SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Wednesday demanded more answers for the two private flights that ferried 36 Latin American migrants to Sacramento earlier this month, issuing a public records request to Florida authorities including the office of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has taken credit for the so-called migrant relocation program.
Three dozen migrants, all adults and a majority of them from Venezuela, were flown to Sacramento-area airports June 2 and June 5 from El Paso, Texas, with a stop in New Mexico.
Bonta’s office on Wednesday filed a pair of public records requests — one to the office of DeSantis and one to the Florida Division of Emergency Management — as “part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation into the conditions under which the migrants seeking asylum were brought into California,” Bonta said in a statement.
The California Department of Justice “swiftly launched an investigation into the circumstances by which these individuals were brought to California, who funded their travel and whether these individuals were given false information,” Bonta’s statement continued.
The Florida governor’s office has confirmed that it was responsible for those two flights but contends that all 36 asylum-seeking migrants consented to the trip.
DeSantis officials shared a link to a Rumble video purporting to show the migrants signing waivers and boarding the plane to California; the video does not identify the people who speak in the video, and The Sacramento Bee was unable to confirm the veracity of the video.
California authorities say the arriving migrants, the first 16 of whom were dropped off at the doorstep of Sacramento’s Roman Catholic diocese, had documents indicating they were part of Florida’s “voluntary migrant transport program.” Some of the arriving asylum seekers had impending immigration court dates, including in different states, some as far away as New York and Florida, authorities said.
The documents suggested Florida had contracted with Vertol Systems Co. to carry out the flights. It is the same company Florida enlisted last fall to fly 49 migrants from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Flight records reviewed by The Bee showed the two recent chartered flights to Sacramento were operated by a company known as Berry Aviation.
The Florida Division of Emergency Management last week released a heavily redacted copy of the proposals from three companies bidding on the migrant flight program contract, including Vertol, after The Bee’s sister newspaper the Miami Herald threatened to file a lawsuit over the documents.
Large portions of the released documents were blacked out, with Florida officials citing “confidential trade secret information.”
California’s top law enforcement official is now requesting that Florida officials produce the unredacted version of those documents, as well as several other categories of documents.
Those include communications between the two Florida government offices and any of the migrants who were transported to California; communications between the two offices and the Florida Department of Transportation; and communications between the two offices and any entities involved in the program, including Vertol Systems and Berry Aviation.
Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom in the immediate aftermath of the two flights blamed DeSantis, and both suggested California could pursue criminal charges for kidnapping, though legal experts say that is unlikely to happen.
“We need to understand the circumstances that led to the implementation of this operation – which was apparently paid for by Florida taxpayer dollars – and the decisions and directives that led to this questionable act,” Bonta wrote in Wednesday’s statement.
“The information gathered will be crucial in determining whether the law has been violated and, if so, what subsequent steps are required to prevent such disregard for human rights from recurring.”
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