Martha's Vineyard migrant airlift

On September 14, 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis sent approximately 50 primarily Venezuelan asylum seekers by air from San Antonio, Texas, to the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

[4] According to DeSantis, the flights he arranged were to expose "liberal hypocrisy",[5] because people in Democratic northern cites "were so proud to be sanctuary jurisdictions", and when migrants arrived "they all of a sudden go berserk".

[10] Some migrants were told, by a San Antonio woman named Perla Huerta,[12][13] that their flights were going to Boston, Massachusetts, where they could get what NPR described as "expedited work papers".

[14] A Boston Globe and Texas Tribune investigation found that a tall, blond woman approached migrants outside a San Antonio McDonald's.

[18] Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker then helped them voluntarily relocate by ferry to Joint Base Cape Cod where support services existed.

[22] On September 20, 2022, the 50 migrants filed a class action lawsuit against DeSantis and Florida's secretary of transportation in a Massachusetts federal trial court, arguing that the Florida governor and his administration "manipulated [the migrants], stripped them of their dignity, deprived them of their liberty, bodily autonomy, due process and equal protection under the law, and impermissibly interfered with the Federal Government’s exclusive control over immigration in furtherance of an unlawful goal and a personal political agenda".

The suit ultimately seeks to have the judge declare DeSantis's actions unconstitutional and prohibit Florida from fraudulently transporting migrants across state lines.

[23] DeSantis's spokesperson responded by saying the migrants had all signed a consent form, and called the lawsuit "political theater" by "opportunistic activists" at the expense of illegal immigrants.