Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida floated the possibility of sending buses of illegal immigrants to President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware if the federal government keeps sending “clandestine” planes to Florida filled with migrants detained at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Republican, who is widely considered to be a top potential 2024 presidential contender, blasted the Biden administration’s border policies at a Wednesday press conference, taking particular aim at the flights sent to Florida in the middle of the night without prior warning to his state.
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“If they’re going to come here, we’ll provide buses,” DeSantis said. “I will send them to Delaware. If he’s not going to support the border being secured, then he should be able to have everyone there.”
There have been over 70 flights with over 30 people each since May or June, the DeSantis administration said last week. This development emerged as the Biden administration struggles to empty overflowing border facilities.
“There’s no notification of the state of Florida,” DeSantis said. “These are done mostly in the middle of the night, and it’s clandestine, and we really have no say in it. … When we initially got wind of this it wasn’t through normal channels, it was people in the federal government effectively leaking this to us so that we have a heads up on it.”
Though a spokeswoman said that the comment about sending the migrants to Delaware was tongue-in-cheek, she said the notion of sending them out of Florida was real.
“To the extent that the federal government is paying for them to go all over the country and resettling them in Jacksonville, would it be against the law for us to send them somewhere else? … That’s something that I think we would want to look into,” she told the New York Post.
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DeSantis said some of the migrants the federal government dumped in his state could have been originally apprehended by Florida law enforcement while they were helping secure the border in Texas.
“What would happen is folks would come illegally, our folks would apprehend, you turn them over to the feds, and then the feds would put them on a bus or on flights and send them all over the country. How is that something that’s effective?” he said.
