There is no bottom: Two planes loaded with migrants sent to Sacramento is a new low | Opinion

There is no bottom to the political depravity behind shipping two airplanes of desperate migrants to Sacramento in three days. The first plane arrived Friday when 16 migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were deposited at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento.

Many of the people transported, apparently under false pretenses, had no idea where they were upon arrival. The second flight arrived Monday. According to The Bee, Monday’s flight was carried out by Berry Aviation, the same Texas-based company involved in Friday’s flight.

All had been transported to Sacramento from El, Paso, Texas with a stop in New Mexico. All of the individuals on Friday’s flight have pending court appearances, “and by transporting them to California under false pretenses, there will be a disruption in their legal due process,” The Bee wrote.

By Monday morning, Attorney General Rob Bonta had accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of responsibility for Friday’s flight and for using vulnerable people to fan the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment.

“This political stunt by Gov. Ron DeSantis is disgusting and morally bankrupt,” Bonta tweeted.

The act of shipping humans across state lines under false pretenses is akin to state-sanctioned kidnapping. It is reprehensible and it demonstrates how sick American political discourse has become.

It would not be the first time DeSantis has been behind such a ploy to ship foreign immigrants to another state.

DeSantis has already been named as the perpetrator behind a similar incident in September of last year, when approximately 50, primarily Venezuelan, asylum seekers were flown from San Antonio, Texas, to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The New York Times found that the migrant flight program instituted by DeSantis has cost Florida taxpayers at least $1.5 million so far.

The migrants that showed up in Sacramento on Friday are believed to have entered the U.S. into Texas, rounded up there and transported to New Mexico, then flown by a charter plane on to Sacramento.

Yet, the likelihood of DeSantis being held to account for this “immoral and disgusting” act of political theater, as AG Bonta said in a statement, is slim.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and DeSantis have been hurling political insults at each other for months. DeSantis is coming to Sacramento soon for a fundraiser, an unlikely move by a Republican presidential aspirant with no virtually no chance of ever carrying such a blue state. Perhaps DeSantis is firing back at Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has visited Florida and trolled DeSantis repeatedly.

In April, Newsom traveled to Florida to meet with students at New College of Florida, the small liberal arts school that has become a flashpoint between conservative and liberal ideologies. In turn, DeSantis has scheduled a visit to Sacramento later this month for a “roundtable breakfast” fundraising event — priced at a cool $3,300 per ticket.

But in this case, human lives are the pawns and the city of Sacramento became the arena to further this juvenile, jockeying game for the White House.

There is no doubt that there are people in California and even in Sacramento who would applaud DeSantis or anyone else for shipping these migrants to Sacramento. But this is a minority view in California.

Californians are not as impacted by the crisis of migrants massing on the Mexican side as other states are. But California is home to more than 10.5 million immigrants, and nearly a quarter of the nation’s undocumented immigrants reside in California, where they constitute more than 6% of the state’s population, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. This state is home to more than two million undocumented immigrants, more than half of which participate in our state’s workforce, contributing an estimated $3.7 billion annually to state and local tax revenues.

Moreover, the crisis at the Mexican border today is a function of political instability in Central America and South America. Migrants literally travel the length of Mexico in mostly unsuccessful journeys in pursuit of asylum in the United States.

Their stories are poignant and often unspeakable.

Sacramento will care for these migrants, not because they were dumped on our doorstep, but because California does not have a political culture that rewards inhumanity.

This story was originally published June 5, 2023 at 12:32 PM.