California officials are investigating migrant flight to Sacramento

Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were abruptly flown to California by private jet and dropped off outside a Catholic church building in Sacramento on Friday, state officials said. .

While it remained unclear on Sunday who approached the group of migrants outside El Paso and orchestrated their flight from New Mexico to California, the episode reflected an aggressive tactic used by hardline Republican governors to protest President Biden’s immigration policies by dozens of migrants. to send. to democratically run states and cities with little warning or explanation. Many of the migrants told a nonprofit that they had no idea they were going to California.

On Sunday, a spokeswoman for California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the migrants were carrying documents mentioning the Florida Division of Emergency Management and the state’s “voluntary transportation program.” The documents also refer to Vertol Systems Company Inc. named as the contractor for the Florida program and the one who performs the transportation.

That was the same company used for transportation last fall when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent two planeloads of South American migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, a Democratic-leaning island in Massachusetts.

Representatives for Mr. DeSantis, a Republican who has made immigration a major theme of his campaign for president, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On the campaign trail, he frequently emphasizes his decision to send migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.

Mr. Bonta and California Governor Gavin Newsom, both Democrats, met with the migrants on Saturday and pledged to care for them while they remained in the state and to launch an investigation into how they were brought to California and whether they were misled. . In separate statements, both men did not rule out the possibility of bringing criminal or civil charges against those involved in transporting the migrants.

The state will work with the City of Sacramento and local nonprofits “to ensure that the people who have arrived are treated with respect and dignity and reach their intended destinations while continuing their immigration affairs,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement . Several Sacramento nonprofits also confirmed they had spoken with the migrants.

The 16 migrants had been approached outside a migrant center near El Paso by people who said they were there on behalf of a private contractor and could help them get to a center where they would get help finding jobs, shelter, clothing and other supplies, according to state and nonprofit officials.

The migrants were then transported to New Mexico and taken on a charter flight to Sacramento, where they were driven to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento. Left outside an administrative building in front of the church, the migrants had backpacks of belongings, little information about their whereabouts and a promise that someone would come and get them.

“Those I’ve spoken to—they feel they’ve been lied to; some of them have said they were abandoned,” said Cecilia Flores, who works with Sacramento ACT, a community organization. “They couldn’t understand why anyone would do such a thing.”

The group, she said, did not include children and appeared to be made up of young women and men under the age of 40 who had gathered outside the migrant center. Many of them sought asylum in the United States, but none of the migrants, to her knowledge, planned to go to Sacramento.

Sacramento ACT and other organizations are working to find safe housing for them and help them take their next steps. Some of the migrants have court appointments elsewhere in the country.

“We’ve all made the comment that this is something we never saw or expected,” Ms Flores said. “Another big question is, is this going to keep happening?”

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, said he was “strengthened” by the investigation, adding that “whoever is behind this needs to answer.”

In any case, it is the second time in recent months that migrants have been transported from Texas to Sacramento. In September, a smaller group of Venezuelans who had crossed the border in Laredo, en route to New York, Florida and Utah, appeared in front of a Catholic Charities building in California’s capital.

They had documents leading them to the local offices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but officials were unable to determine who sent them. Some had walked the 10 miles from Sacramento International Airport, some without shoes.

Dates from FlightAware, a website that tracks flights across the country, shows a direct flight between Deming Municipal Airport in Luna County, NM, and Sacramento McClellan Airport that landed just before 11 a.m. on Friday after about three hours. A representative of Berry Aviation, a charter service based in San Marcos, Texas, told The Sacramento Bee that the flight was “something run by the government”, but made no further comment.

Vertol, the company believed to have brought the migrants to Sacramento, is an aerospace company and defense contractor based in Destin, Fla. It has ties to Republican leaders in Florida, as well as one of Mr. DeSantis’ top assistants, Larry Keefea former US attorney who represented the company in litigation before and after supplied the state’s migrant flight program. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who sent migrant buses to Washington and New York last year, Mr. DeSantis made it a point to send dozens of South American migrants to a Democratic-leaning state in an effort to draw attention settle on an influx of migrants at the southern border at the time. Mr. DeSantis targeted Martha’s Vineyard, where former President Barack Obama has a vacation home, and considered a separate flight to a airport near Mr. Biden’s home in Delaware. (That flight to Delaware was called off.)

The 49 migrants on the charter flights of Martha’s Vineyard, run by Vertol, said they were tricked into getting on the planes with promises of help waiting for them when they landed. But no one on the ground knew they were coming, prompting local officials to rush to provide food and shelter, sparking fierce backlash across the country.

The migrants, many of whom were among the millions who fled a devastating economic crisis in Venezuela, later sued Mr. DeSantis and other state officials in a lawsuit that is still pending. Those flights cost at least $1.5 million in taxpayers’ money, state records show.

But Mr. DeSantis and his Republican allies in Florida have since doubled down. Lawmakers this year voted to expand the state’s migrant flight program, approving a $12 million budget, and the state recently rented three private contract companies, including Vertol, to organize the last round of flights.

DeSantis has scheduled a $3,300 per board fundraiser in Sacramento on June 19 and has publicly exchanged barbs with Mr. Newsom over immigration. As he storms the early nominees of the presidential campaign, his story about the migrant flights has earned some of his biggest lines of applause.