Newsman: Texas law enforcement authorities said Monday they are opening an investigation into how 48 Venezuelan migrants were “lured” last week to board flights from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha‘s Vineyard under a plan orchestrated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for “nothing more … than a photo op.”
Florida’s Republican governor has told reporters that he plans to continue paying the cost of transporting migrants detained at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas to keep them from settling in Florida and sending them to “sanctuary cities” around the country. He also said he wants to call attention to the Biden administration’s “reckless” border security policies.
“I got $12 million to use, so we are going to use it,” he said. “Because I think people want to see that we’re actually standing up and trying to protect the state against (President) Biden’s really, really reckless policies.”
“We want to make sure that [Florida] taxpayers are not having tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people coming in illegally,” he said.
Last Wednesday, without informing local officials in Texas or Massachusetts, DeSantis ordered the state to shuttle the migrants aboard two chartered airplanes from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard.
“Our understanding is that a Venezuelan migrant was paid what we would call a bird dog fee to recruit approximately 50 migrants from the area around a migrant Resource Center … in San Antonio,” Bexar County, Texas Sheriff Javier Salazar told reporters.
“As we understand it, 48 migrants were lured — I will use the word lured — under false pretenses into staying at a hotel for a couple of days,” said Salazar, who said the migrants were then taken by airplane at a certain point and flown to Florida before continuing to Massachusetts.
Salazar, an elected Democrat from south Texas, said the migrants were taken out of Texas to Martha’s Vineyard “under false pretenses,” noting they were “promised work (and) promised the solution to several of their problems.”
“They were taken to Martha’s Vineyard from what from what we can gather for nothing more, for little more than a photo op, video op, and then they were unceremoniously stranded in Martha’s Vineyard,” said Salazar.
