Ron DeSantis recently made a big splash by sending, immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Briefly, DeSantis set aside $12 million in Florida’s budget to ship unauthorized migrants, in Florida, out of the state. However, in an obvious publicity stunt, the money was used to to round up Venezuelan asylum seekers, in San Antonio, Texas, to send to Martha’s Vineyard. The goal was to bring attention to the number of unauthorized immigrants entering the Southern border and send them to Democrat held Northeastern states. DeSantis, who is running for reelection in the November Florida gubernatorial race, has faced backlash for the stunt.
In what only can be seen as irony, Florida is now being flooded by immigrants who are aiding in the cleanup of the hurricane Ian aftermath. Saket Soni is the executive director of the non profit group Reselience Force. The group advocates for disaster response workers, many of them undocumented immigrants. As per Soni, they are arriving from locations such as New York, Louisiana and Texas. Soni adds that,
“What you have now is basically immigrants who are sort of traveling white blood cells of America, who congregate after hurricanes to heal a place, and then move on to heal the next place,”
Currently, hundreds of these workers, many of them from out of state, are assisting in the Fort Myers cleanup. Soni expects many more to arrive in the coming weeks.
DeSantis, for his part, in a press conference, earlier this week, chose to focus on three illegal immigrants, arrested for looting .
“These are people that are foreigners, they’re illegally in our country, and not only that, they try to loot and ransack in the aftermath of a natural disaster. I mean, they should be prosecuted, but they need to be sent back to their home countries. They should not be here at all,”
There is a saying “Every cloud has a silver lining” For DeSantis, it is more like “Beware the dark clouds in the silver lining”.