Newly released batch of text messages show DeSantis’ staff communicating with Texas...
Venezuelan migrant Angelica Perez reacts with joy after receiving donated clothing, shoes and snacks at the City of San Antonio’s Migrant Resource Center, which helps asylum-seekers get to their destinations after being processed by U.
S. Customs and Border Protection.Weeks before a former Army counterintelligence officer from San Antonio recruited stranded immigrants to fly out of state as a political gesture by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, she rode with a high-ranking Florida official and Texas Department of Public Safety officers in August to scout locations in Del Rio where she could do the same thing. Text messages released late Monday show DeSantis’ staff communicating with Texas officials well in advance of the splashy flight of immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Most of the messages were between the Florida governor’s public safety czar Larry Keefe and James Montgomerie, a contractor who facilitated the migrant flights, along withThe latest texts, released to some reporters as part of a public-records lawsuit filed by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, show the Florida delegation also tapped Sam Miller, an operations chief with the Texas Division of Emergency Management, for information in advance of DeSantis’ project. Ultimately, Huerta recruited about 50 South Americans near a migrant resource center on San Pedro Boulevard in San Antonio, and the Florida group flew them to Martha’s Vineyard in a pair of chartered private planes on Sept. 14, records show. The flights drew outrage from Democrats and immigrant advocates and were seen as an attempt by DeSantis to upstage Gov. Greg Abbott, who had been producing the same effect using buses to take immigrants to cities like New York, Chicago and Washington D.C. The texts released Monday show that Dave Abrams, an adviser to DeSantis’ re-election campaign, was included in conversations about the migrants. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday.showed Abbott’s office may have known about DeSantis’ plans, contrary to an assertion by an Abbott spokesperson that the Texas governor was not involved in the flights.The exchange, between DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, and Luis Saenz, Abbott’s chief of staff, included information for Keefe and a message that said “he can loop in others as needed.” The message added that Keefe was a “former US Atty under Trump, trustworthy and effective.” “The notion that Texas and Governor Abbott say they were not involved is utterly ,” Michael Barfield, the center’s director of public access, said in an interview Tuesday, using a barnyard term for falsehood. Barfield’s group believes DeSantis’ office appears to have withheld some records, despite orders by a judge to release pertinent public information over the Martha’s Vineyard flights. “We’ve also learned there were encrypted messages using Signal by these individuals, and believe more records have not been produced yet,” Barfield said. The texts show Miller, the Texas emergency management official, provided Huerta with information about how migrants navigate north after being processed and released by U.S. Border Patrol agents. The messages also refer to meetings Miller had with the Florida delegation. Late Tuesday, Miller’s agency released a statement saying it had received a request “from our DPS partners” to brief Florida Department of Law Enforcement personnel touring the border area in August to observe “our state’s voluntary border bus operations.” Emergency management officials “were not aware of how Florida law enforcement officials would utilize the information gathered from those conversations,” the statement said. Huerta, a San Antonio high school graduate who retired in August after 20 years with the Army, recruited the immigrants by paying $700 to one of their countrymen in San Antonio, a homeless Venezuelan man named Emmanuel, according to the League of United Latin American Citizens and attorneys for the migrants. The cash payments were placed in paper bags and hidden near a dumpster behind a Bill Miller’s restaurant in East Terrell Hills, according to Jorge Aristotelidis, one of Emmanuel’s attorneys. “The money was left in a place where nobody else would know,” Aristotelidis said. “These people did not want anyone to know who was paying.” He said Emmanuel “feels he was manipulated” by Huerta because she gave him misleading information to pass on to the migrants he recruited. He was living at a makeshift camp behind a McDonald’s near the migrant center when Huerta approached him. Huerta, 43, has largely disappeared from the public eye, scrubbing her social media profiles and selling her home in Tampa, Fla. She is a person of interest in anEmmanuel, whose last name has not been divulged for safety reasons, has cooperated with investigators.DeSantis’ flights also sparked an investigation by the Treasury Department’s inspector general into whether the governor improperly used money connected to federal COVID-19 relief. The Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights has sued DeSantis, accusing him of using “false promises and misrepresentations” to coerce them onto the flights. A Florida judge had previously orderd the DeSantis administration to release documents connected to the migrant flights by Monday after ruling that DeSantis wasn’t following the state’s public record laws. Some of the texts released Monday are dated from August to mid-September and show that Keefe communicated about contracts and flight times with Montgomerie, owner of the Florida-based Vertol Systems Company Inc., which facilitated the flights to Martha’s Vineyard. Huerta was working for Vertol at the time, the texts show.
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