California authorities accuse Florida of arranging migrant flights from Texas

California authorities are accusing Florida of flying a group of sixteen migrants from El Paso, Texas to Sacramento last Friday after allegedly promising them that a migrant center would provide them with support and jobs. 

“Today Attorney General Rob Bonta and I met with over a dozen migrants in Sacramento,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote in a news release. “These individuals were transported from Texas to New Mexico before being flown by private chartered jet to Sacramento and dumped on the doorstep of a local church without any advance warning.”

Attorney General Bonta said an investigation is being carried out to determine where the migrant flight originated from and who is responsible for arranging their transportation to California. However, after a preliminary investigation, Bonta said he was confident it was organized by the State of Florida. 

“To be clear, this was the state of Florida using its budget to move migrants in Texas to New Mexico and California,” he said. “These are migrants who never were in Florida.”

“We are also evaluating potential criminal or civil action against those who transported or arranged for the transport of these vulnerable immigrants. While this is still under investigation, we can confirm these individuals were in possession of documentation purporting to be from the government of the state of Florida,” Bonta continued. 

Bonta said in an interview on Sunday that his team had documents showing that their travel had been organized by the Florida Division of Emergency Management and a contractor Vertol Systems Company. 

The migrants, who were from Venezuela and Colombia, were allegedly approached outside of a migrant center in El Paso, Texas, and were offered a flight to Sacramento, where they would receive assistance finding a job, shelter, clothing, and other necessities. 

The migrants were transported from El Paso to New Mexico, where they boarded a chartered flight to Sacramento and eventually were dropped off outside the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento. 

According to local nonprofits, the group of migrants arrived without any information of what to do next or who to look for. 

“The ones that 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 something like that.”

Newsom said that the city of Sacramento and local nonprofits would work together “to ensure the people who have arrived are treated with respect and dignity, and get to their intended destination as they pursue their immigration cases,”