Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said late Monday that the flights he chartered for migrants to Martha’s Vineyard were “clearly voluntary.”
“It was clearly voluntary, and all the other nonsense you’re hearing is just not true,” DeSantis told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “And why wouldn’t they want to go, given where they were?”
DeSantis said all the migrants who flew to Martha’s Vineyard last week signed consent forms and were provided with maps and numbers for different services in the area.
The Florida governor has been accused of recruiting a group of nearly 50 migrants under false pretenses when he chartered two flights from Texas to the Massachusetts island late Wednesday.
The sheriff for Bexar County, Texas, opened an investigation on Monday into DeSantis’s transport of migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. According to the sheriff, one migrant was paid to recruit the others, who were promised work and other benefits.
However, DeSantis has denied the accusations, claiming the migrants were willing to leave after being “abandoned, homeless, and ‘left to fend for themselves’” in Texas, his spokesperson previously told The Hill.
“They were in really, really bad shape,” DeSantis said on Hannity’s show. “There are jobs available in Martha’s Vineyard. There is lodging available in Martha’s Vineyard. Had they lived up to … what they bill themselves out as a sanctuary jurisdiction, they could have absorbed those people without a problem.”
The flights to Martha’s Vineyard appeared to be DeSantis’s first foray into transporting migrants to Democratic-led cities in protest of President Biden’s immigration policies. He joins two other Republican governors — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey — who have been busing migrants to for several months.
Altogether, the three governors have sent nearly 13,000 migrants to Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago and Martha’s Vineyard since April.