California Officials Investigating Flight of Migrants to Sacramento
Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were abruptly flown on a private chartered jet to California and dropped off outside a church building in Sacramento on Friday, state officials said, accusing a contractor for a state-funded Florida program of transporting the group from outside a Texas migrant center under a false promise of jobs if the migrants agreed to be taken to California.
Were confident it was Florida, Californias attorney general, Rob Bonta, said in an interview on Sunday, citing documents the migrants showed authorities upon their arrival that indicated their travel had been administered by the Florida Division of Emergency Management and its contractor, Vertol Systems Company.
Mr. Bonta, whose office is investigating the episode, said that the migrants, who are not fluent in English, had been approached outside El Paso and told in broken Spanish to sign the documents as a condition of boarding the plane to Sacramento, but that not all had understood where they were going and not all had signed.
The episode mirrored an aggressive tactic used by hard-line Republican governors to protest President Bidens immigration policies by dispatching dozens of migrants, with little explanation or warning, to states and cities led by Democrats. Vertol Systems was the company used for transport in the fall when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida directed two planeloads of South American migrants from San Antonio to Marthas Vineyard, a Democratic-leaning Massachusetts island.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/us/migrants-california-church-texas.html