Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
An image of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is overlaid with the words “Don’t attack our democracy,” at a rally to denounce the governor’s immigration policies, September 20, 2022, in Doral, Florida.
On Tuesday, Lawyers for Civil Rights, Boston filed a federal class action lawsuit in U.S. district court in Boston against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Florida state officials on behalf of a group of Venezuelan immigrants who fell into the GOP’s maw. Last week, lured by unknown persons, they were flown to Martha’s Vineyard, about an hour’s ferry ride from President John F. Kennedy’s summer home on the Massachusetts mainland. The suit alleges that the Floridians “and other unidentified accomplices designed and executed a premeditated, fraudulent, and illegal scheme centered on exploiting this vulnerability for the sole purpose of advancing their own personal, financial and political interests.”
“The defendants manipulated them,” the suit continues, “stripped them of their dignity, deprived them of their liberty, bodily autonomy, due process, and equal protection under law, and impermissibly interfered with the Federal Government’s exclusive control over immigration in furtherance of an unlawful goal and a personal political agenda.”
The day before the Boston filing, Bexar County, Texas, Sheriff Javier Salazar opened a criminal investigation into how the group was recruited in San Antonio, where the air travel originated.
After lashing out at President Biden and telling him to “do his damn job and secure the border,” the Florida governor decided to transport immigrants across state borders to Massachusetts. His action treads perilously close to a usurpation of federal powers to regulate immigration. DeSantis has put himself and the state of Florida into possible legal jeopardy—while accelerating tensions between Democratic and Republican states to dangerous levels.
The aspiring chaos agent believed his action would send Bay State officials and residents into paroxysms of furious finger-pointing. Instead, the Vineyarders provided the immigrants with food, shelter, medical care, and Spanish-speaking high school student translators. The governor of Massachusetts, a Republican, and two Democratic members of the state legislature helped run a smooth humanitarian response, a small triumph of good government in a bad situation.
DeSantis, who has had his actions and the words “mini-ethnic cleansing with genocidal precedence” used in the same sentence, has seen his own legal and political problems explode. He is not the only governor to send immigrants across state borders to places viewed as more inclined to handle immigrants as actual human beings—fellow Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has also transported migrants to New York, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.
The Boston case raises federal preemption concerns: When it comes to immigration enforcement, only the federal government has the power to decide which people “to admit, exclude, remove, or allow to remain in the United States,” the lawsuit states.
The Supreme Court has upheld those powers: that it’s not the states, but rather the Department of Homeland Security, acting through Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that has the legal authority to transport migrants. Kathleen Kim, an immigration law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, notes that ICE has the “broad discretion” to detain noncitizens, depending on an individual’s immigration status.
“State authorities have no immigration power,” says Kim. “They may not interfere in Department of Homeland Security’s exclusive authority to enforce immigration law.” She adds that the “involuntary forcible movement of immigrants by state governmental actors [raises] legal issues [such as] trafficking and unlawful transportation by state officials across state borders.”
The suit further notes that transporting people clear across the country takes them away from their immigration proceedings, and that an official-looking brochure handed to them by DeSantis’s henchmen falsely promised jobs, support, and services that Martha’s Vineyard was unprepared to offer (though its residents spontaneously welcomed the immigrants and supplied them with both material and emotional support).
The lawsuit also alleges that the immigrants were victims of a conspiracy to deprive them of their civil rights and that the governor and other officials “agreed in and amongst themselves to inflict this injury.” DeSantis had bragged to a group of GOP donors about sending people to Martha’s Vineyard before the flights. (He has already started skittering away from the incident and did not mention it in a recent email to supporters.)
Democratic state and local leaders are now grappling with the problems that fellow state leaders have deliberately inflicted on immigrants and their own states and cities. Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., have also been targeted by the migrant transportation scheme. By mid-September, some 10,000 people had arrived in New York, with total numbers running as high as 13,000 overall. Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois has indicated that legal action is possible. Texas officials have repeatedly ignored Illinois’s requests for information about the trips.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker implemented emergency support plans as the migrants were transported from Martha’s Vineyard to Joint Base Cape Cod, a military facility already designated as an emergency shelter. Pritzker also declared a state of emergency, coordinated with suburban leaders to track down hotel rooms, and deployed National Guard troops to assist. (Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser’s request for National Guard troops has been denied twice by the Pentagon for reasons that appear not to have precluded the troops being deployed in Chicago. Unlike state governors, the mayor of the District of Columbia does not have independent authority to deploy the Guard.)
Washington created a $10 million Office of Migrant Service (the city intends to pursue reimbursement for those funds) to coordinate arrivals and social services. Federal Emergency Management Agency funds are available to localities and nonprofit agencies for food and shelter, and a group of Democratic senators has requested additional humanitarian aid. The Biden administration could also move to relieve pressure on states by confronting the logjam in immigration courts handling asylum cases and other immigration matters and by expediting employment authorizations for eligible immigrants to relieve pressures on social service agencies, according to Sarang Sekhavat, political director for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.
Texas estimates spending $12 million on migrant trips. In Florida, DeSantis intends to “exhaust all those funds” in the state’s $12 million relocation program, apparently funded through interest on federal COVID recovery fund monies. The Boston lawsuit alleges that such expenditures are not authorized under federal law. Florida budget language authorizing “the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state” suggests that expenditures on legal immigrants from other states (which is precisely what the migrants shipped to Martha’s Vineyard are) may conflict with state law.
DeSantis and Abbott have opted to exacerbate federal, state, and local partisan clashes, creating a crisis more dire than requests for National Guard troops and additional federal funding would indicate. By inflicting new injuries on people already devastated by harrowing treatment in their homelands, only to arrive in the United States for more of the same, the governors have plumbed a new low in moral perversity. Illegally inflicting unanticipated problems on their fellow governors, other elected officials, and ordinary citizens borders on the bellicose. In the wake of these migrant dispersals, Congress has not moved to address any major immigration questions— and certainly will not in the next few weeks before the midterm elections or in a lame-duck session.
“These state government actions suggest how emboldened and brazen state governments, at least the states involved in this, have become, challenging federal governmental authority while dehumanizing real people,” says Kim. “It is a growing trend among certain conservative states to exercise power that disrupts rule of law and democratic norms because things are happening in the courts and legislatures that are catalyzing states to go rogue.”
