Efforts to reach Ms. Huerta by phone and at her home in Tampa were unsuccessful.
The man who said he worked with her to help sign up other migrants agreed to speak on the condition that his name not be used because the events are under investigation. He said he first met Ms. Huerta on Sept. 10 outside the Migrant Resource Center in San Antonio.
Where were the migrants from? The 48 migrants who were taken from a shelter in San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard in mid-September are Venezuelans who had crossed the southwest border without authorization and had turned themselves in to border officials; many likely planned to claim asylum. After being taken into custody, they had been released to face future proceedings.
What happened to the migrants after they arrived on the land? Volunteers and officials in Martha’s Vineyard welcomed the migrants with food and clothing and gave them shelter at a local church. A few days later, the migrants boarded buses for a temporary shelter at Joint Base Cape Cod.
Are the claims being investigated? Yes. A county sheriff in Texas has opened a criminal investigation into the drop-offs, saying that it was clear that many of the migrants had been misled and lured away from Texas to score political points. The sheriff, who has been a critic of the Republican handling of illegal immigration, added that his decision to open the investigation was not politically motivated.
She asked him to help her recruit other migrants like him from Venezuela. But he said he felt betrayed, because she never mentioned working on behalf of the Florida government. “I was also lied to,” he said. “If I had known, I would not have gotten involved.” All he was told, he said, was that “she wanted to help people head up north.”
The effort to fly migrants to Martha’s Vineyard appeared to have been far less organized than the more sweeping program created by Mr. Abbott in Texas that already had bused more than 11,000 migrants from the state to three northern, Democratic-run cities — Washington, New York and Chicago.
But the goal for both governors was the same: draw attention to the large number of unauthorized migrants arriving daily at the southern border and force Democrats to deal with the migrants whom they profess a desire to welcome.
In the case of the flights to Martha’s Vineyard, Florida state records show that an airline charter company, Vertol Systems, was paid $615,000 on Sept. 8 and $950,000 less than two weeks later. The first payment was for “project 1” and the second payment for “projects two and three.” So far, Florida officials have acknowledged only the initial flights and have not spoken of plans for others.
The money to fly migrants came from a special $12 million appropriation in the state’s last budget, a brief item that gave funds to the state’s Department of Transportation to create a program “to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state.”
The program was conceived as a means for Florida to push back on the number of unauthorized migrants being flown into the state by the federal government. As of August, Mr. DeSantis said the funds had yet to be used, because the additional large groups of migrants that had been expected had failed to materialize.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/us/migrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis-texas.html
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