Fact check: Ron DeSantis distorting immigration facts as he defends flights

Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott have both framed their highly controversial efforts to send migrants in planes and buses to liberal states as a way to raise awareness about the “historic” crisis at the US border.

Mr DeSantis also claimed it’s helping fight illegal immigration.

“Biden can’t defend his policies of open borders,” Mr DeSantis said at an event on Tuesday. “It’s doing huge damage to our country.”

So, how historic is the current border situation? Is Joe Biden creating an “open border” that’s responsible for these trends? And were the migrants on the Martha’s Vineyard flight in the US illegally?

Here’s what you need to know:

Indeed, a historic number of people have crossed the US-Mexico this year.

So far, in fiscal year 2022, more than 2.1m migrants have been encountered at the frontier line, according to US Customs and Border Protection.

That’s already more that 2021’s total, which just barely topped previous records from the 1980s and early 2000s, as the Pew Research Center noted in an analysis.

For what it’s worth, the record year of 2021 also included the final few weeks of the Trump administration, but you’re unlikely to hear much mention of that from partisans like Mr DeSantis and Mr Abbott.

Republicans like to talk as if Joe Biden’s border is a lawless place, absent of any touch of US officials, and also paint his administration as one that’s wiped away every trace of the Trump White House’s hard-line policies.

“He inherited a border that wasn’t like this,” Mr DeSantis said on Tuesday. “He has created a crisis.”

This isn’t entirely accurate.

In fact, the Biden administration’s border looks a lot like the one under the Trump administration.

President Biden, for example, is still building the border wall along the US-Mexico border, a project that remained incomplete — “open” perhaps, to borrow Mr DeSantis’s phrase — at the end of the Trump adminsitration.

The Trump administration’s controversial Remain in Mexico programme, which forced asylum seekers to wait on the Mexico side of the border as their claims processed, was in place until this June.

And Mr Biden has continued using Mr Trump’s Title 42 order to massive effect. The policy, a supposed pandemic measure cooked up by arch immigration opponent Stephen Miller, reportedly over the protests of the CDC, allows immigration officials to refuse entry to asylum-seekers on Covid grounds before they even enter the US and seek immigration proceedings.

According to a Pew analysis, the Biden administration has already carried out the great majority of the roughly 2.2m Title 42 expulsions that have taken place since the policy went into effect.

Expulsions this year under the health rule, which the Biden administration renewed in August despite previous plans to abandon it, appear well on track to top the 1.07m conducted in 2021, according to Border Patrol stats.

Border officials also note that in addition to all the usual, nuanced drivers of immigration to the US — poverty, climate change, the legacy of US foreign intervention — political instability beyond American shores is a huge factor.

“Failing communist regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are driving a new wave of migration across the Western Hemisphere, including the recent increase in encounters at the southwest U.S. border,” CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus said in a recently released enforcement update.

And even during the Trump administration, harsh policies like Remain in Mexico and Title 42 weren’t deterring border crossers from trying their luck over and over again until they got into the US, analyses and the Border Patrol have concluded.

“There’s never going to be a point of militarization that the US can get the border to that would completely stop all these flows,” Jessica Bolter of the Migration Policy Institute told The Independent at the end of the Trump administration.

“The environmental and security push factors that are driving people to leave, as well as economic push factors, especially during and in the wake of the pandemic — there’s always going to be reasons to migrate.”

Ron DeSantis has also falsely claimed the migrants his government sent on planes to liberal areas were criminals.

In fact, they were excercising rights protected under US and international law by seeking asylum in America.

As the news broke last week about Mr DeSantis’s migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, his communications directors defended the policy, saying it that it was a rightful use of state resources to “transport illegal immigrants to sanctuary destinations.”

However, the 48 migrants on the plane, many of them Venezuelans, were in the country legally.

They had already presented themselves to immigration authorities and were waiting on asylum proceedings.

After reaching the border, and turning themselves to authorities, migrants requesting asylum must undergo a “credible fear screening” to determine whether their return to their home countries could expose them to further persecution or threats. Following a screening, they are released while awaiting a hearing for their asylum case.

It was at this point, near San Antonio’s Migrant Resources Center, that the group of migrants targeted by people ostensibly working through Governor DeSantis’s operation were sent to Massachusetts.

Critics argue that it is the Florida governor himself who broke the law.

The migrants on the Martha’s Vineyard flight filed a class action lawsuit against the Republican on Tuesday, arguing that they were enticed onto the cross-country flights with false promises of work, housing support, and other services.

“Plaintiffs have led lives inflicted by violence, instability, insecurity, and abuse of trust by corrupt government officials that most Americans could hardly conceive of,” the suit reads.

“They fled to the United States in a desperate attempt to protect themselves and their families from gang, police, and state-sponsored violence and the oppression of political dissent. To put it simply, Plaintiffs, and the class of similarly situated individuals they seek to represent, are vulnerable in a way and to an extent that almost defies verbal description.”

Local officials in Texas are investigating whether Mr DeSantis’s scheme broke any laws.

California governor Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, has argued it was tantamount to kidnapping and has urged the federal Department of Justice to investigate.

Governor DeSantis has made himself the face of the anti-immigration movement with his migrant flights to Florida, but there’s something notable about that: mass migration isn’t much of a factor in Florida, and the flights themselves began by picking up migrants in Texas, a state far more in contact with cross-border migration from Mexico.

“We’re not seeing mass movements of them into Florida,” Mr DeSantis said on Tuesday at an event, describing a slow trickle of migrants coming “in onesie-twosies” into the Sunshine State.

The data backs this up.

According to the most recent Border Patrol numbers, the border sector that includes Florida was about 400 times less busy than the ones in the Southwest.