Dela-where? Gov. DeSantis dances around new migrant flight questions

Gov. Ron DeSantis. Image via AP.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is saying plenty about America’s immigration crisis, but is offering less details about Florida’s latest rumored response.

DeSantis was in Melbourne Tuesday when he took multiple questions about a chartered flight purportedly headed to Delaware from San Antonio via Crestview, Florida, which contains undocumented immigrants much like last week’s similar flight to Martha’s Vineyard.

“I cannot confirm that, I can’t,” DeSantis said.

While DeSantis wouldn’t confirm that flight directly, he offered another robust defense of the state’s early approach to programming $12 million of budgetary funds dedicated to removing undocumented immigrants from the state.

“What we’re doing is not the ultimate solution,” DeSantis said. “I think it’s opening people’s eyes to the solution.”

Responding to the introduction of a partisan critique from U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York that DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott were acting like “human traffickers,” DeSantis deflected.

“When Biden was flying these people all over the fruited plain in the middle of the night, I didn’t hear a peep out of those people,” DeSantis said, saying that “outrage” from liberals was absent until now.

“The only thing I hear them getting upset about is you have 50 who ended up in Martha’s Vineyard. Then they get really upset!”

DeSantis noted the “volunteer” nature of Florida’s “transport to sanctuary jurisdictions” as illustrated by the Martha’s Vineyard drop.

“If you believe in open borders,” DeSantis said. “It’s the sanctuary jurisdictions that should bear the brunt of the open borders.”

“They were provided the ability to be in the most posh sanctuary jurisdiction in the world,” DeSantis said, contending that the new arrivals were “deported” from Martha’s Vineyard.

DeSantis’ remarks in Melbourne continue a rhetorical offensive that started on Monday’s Hannity program on the Fox News Channel.

DeSantis appeared on Fox News’ Hannity on Monday, his first interview after the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office opened a criminal investigation into a Florida-funded charter flight involving two planes and 50 undocumented immigrants flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

The Governor did not address the Sheriff’s Office probe during that appearance, however, focusing instead on a rhetorical defense of the move as something Martha’s Vineyard residents and migrants consented to.

“It’s only when 50 get put into Martha’s Vineyard, which wasn’t saying they didn’t want this. They said they wanted this, they said they were a sanctuary jurisdiction,” DeSantis said.

The undocumented immigrants had “all signed consent forms to go,” DeSantis said, showing that the flights were “clearly voluntary and all the other nonsense you’re hearing is just not true.”

Even while DeSantis is taking questions on the migrant flights now, others still remain, including about the mechanics of the flight itself. The Florida Democratic Party presented six for media in a press release ahead of the DeSantis event, including about how passengers were lured on the trip.

One question read as follows: “Who is ‘Perla,’ the woman who is reported to have been misleading migrants to board the planes with false promises of ‘three months of rent, work’?

Indeed, questions about the mysterious Perla (and other details of the flights) likely will be posed to the Governor in the days ahead. But for now, he says to expect more of these one way trips originating in Texas.

“We have a whole infrastructure in place,” DeSantis said. “It’s not just flights. We have ground. We have other things that we can do. It’s already made more of an impact than anyone thought it could possibly make.”