Florida Confirms Arranging Migrant Flights to California

Tuesday evening’s statement was the first time that Mr. DeSantis’s administration had addressed the flights since they landed in California’s capital city. At a bill signing ceremony on Tuesday morning, the governor, unusually, did not take questions from reporters. The silence from Mr. DeSantis on a high-profile incident drawing national interest was uncharacteristic, especially given the pointed attacks against him by Mr. Newsom and others.

In an interview, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said it was appropriate that Mr. DeSantis and Florida officials were “accepting blame for their reprehensible and morally bankrupt conduct.” The migrants who arrived on Friday had been dropped off outside the Catholic Archdiocese of Sacramento, Mr. Bonta said, and left “dazed and confused, violated and hurt on the doorstep of an archdiocese that wasn’t even open.”

He said the migrants had both told him personally and signed statements saying that they had come to California because the contractor, Vertol Systems Company, had falsely represented the transport as a way to obtain desperately needed employment.

“It was a lie,” Mr. Bonta, a Democrat, said. “It was false. You can’t consent based on deception.”

Roughly three dozen migrants have arrived in Sacramento on two charter flights since last Friday. The migrants, most of whom are from Venezuela, said they had been recruited for the flights outside a shelter in El Paso. Several said they were promised help finding work. They are now staying at motels in the Sacramento area, according to local nonprofits.

Vertol Systems Company, which is based in Florida, was the same private contractor that arranged sending two planeloads of migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard last year in an operation funded by Florida taxpayers.