Gov. Ron DeSantis’s flying of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard is a grave danger to immigrant communities.

For those who are not in the know, here is what happened. On Wednesday, Sept. 14, a total of 50 immigrants arrived at Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. They arrived on a total of two planes that originated in San Antonio, Texas.
Despite originating from Texas, the flights were paid for by the state of Florida. Both Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, of Florida appear to approve of this action.

Martha’s Vineyard was not informed about this and as such was left desperately trying to scrape together resources to provide for the migrants. It is also worth noting that the immigrants claim they were misled, being told that they were being taken to Boston, where they could receive work.

This is a complete outrage. This political stunt, funded presumably by Florida taxpayer money, was extremely dangerous. In addition to being extremely duplicitous due to straight up lying to the migrants.

Some may be thinking, how does this affect us? Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts are basically on the other side of the country, why should we care about some other states’ immigration policies? One thing to think about is that we can be next.

This stunt coincides with Texas’s plan to send immigrants to other states. The Florida program was responsible for targeting states like California as spots for activities like this.

The justification being that they “…incentivizing illegal immigration.” According to a statement, buy a spokesperson for Gov. DeSantis. Do you want to get caught up in the next potentially life-threatening political stunt?

People also need to consider that California is an immigrant state. It boasts about 11 million residents who are foreign-born. That is about a quarter of the nation’s immigrant population. 27% of the state’s population was not born here, meaning that future immigration policies can have a massive effect on the people of California.
Policies like these are spreading. We need to fight back now before they start hurting our community directly.