United States
DeSantis: Keep moving migrants to other parts of the US
People who fled their Latin American homeland stand in front of a church on Martha’s Vineyard. Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis had her taken there. photo
© Ray Ewing/Vineyard Gazette/dpa
The dispute over immigration policy in the United States is coming to a head. Republican governors are using a tactic that has been sharply criticized by President Joe Biden’s government.
The Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, wants to further exploit migrants with high-profile actions for political purposes. He announced that he would continue to create people in democratic parts of the country. “There will also be buses and there will probably be more flights,” de Santis said. “We want to make sure that taxpayers (in Florida) don’t have to foot the bill for tens of thousands or thousands of people who enter the country illegally. And this is the most effective way to do that.”
DeSantis had unannounced on Wednesday several dozen migrants brought by plane to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in the state of Massachusetts. It is known as a posh resort. The migrants had been flown to the island from the US state of Texas via Florida – according to DeSantis voluntarily. He claimed they were chosen because they originally wanted to come to Florida from Texas. If they did come to Florida, it would come at a high cost to communities, he said. “We’re trying to avoid that.”
Migrants themselves receive hardly any information
The US media said that many of the migrants did not know where they were actually being taken. Many of them were eventually taken to a military base on Cape Cod on Friday. There they are to be housed in dormitories and provided with food. They are mostly people from Venezuela. The country has been suffering from a severe political and economic crisis for years. Around six million Venezuelans have left their homeland.
The US government had sharply criticized the procedure and described it as “inhuman”. “This is the type of tactic we’ve seen used by smugglers in countries like Mexico and Guatemala,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said. Other Republican governors had also sent large numbers of migrants to democratic regions of the country in recent months.