Second Plane Carrying Migrants Arrives in Sacramento
The migrants who arrived on Monday — who said their journey, too, had begun in El Paso — were flown to Sacramento from the same airport in New Mexico, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. (It had been a long trip. Around lunchtime, Steven Thompson, 62, the owner of a flight school at Sacramento Executive Airport ordered three Little Caesar’s pizzas for the migrants. The group could be heard clapping and cheering when the food arrived.)
Wilkendri Rodriguez, 23, said in an interview at the airport that two men and two women had approached him at an El Paso shelter and asked if he wanted to go to California. Mr. Rodriguez, who had survived a dangerous journey through the jungle to reach Texas from Venezuela, said he had eagerly agreed.
“It’s something you don’t wish on others, because it’s too much, a lot of death,” Mr. Rodriguez said of his trek to the United States. He said he was extorted by criminal gangs during the journey.
He said the people who offered him the flight to California told him they could help him find work.
“I don’t know what is their motivation to organize these trips,” he said in Spanish. “I don’t know if it’s political or part of the government. They didn’t tell us anything.”
Mr. Rodriguez added that the people told him, “If you want to go, go, or stay. Nobody is being obligated.”
Representatives of Mr. DeSantis have not responded to requests for comment. Neither has the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which is running the state’s taxpayer-funded program to transport migrants from the southern border to other areas of the United States. Mr. DeSantis appeared on a Fox News radio program on Monday morning but did not discuss the migrants who had mysteriously appeared in Sacramento.
Source: The New York Times
