Anger and anxiety as DeSantis’s asylum-seeker flights return to US skies

The already congested skies over the western US became a little more crowded this week after Florida’s rightwing Republican governor Ron DeSantis ordered the return to flight of one of America’s most notorious transport airlines.

Air DeSantis, as supporters colloquially refer to the state’s unauthorized alien transportation program, doesn’t even exist as an official entity. It isn’t registered as a company, or with the Federal Aviation Authority, is mired in legal troubles, and has been grounded for months.

Yet its renewed mission, ferrying scores of South American asylum seekers around the country aboard chartered aircraft, and leaving them on church doorsteps in Democratic states and cities for authorities there to deal with, provides the perfect vehicle for DeSantis to enhance his reputation as an immigration hardliner.

The political capital the project yields with his base might be invaluable as he pursues the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.

Unsurprisingly, critics of the governor’s agenda, and those on the ground in California attempting to assist bewildered Venezuelans and Colombians dropped off in two separate episodes in four days, see things differently.

“They’re resilient people. But at the same time they have feelings of abandonment, and realizing that they were duped into a political stunt,” Oren Sellstrom, litigation director for Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights, told the Guardian.

“There’s anger mixed in with fear and frustration. You have to remember that many of the migrants came from countries where getting caught up in political divisions can get you and your family killed.

“So the idea that they have suddenly been thrust into this political maelstrom, when all they thought they were getting was assistance from good Samaritans, is deeply troubling to many of them.”

Related: Florida confirms it was behind flights that left asylum seekers in California

Last year, Sellstrom’s group filed a lawsuit against DeSantis on behalf of almost 50 mostly Venezuelan migrants used as “political pawns” when they were scooped up in El Paso, Texas, and dumped with no advance notice in the wealth liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard.

He says given the similar circumstances to the Sacramento groups who were also lured by Florida representatives in Texas with fake promises of accommodation, jobs, food and clothing then flown to California via New Mexico, the attorneys are looking to add them to the class action.

“We already have a mountain of evidence showing fraud and misrepresentation on the part of Governor DeSantis and his co-conspirators,” Sellstrom said.

“We fully expect that evidence will grow as the case proceeds. But it is clearly unconstitutional and a violation of state tort laws to induce vulnerable immigrants to travel by fraud and misrepresentation.”

DeSantis’s potential legal exposure doesn’t end there. A sheriff in Bexar county, Texas, who has been investigating the Martha’s Vineyard flight, filed a criminal case with the local district attorney this week.

California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, threatened kidnapping charges against his Florida counterpart, with whom he has long feuded, and called him a “small, pathetic man”.

“I think I’ve been generous. He’s just weakness masquerading as strength, he’s flailing [and] desperate for attention,” Newsom said of DeSantis on NBC’s Today show.

“Here’s a governor from the state of Florida, using taxpayer money, he had to go to another state to find people under false pretenses, took them into another state by bus, then took them on a charter flight to Sacramento lying to them that they had help on the other side.

“[They] knocked on the door and left these migrants right there on the steps. What kind of human being does that?”

The timing of the resumption of DeSantis’s migrant program, operated by Florida’s department of emergency management, despite none of the Sacramento groups coming within 1,200 miles of the state’s border, is also raising eyebrows.

Last month, he signed off on an additional $12m for more migrant flights approved by the Republican-dominated Florida legislature. But political opponents say his entry into the presidential race, and attempts to move even further to the right than his main rival for the nomination Donald Trump, are his real incentive.

“Ron DeSantis is doing this for one simple reason: he’s running for president,” the progressive Democratic Florida congressman Maxwell Frost told the Guardian.

“But make no mistake, this probably illegal stunt will only hurt vulnerable people and our state as a whole. The governor and Florida Republicans intended for this bill simply to scare people, but now they’re going to see the real consequences of their hate.”

Yet DeSantis remains defiant. His media team put out a statement this week insisting that all the migrants who traveled had done so voluntarily, although it did not address claims they were promised incentives that did not materialize.

“Through verbal and written consent, these volunteers indicated they wanted to go to California,” Alecia Collins, spokesperson for the Florida division of emergency management, said in the statement, which was accompanied by an unverifiable video montage appearing to show people signing consent forms and thanking officials for treating them well.

At an immigration roundtable in Arizona on Wednesday, DeSantis attempted to shift blame on California for enticing them.

“They give benefits, they give unemployment checks, they do all that and so you could see why some of those folks were interested in going that direction,” he said.

“In Florida, we’ve gone the opposite way. We’re going to have a legal workforce, we’re not going to have benefits, we’re not going to do that. Other states have tried to incentivize it and they should be the ones to pay.”

Immigration law experts say DeSantis’s actions might end up achieving the opposite of what he intended because federal law offers protections to “victims of criminal activity” regardless of immigration status.

“It seems the San Antonio sheriff certified the Martha’s Vineyard folks, and provided a document that will allow them to apply for a U Visa, even if they don’t prosecute,” said Daniel Morales, associate professor of immigration law at the University of Houston law center.

“These are all symptoms of the same problem, which is with immigration in the US these days everybody’s playing on a symbolic terrain. You’ve got DeSantis trying to own the libs by shipping migrants to places they obviously couldn’t afford to live, you’ve got sheriffs and Gavin Newsom saying, ‘I’m gonna prosecute you.’

“But there’s no doubt these people are being treated wrongfully, that they’re being used as a means to an end, as political pawns, and that’s never right morally.”