“She said I should go, that there were people there to receive us who would give us lodging, that they would help us … get our [immigration] papers in order,” a woman said.
Migrants enter a makeshift shelter at Sacred Heart Church in El Paso on Friday after being released by border agents at the Mexico-Texas border.An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., in 2022 by the state of Florida had been recruited in Del Río, Texas. They were recruited in San Antonio.
Over two days, the contractors managed to recruit 16 migrants for a flight June 2 and 20 for a flight June 5 — whom they drove two hours west to a small airport in New Mexico for the trips to Sacramento.Migrants stand in the alley outside Sacred Heart Church's shelter Friday. Some choose to sleep outside the El Paso church rather than in its shelter.
DeSantis and his spokespeople have defended the flights, arguing that migrants boarded them voluntarily. DeSantis organized a similar protest flight in 2022, recruiting migrants in San Antonio to fly to Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Despite widespread condemnation and an ongoing criminal investigation over whether those migrants were misled, the Florida legislature this year allocated $12 million that can be used for such flights. DeSantis' office did not respond to a request for comment.
When a Venezuelan woman told the contractors she didn’t want to go to California but was trying to get to New York, one told her that “people in California” would book her flights to New York once she landed, she said. The woman asked that her name not be used because she was unsure of the contractors' identities and feared repercussions if they returned. Other migrants who turned down the contractors expressed similar fears.
Despite the woman continuing to push her to get on the plane, María turned her down. But she watched in anxiety as one of her friends went. María said her friend told her that police interviewed the migrants as soon as they got off their June 2 flight, and that she and the others. While confused at what was happening, the friend told María that the flight had been “normal,” and they’d arrived in California safely, as promised. María's friend could not be reached to verify her experience.
Father Rafael García, the pastor of Sacred Heart, said he learned about the flights from the news, but it didn’t surprise him that the Florida contractors had chosen his 125-year-old church as a place to recruit migrants. The church and its shelter have appeared frequently in the news, and migrant arrivals in El Paso have reached record highs in the last year. Still, García was disappointed to learn what had happened.
"The truth is, I see it as a very bad thing, the way they used the migrants," he said. "They don't understand the reality here: that it was by necessity that we've traveled through all these dangers. The governor of Florida, of California or wherever should focus on fixing their own internal problems, and not use immigration, because we migrants aren't the ones to blame here.
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