyard. The group just sent lawyers to Sacramento to investigate if the flights that landed there have any bearing on that ongoing case.
“This is a class-action suit filed on behalf of all immigrants who are induced to travel across state lines through fraud and misrepresentation on the part of Governor DeSantis and his co-conspirators,” Oren Sellstrom, the litigation director for Lawyers for Civil Rights, told me Wednesday.
In San Antonio and Bexar County, the mood to go after DeSantis or other Florida officials is a bit more subdued. Even so, without naming any suspects, the sheriff there says multiple counts of unlawful restraint, some of them felonies, were committed. DeSantis has acknowledged that his administration was behind the flights from Texas to Massachusetts.
“If a review of the facts reveal that a felony offense has been committed, we will present that case to a grand jury for their deliberation,” Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales said Tuesday after recommendations by the sheriff’s office were made public.
As Newsom said on the “TODAY” show Thursday: “Now, who’s ultimately accountable and responsible? I mean, the buck should stop with Ron DeSantis and the games he’s playing.”
As his comments Wednesday about the flights to California indicate, DeSantis’ motivation isn’t compassion for migrants; his motivation is to stick it to states where Democrats are in charge.
And he is playing games. As his comments Wednesday about the flights to California indicate, DeSantis’ motivation isn’t compassion for migrants; his motivation is to stick it to states where Democrats are in charge. And to portray himself as even more hardcore on migration than his chief opponent for the Republican nomination: former President Donald Trump.
“These sanctuary jurisdictions are part of the reason we have this problem because they have endorsed and agitated for these types of open border policies,” DeSantis said in a visit to the Arizona-Mexico border Wednesday. “They have bragged they are sanctuary jurisdictions. They attack the previous admin efforts to try to have border security. … When they have to deal with some of the fruits of that, they all of a sudden become very, very upset about that.”
The series of events that led to migrants landing in Sacramento is almost an exact carbon copy of the series of events that led to migrants landing in Martha’s Vineyard, Sellstrom told me Wednesday.
“Similar to the Martha’s Vineyard migrants, the Sacramento migrants were also led to believe that there were going to be social services awaiting them in Sacramento, that it was a coordinated effort to have agencies expecting their arrival. And then, of course, that turned out to be false,” Sellstrom said. “The migrants were simply deposited at the doorstep of a church.” Sellstrom said that the defendants in the lawsuit, including DeSantis, have been filing procedural motions “to try and avoid facing the music in court,” but says the recent flights of migrants to Sacramento only strengthens the plaintiffs’ case. DeSantis and Florida officials will insist that all the migrants on the flights voluntarily agreed to board the planes. They cite as their proof videos of people smiling as they board the planes, rode buses and gathered together in rooms. Why wouldn’t they be smiling if they believed they were being taken to a place where they could find work, a new home, a new life? Lawyers for Civil Rights has examples of brochures those migrants were given that suggest they’ll get cash assistance, housing assistance and furniture, clothes and transportation to job training programs, and help in registering their children for school and in applying for Social Security cards. Why wouldn’t they be smiling if they believed they were being taken to a place where they could find work, a new home, a new life? Sellstrom said those promises of employment, those promises of relief, never materialized in Martha’s Vineyard. And they likely won’t materialize in Sacramento. Evidence suggests that the migrants who were recruited were just conned and duped into flying to other places, which is morally reprehensible. DeSantis is using state money to exploit people and take advantage of their hopes and fears. DeSantis could have actually framed his flights as real flights of hope, but, again, it’s crystal clear he isn’t concerned about migrants or their lives. He seeks to punish them and those who think we as a country should exhibit more compassion. Despite the bills he signed last month, there’s no reason to think that DeSantis cares about human trafficking. If he did, then he wouldn’t be tricking people into taking flights that eventually leave them abandoned.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. 
