Massachusetts authorities have asked federal officials to investigate Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s $12 million political stunt of shipping foreign asylum seekers to Democratically-run states to “own the libs” instead of trying to increase teacher pay or cut down on child abuse in his state, USA Today reports.
“We are requesting that the Department of Justice open an investigation to hold DeSantis and others accountable for these inhumane acts,” state Rep. Dylan Fernandes tweeted Sunday. “Not only is it morally criminal, there are legal implications around fraud, kidnapping, deprivation of liberty, and human trafficking.”
The migrants involved in the stunt–DeSantis paid for private planes to move asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts as a publicity stunt paid for by taxpayer funds to show how much of an asshole he is–said they were told they would be sent to Boston where they would be given housing and jobs. In fact, never DeSantis nor fellow asshole Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, did not inform anyone at the destination so arrangements could be made, sending authorities in Massachusetts scrambling to find the necessities for the migrants.
DeSantis, Abbott and Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey have been transporting thousands of migrants, typically via bus, to places like Washington, DC or New York City where they are dumped off typically in the middle of a street where a Fox propaganda network crew was told to go. Why the Republicans informed a cable news network and not local authorities is clear: this is a stunt to “own the libs” by sending migrants to them as performance art; Texas and Arizona get tens of millions of dollars in federal money every year to help migrants; DeSantis is using leftover Covid relief money to pay for the stunt, when the individuals weren’t even in Florida.