Catholic GOP lawmakers quiet as bishop criticizes Florida for migrant relocation flights

Catholic Republican lawmakers are mostly silent after a Texas bishop denounced Florida's taxpayer-funded migrant flights as morally reprehensible.

Gov. Ron DeSantis confirmed last week that Florida paid to transport 36 Venezuelan, Colombian, and Mexican migrants from Texas to Sacramento, California. The group was dropped off in front of a Catholic Charities office without any warning.

The Associated Press reports one passenger who made it to California called others he knew from Texas to warn he had been duped into a scam.

“They just dumped us in the middle of nowhere at this church and no one knows what’s going on,” said one migrant who recounted what he had been told by a friend.

El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz leads the Texas Diocese where Florida officials are said to have targeted the asylum seekers. He called the incident morally reprehensible.

Seitz said it is clear to him those that recruited the migrants with promises of assistance acted clearly not out of concern “but in an effort to make a political point."

“If you’re seeking to help a person who needs to get to a certain destination where they have a sponsor, where they have a job or something like that, that is a commendable act,” said Seitz.

But Seitz takes issue with what he said is a program that moves and abandons people in a strange place, just to make a political point.

“That is reprehensible. It is taking a person who already has lost everything — everything. They have nothing, not even a nation they can really call their own because they have had to flee that nation. And then using them for your own purposes: That is not morally acceptable,” said Seitz.

Catholic politicians of both parties have clashed with the church over the years, at least since then-candidate John F. Kennedy’s 1960 pledge not to take orders from the Vatican.

DeSantis also differs with U.S. bishops over the death penalty, which the governor supports, and the church does not. President Joe Biden is Catholic and defies church hierarchy on access to abortion.

DeSantis has made immigration a main talking point of his presidential campaign. He promises to finish a border wall that former President Donald Trump started, blames the current president for an immigration crisis, and taunts Democratic governors who criticize his relocation program when it moves migrants into their states.

“That’s the policies that they’ve staken out,” DeSantis said Wednesday at a Arizona roundtable discussion on immigration.  “And then what? When they have to deal with some of the fruits of that, they all of a sudden become very, very upset about that."

At an Iowa campaign event, DeSantis quipped he had sent “illegal aliens to beautiful Martha’s Vineyard.”

DeSantis started a migrant relocation program in September when he spent a reported $1.6 million to fly 50 migrants from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, unannounced and no arrangements made with local officials.

Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, defended the September flight to bring attention to a need for a guest worker program.

“The governor is trying to protect Florida from problems that are arising federally. I agree with him on the policy,” said Passidomo at the time.

In the face of criticism for the Vineyard’s flight, Florida lawmakers provided $22 million for the effort, $10 million in a February special session, and another $12 million last month.

Passidomo was one of 24 Catholic lawmakers in the House and Senate who approved spending the money.

She, along with a dozen other Catholic lawmakers who voted to fund the migrant relocation program, did not respond Friday to a request for comment from the USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida about Bishop Seitz’s remarks.

Rep. Thad Altman, R-Brevard, declined to address Seitz directly, but he did call the flights a “humane” gesture.

“There are communities that have designated themselves as sanctuary cities and welcome immigration. As I said in the floor debate, it’s a humane policy to take people to states that have vocally and legally stated that they want to provide sanctuary. If they are sincere in what they say, I think that’s a humane thing to do,” said Altman.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said his office has begun an investigation to see whether the migrants were lured onto flights under false pretenses.

Bonta told CNN the migrants he talked to did not know where they were and that the people who traveled with them to California said they would be right back but never returned.

James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jcall@tallahassee.com. Follow on him Twitter: @CallTallahasse

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Bishop blasts Florida migrant transport program; Catholic lawmakers quiet