María had traveled more than 2,800 miles from Venezuela to reach the United States in early May. Once crossing the border, however, she’d only made it four blocks, to a shelter at Sacred Heart Church, in downtown El Paso.
Like many asylum seekers released on parole by Customs and Border Protection, she had no money to pay for a plane or bus ticket, she said. She slept in the church shelter, and then in the alley outside, for three weeks, until a woman approached and said she would fly María on a private jet to California.
“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,” said María, who asked to be identified only by her first name, out of fear of potential repercussions from the woman who approached her.
What María didn’t know was that the woman was a contractor hired by the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
María had found herself in the center of a political storm. Migrant flights and the national attention they’ve drawn are yet another chapter in the political fight over the border, with California officials vowing to investigate whether the travelers were misled and the Florida governor doubling down on hard-line policies and a portrayal of himself as a culture warrior.
The contractor, along with another woman and two men, spent the afternoon walking around the church trying to recruit migrants like María to board a charter flight to Sacramento. María and other migrants said the contractors did not identify themselves beyond saying they were there to “help the migrants.”
Over that weekend, the contractors managed to recruit two planefuls of migrants — 16 on a Friday flight, 20 on Monday — whom they drove two hours west to a small airport in New Mexico for the trips to Sacramento.
The scheme was a gambit by DeSantis, and brought attention to his recently launched presidential bid focused on denouncing what he calls “wokeness” and attacking states like California over “sanctuary city” policies.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the flights.
“My Administration is working with the California Department of Justice to investigate…. whether the individuals orchestrating this trip misled anyone with false promises or have violated any criminal laws, including kidnapping,” he wrote in a statement the next day.
DeSantis and his spokespeople have defended the flights, arguing migrants’ decisions to board were entirely voluntary. DeSantis organized a similar protest flight in 2022, recruiting migrants in Del Río, Texas, to fly to Martha’s Vineyard. 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.
In Arizona near the border with Mexico on Wednesday, he decried what he called “open border” policies and said, “I think the sanctuary jurisdictions should be the ones that have to bear that.”
In El Paso, three migrants who were approached by the contractors, but who decided not to go with them, said the contractors’ offers were vague and suspicious. Though the contractors maintained a friendly composition, they pushed aggressively for migrants to board flights, those approached said, and they insisted on seeing the documents border agents had given them.
When one Venezuelan woman told the contractors she didn’t want to go to California but was trying to get to New York, a contractor told her that “people in California” would book her flights to New York once she landed there, she said. The woman asked that her name not be used because she was still unsure of the contractors’ identities and feared repercussions if they returned. Other migrants who turned the contractors down expressed similar fears.
María said the contractor who talked to her was insistent, and that she kept telling her that she should board the plane. When María said no, she wanted to stay in El Paso to make her court date, the contractor told María she would “change her date” for her.
The whole affair made María nervous. She worried the mysterious contractors were drug traffickers — why else would they have a private plane? The contractor seemed to sense her nervousness.
“She told us not to be afraid — that she didn’t want to steal our hearts or our organs or anything,” María said.
Despite the woman continuing to push her to get on the plane, María ended up turning her down. But she watched in anxiety as one of her friends went with them.
Imelda Maynard, an attorney with the Catholic Charities of Southern New Mexico’s legal aid clinic, met with a family who chose to go with the contractors that Thursday. She says the family — now clients of her organization — were offered help finding housing and jobs. The husband, wife and four young children were driven by the contractors in a rented van about two hours east into New Mexico, where the contractors booked them rooms in a Super 8 motel and promptly disappeared.
According to Maynard, while the contractors reappeared the next morning to take some of the migrants to a private plane, the contractors seemed unsure whether the family could travel with children, and they told the father that they had to delay. Maynard says her clients waited in the motel until Sunday, when one of the contractors suggested the father could board a flight alone the next day, and his family could join him at some other point. The family asked instead to go back to El Paso. They were allowed to leave.
Maynard said that the father told her his family had been well-treated by the contractors; they had been fed well and comfortably housed. Nonetheless, he was nervous about them coming to look for his family, and he stayed on the lookout. Like other migrants, he was concerned that the contractors might have been drug traffickers.
According to Maynard, the father later got a call from a woman who had landed in California. Maynard says that the woman told the father that the planes were a “scam” — that there had been no jobs waiting for them.
On that Sunday, María’s friend who had gone with the contractors also called her from California. The friend said that the contractor had driven them about two hours east to a motel before returning the next day to take them to the airport, where, as promised, a private plane was waiting, according to María.
María said her friend told her that police had interviewed the migrants as soon as they got off their flight, and that she and the others had met the governor of California. While confused at what was happening all around her, the friend told María that the treatment on the flight had all been “normal,” and that they’d arrived in California safely as promised.
María’s friend could not be reached to verify her experience. Newsom confirmed that he had met with migrants on Saturday, along with California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.
Newsom spokesman Anthony York, who was present at the meetings, said the migrants seemed to be in good moods. They had been dropped off in front of the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento, and had since been housed and fed by a coalition of local faith groups.
“We saw these folks after their first good night’s sleep in who knows how long, and I think a lot, a lot of them were just happy to have been fed and clothed,” York said. “And so a lot of them were in very good spirits just because they were being welcomed by the NGOs that received them and the faith community embracing them.”
York blasted DeSantis for using the migrants for “propaganda” purposes after his administration released a video showing people signing paperwork and smiling and waving aboard a private flight. “
“This is a ploy to use Florida taxpayer dollars to move migrants from Texas — not from Florida — into California in a desperate attempt to get votes in Iowa and New Hampshire,” York said, referring to DeSantis’ 2024 bid. “It’s just disgusting.”
Father Rafael García, the pastor of Sacred Heart, said he learned about the flights from the news, but he said 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 within the last year. Still, García was disappointed to learn what had happened.
“It’s immoral when you’re using deception to make a political point, or to make a scandal in the media,” García said. “You’re using people for an ends, without respect to their dignity.”
The priest said that if the contractors returned to his church to recruit more migrants, he would take pictures of their cars and call police.
By the end of the week, the news of who had actually taken the migrants to their flights had begun to spread among the Sacred Heart shelter. Luis Guerrero, a Venezuelan asylum seeker staying at the church, was offended when he learned that a politician had organized the charter flights as a form of protest.
“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.”
However, even for the migrants who turned down the free charter flights, it was obvious why others boarded. For some, it was the promise of lodging and help with their immigration cases. For others, it was simply a free ride to California, a state many migrants want to reach, but are unsure of how.
Many migrants crossing the Texas border are unfamiliar with the country’s vast geography, and unprepared for how expensive travel can be from a place like El Paso to cities as far away as Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. The federal government does not offer any funding or assistance with shelter or travel, and, for years, nonprofits and local shelters have raised money to help these migrants book travel to reunite with family.
In 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending charter buses from the Texas border to Washington, New York and Chicago. While the buses were Abbott’s attempt to protest Democrat’s policies on immigration, many migrants eagerly accepted the free ride away from the border.
But others have reported feeling confused about their final destination, especially for those unsure of U.S. geography. Many migrants who accepted the DeSantis-organized flight to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022 told reporters they felt misled and taken advantage of — none of them had been trying to reach the island, which has little shelter space or immigration aid, prior to getting approached by Florida contractors.
In El Paso on Friday, Norman Manuel Martínez, an asylum seeker from Nicaragua, said he was disappointed he hadn’t had the chance to take one of the flights. He arrived at Sacred Heart Church on Monday, after the last flight had already left.
During his first week in the city, Martínez has struggled to raise money so he could reunite with his nephew in Los Angeles, or his childhood friend in San Francisco. Men have come to the shelter in the morning offering day labor in the farmlands to the east, and Martínez spent two long days this week picking onions.
When asked if he would get on the charter flight if the contractors returned, his answer was immediate.
“Of course I would,” he said. “Of course I would.”
Special correspondent Ivan Pierre Aguirre contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
