Ron DeSantis Did His Democratic Challenger a Huge Favor by Trafficking Migrants

For example, prominent Spanish-language talk radio host Roberto Rodríguez Tejera recently compared DeSantis to Fidel Castro. “Truly, this is criminal. They are using human beings to advance political points of view. This is what Fidel Castro did when he wanted to clean the Escambray. During the cleaning of the Escambray, they took peasants from one place and sent them to another by force,” he told his listeners on September 15.

“This disrupts 60 years of Republican rhetoric about exiles from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela,” said Fernand Amandi, managing partner of Bendixen and Amandi, one of the nation’s leading multilingual polling and strategy firms. “For 60 years, we have heard Republicans say, ‘Come to Florida, where you can be free,’ and now DeSantis’s actions tell a community who came to Florida for freedom, future generations will now be deported from this state.”

Senator Marco Rubio, who is facing an increasingly challenging reelection effort against Democratic nominee Congresswoman Val Demings, has clumsily attempted to sidestep conversation about DeSantis’s stunt by focusing on the “thousands of people [who] enter the country illegally.” But what Rubio won’t discuss is that these people were asylum-seekers, whose rights are protected by U.S. and international law. They were fleeing the sort of tyranny that Rubio has long criticized, the sort of tyranny that Rubio’s own family fled before settling in the United States, and which he brings up often. (Rubio’s own reelection campaign has become more competitive as he maintains his far-right views on abortion in a post-Roe world.)