The flight of Venezuelan migrants Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis planned to go to President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware Tuesday never materialized amid mounting criticism of the political performance art that used unsuspecting migrants as pawns, USA Today reports.
According to FlightAware.com, an aircraft tracking app, Ultimate Air Shuttle 11 was originally scheduled to make a multi-leg trip from Longview, Texas, through Florida, to a community airport near Wilmington, Delaware, near Biden’s residence, before going on to Teterboro, New Jersey. However, public outrage at using asylum seekers as props likely altered DeSantis’s intended stunt because his earlier charter fight, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, was met with disgust and derision by Democrats and many conservatives.
Statements made in the filing of a class action lawsuit declare that many of the migrants were deceived to board the plane after being held in a hotel by a Texas airport for days while a DeSantis-hired coyote named Perla recruited passengers for the flight. Although DeSantis claims the passengers–including families with children–boarded the flight voluntarily, it appears they were actually kidnapped by inveiglement via false promise.
DeSantis has been criticized on a number of rather fronts as well: he used $12 million in federal Covid relief funds to pay for his political stunt instead of using the money to benefit Floridians. He also paid for asylum seekers in Texas to be moved to Martha’s Vineyard–after a brief stopover in Florida–so he could claim he moved the migrants out of Florida. The passengers were told they would get money, housing, jobs and other services in Massachusetts, although the specific programs they were told about were for refugees, not asylum seekers.
Flight UE11 started Tuesday in Longview, Texas and was scheduled to fly to Okaloosa County, Florida so DeSantis could claim he shipped the migrants out of his state. Instead, the flight went to Nashville, Tennessee before going on to Teterboro, New Jersey.