On Tuesday I looked at the crap that Ron DeSantis was pulling in, checks notes, Texas and Massachusetts, 2 states he is definitely not the governor of. His fellow radicals were jubilant about how he owned the liberals, and he had planned to scoop up some more migrants, this time to fly them to an airport near Joe Biden’s Delaware home.
One thing in the Martha’s Vineyard kidnapping seemed very odd—the planes took off from Texas, then stopped in Florida, and then continued on to Massachusetts. The question was soon answered:
This is taken directly from SB1808, which passed by the majority in the FL Legislature, and was signed into law by @GovRonDeSantis. https://t.co/Pds0BMaDFT pic.twitter.com/p1DRSedWfe
— Sen. Jason Pizzo (@senpizzo) September 20, 2022
A closer look at the statute reveals that DeSantis seems to have violated both the requirement that the migrants be located in Florida, and that they be “unauthorized aliens”:
Additionally, there has been no determination made that these folks he picking up in Texas and moving to other states are "unauthorized aliens."
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) September 20, 2022
The Tuesday flights were also scheduled to stop again in Crestview, Florida, but the news that the airport was again going to be used to get around the legal restrictions came out and it seems that the plan changed:
plans. Now, spooked by presence at Crestview, FL airport, the flight is skipping Florida altogether heading to Delaware from Texas through Tennessee.
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) September 20, 2022
It soon became clear why DeSantis gave up. First Bexar County announced it had opened an investigation into the flights:
“They had a right not to be preyed on and played for a fool,” Sheriff Javier Salazar of Bexar County said, announcing criminal investigation of Ron DeSantis’s human trafficking stunt.https://t.co/cEMUFJnaYP
— Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) September 20, 2022
Second, the migrants sued DeSantis:
BREAKING: Migrants flown to Massachusetts file class action lawsuit against DeSantis and other Florida officials in federal court pic.twitter.com/Rp5xgAWOKp
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 20, 2022
Let’s stop and savor this for a moment. DeSantis tried to hate undocumented immigrants more than both Greg Abbott and TFG, but he was hamstrung by the fact that Florida isn’t a border state. So he decided to move some migrants in Texas and leave them to fend for themselves and to punish blue states for not being border states. He did this to this group of people because he wanted to openly bully them.
And they got legal help right away and once they started telling their new attorneys how they ended up on Martha’s Vineyard it was clear their civil rights had been violated and now DeSantis is in legal danger.
The things that DeSantis did to trick them—preying on hungry people by promising them McDonalds gift cards if they signed the paperwork, not all of which had been translated into Spanish, so none of them could actually give valid consent—and giving them a pamphlet full of misinformation are now elements of a class action suit encompassing everyone that the DeSantis administration has deliberately misled in order to relocate the migrants.
There’s a lot more still to play out, but right now this feels like a win for the good guys.
Let’s hear it for the underdogs:
Governors DeSantis and Abbott are despicable assholes, racing each other to see how low they can go. I loathe Republicans!