Republicans Use Migrants for Political Games

In September, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis used money from a special Florida state fund to mislead 48 asylum-seekers when he flew them from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

DeSantis, who is widely considered a frontrunner as a GOP candidate for the next presidential election, used people who have lived through harrowing migration experiences as pawns to further his political aspirations. DeSantis now faces several lawsuits and investigations.

DeSantis is not the only politician sending migrants from border areas to other cities as a political ruse. Since May, Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey has bused several thousand migrants to cities in the East Coast, mimicking Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign which also has transported over 11 thousand migrants to Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C, including near Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence. Abbot is also considered a likely contender for the GOP presidential nomination.

But with DeSantis, information about how his affiliate, Perla Huerta, now known to be a former military counterintelligence agent, lured migrants with false information and the promise of employment, is disturbing. According to a New York Times report, Perla targeted Venezuelan migrants at a shelter in San Antonio.

She fed and temporarily housed the migrants after assuring them they would have jobs and monetary benefits in Martha’s Vineyard. The migrants were told to seek out a community center where supposedly services and support awaited them once they arrived. No one knew the migrants were on their way, and the promise of jobs and benefits was a complete fabrication meant to deceive them.

The actions that DeSantis, Abbot, and Ducey take are dangerous because they objectify human beings, diminishing their agency and deliberately engaging in fearmongering about asylum seekers who are already vulnerable to extreme acts of violence.

Abbot, for instance, has spent over $4 billion dollars on Operation Lone Star (OLS) since March 2021, which has involved the deployment of over 10,000 National Guard members and Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers to border areas with Mexico. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is investigating whether DPS subjects those it arrests with “differential and unlawful conditions of confinement based on their perceived or actual race or national origin.” Over 100 advocacy organizations submitted a 50-page complaint in December 2021 with allegations that with OLS, Abbot permits profiling based on race and national origin, that arrests happen without probable cause, and that other irregularities, including lengthy jailing of Black and Brown men, occur frequently. The complaint also points out that in Kinney County along the border in west Texas, “leadership has expressed support for using vigilante groups,” some of which “supported the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol,” to carry out border enforcement operations. For decades, vigilantes operating along the U.S.-Mexico border have used extreme violence as a primary course of action when interacting with migrants.

In Texas, two twin brothers face manslaughter charges after fatally shooting Jesus Ivan Sepulveda Martinez, 22, and injuring a woman in what appears to be an assault on a group of migrants in West Texas in September. The shooter is a warden of a for-profit immigration detention center. Witnesses say they heard the brothers shout profanity at them in broken Spanish as they fired their shots. Now, family members in Mexico are demanding justice for Sepulveda Martinez whose family says the brothers “tried to hunt them like animals” when they fired on the group.

It is shameful that DeSantis, Abbot, and Ducey play politics with the lives of people seeking asylum and who are extremely vulnerable to abuse. Their political base may applaud these dangerous theatrics that could provoke more horrific acts of violence, but that shouldn’t absolve them of the responsibility and culpability they share in inciting such acts of violence.

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