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Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., addressed mainstream claims that he coerced illegal migrants to board planes headed to the exclusive community of Martha’s Vineyard in September on Monday, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that the migrants signed consent forms.
DeSantis told Hannity, “They all signed consent forms to go and then the vendor that that is doing this for Florida, provided them with a packet that had a map of Martha’s Vineyard. It had the numbers for different services on Martha’s Vineyard, and then it had numbers for the overall agencies in Massachusetts that handle things involving immigration and refugees.”
Last week, Gov. DeSantis highlighted the duplicitous hypocrisy of the radical left’s open border stances by flying two planes packed full of illegal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard – a community so exclusive that several former presidents, including Barack Obama, have held residences there.
DeSantis continued in his comments to Hannity, “So, it was clearly voluntary and all the other nonsense you’re hearing is just not true. And why wouldn’t they want to go, given where they were? They were in really, really bad shape and they got to be cleaned up – everything treated well and then put in a situation because, Sean, there are jobs available in Martha’s Vineyard. There is lodging available in Martha’s Vineyard.”
On Monday, Sheriff Javier Salazar announced on Twitter that he had opened a criminal investigation into DeSantis’s move to relocate the migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. He claimed that DeSantis had “lured” the migrants from the San Antonio, Texas, Migrant Resource Center.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) swung back at the apparently political move, stating, “At a time when Texas law enforcement is dealing with the impacts of the deluge of crime and dugs that have flowed across our borders, this purely partisan grandstanding is not just unhelpful, it is unlawful.”
DeSantis told Hannity that while governors like himself, Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, and Doug Ducey, R-Ariz., are accused of engaging in the “political stunt” of sending immigrants to Democrat cities, the “biggest stunt was Biden coming into office and reversing Trump’s policies, not because Trump’s policies weren’t working – he reversed them because he wanted to virtue signal to his base and he wanted to show that he thought Donald Trump was bad.”
