Elie Mystal: Let's Talk About Ron DeSantis's "Reason" for Kidnapping Migrants

[Nevilledog]

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Elie Mystal
@ElieNYC
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Corporate media wants to use DeSantis's kidnapping of immigrants to launch into another round of fear stories, but have you actually *listened* to DeSantis's argument? Most of it is unbelievable nonsense and what isn't is shocking.
My latest in @thenation

thenation.com
Let’s Talk About Ron DeSantis’s "Reason" for Kidnapping Migrants
The media has done a poor job of questioning the Florida governor, but the few explanations he's given are shocking.
7:20 AM · Sep 26, 2022

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/ron-desantis-excuse-kidnapping-migrants/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/kNUHM

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s excuse for kidnapping Venezuelan immigrants and sending them to Martha’s Vineyard is certifiably ludicrous. Yet most people haven’t heard his attempted defense, either for the kidnapping charge or for the circumstances that led him to send lawful asylum seekers to the Massachusetts island. The corporate both-sides media have largely buried his lies and excuses, instead using this situation to launch another debate about the immigration system in this country—which is what Republicans want us to focus on. They certainly don’t want us talking about their revocation of reproductive rights or cultish support of a former president who is being investigated for espionage.

Luckily, I am not desperate to secure pillow advertisements, so let’s get into it. The first and most obvious question that every reporter should be asking is: How did these immigrants get into DeSantis’s clutches in the first place? Remember, we’re talking about mainly Venezuelan immigrants who were in this country lawfully seeking asylum in Texas. They were staying in San Antonio. How did DeSantis get two planeloads of people to Martha’s Vineyard, by way of Florida?

DeSantis has an answer for that and, once you wring English out of the gobbledygook, his explanation is shocking. Here’s the answer he gave to the threshold question of where these people came from, as reported by local Florida news outlets:

DeSantis said that “we’re not seeing a mass movement of [migrants] into Florida.” Instead, the state is using “intelligence” to identify people who enter the U.S. and want to come to Florida and diverting them to “sanctuary cities.”

“We have to go and figure out, ‘OK, who are those people likely to be,’ and if you can do it at the source and divert to sanctuary jurisdictions, the chance they end up in Florida is much less,” the governor said.

That’s the verbal equivalent of a guy selling TVs out of a truck trying to gloss over where he got the goods. So you need to do a close read to figure out what he’s actually implying. “We’re not seeing a mass movement of migrants into Florida” is DeSantis’s way of admitting that his state is not dealing with a mass influx of undocumented border crossings. Politically, this is important for DeSantis to say, because, while Florida does receive a fair number of immigrants entering the country without official status, a lot of those people come by boat and a number of them come from Cuba. People of Cuban descent are a huge part of the Republican base in Florida, so DeSantis has to assure that constituency that he’s only treating other immigrants like unwanted trash, not Cuban immigrants.

*snip*

[Walleye]

1. Who in hell is Perla?

[Nevilledog]

2. $5 it's Christina Pushaw.

[Walleye]

6. That's what I thought. I wonder if she speaks Spanish. She was involved with the bad guys in Ukraine

[dchill]

3. I thought Florida's immigrant problem was Russians.

[Nevilledog]

4. It's not a problem if you're making money off them.

[dchill]

5. Right? I've lived in Florida twice, but both times...

...I went back where I came from.

Pennsylvania.

[Solly Mack]

7. K&R

[Mad_Machine76]

8. Did anybody ask

where he's getting this "intelligence"? I imagine that (probably) wouldn't nor shouldn't have access to such information. Also, yeah, isn't he essentially self-selecting the immigrants he wants in Florida?