(Headline USA) Lawyers representing migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard nearly two years ago by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can sue the charter flight company that transported them to the island off the Massachusetts coast, according to a ruling Monday by a federal judge in Boston.
Under Monday’s ruling from Obama-appointed District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs, the illegal immigrants can proceed with their suit against Florida-based Vertol Systems Co., which had agreed to fly them to the island for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
An email to the company seeking comment after the afternoon release of the ruling was not immediately returned.
While DeSantis was named in the suit, Burroughs conceded that the court did not have jurisdiction over the official actions of an elected official from another state in this case.
“As we’ve always stated, the flights were conducted lawfully and authorized by the Florida Legislature,” Julia Friedland, the deputy press secretary for DeSantis, said in a statement. “We look forward to Florida’s next illegal immigrant relocation flight, and we are glad to bring national attention to the crisis at the southern border.”
Yet, the lawfare attack, regardless of its final outcome, is likely to have a chilling effect on other airlines and risk-averse transportation companies—including Greyhound buses—that might be considering cooperation with GOP governors such as DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
The 50 Venezuelans were sent to Martha’s Vineyard from San Antonio, Texas, and had been promised work and housing opportunities, much as they were by the Biden administration and leftist non-governmental organizations that encouraged them to violate U.S. law by entering the country illegally in the first place.
While there are as many work opportunities in the idyllic vacation retreat—an enclave for rich and powerful New England liberals, including former President Barack Obama—as there are in San Antonio and elsewhere, leftists reacted in horror at the presence of the foreign interlopers in their backyard, and quickly shipped them off to a military base on the mainland.
They also threatened retaliation against DeSantis for orchestrating the stunt, although some have since conceded that it was a particularly effective way to highlight the issue of the Biden administration’s open-border policies and the hypocrisy of wealthy elites who had previously downplayed concerns and accused critics of xenophobia.
Burroughs decreed in her ruling that the facts of the case “taken together, support an inference that Vertol and the other Defendants specifically targeted Plaintiffs because they were Latinx [sic] immigrants.”
Many Latinos find the -x ending, an effort to replace masculine and feminine suffixes, to be offensive, although some virtue-signaling leftists persist in using it as a way to telegraph their support for transgender issues.
The court also claimed that “Unlike ICE agents legitimately enforcing the country’s immigration laws … the Court sees no legitimate purpose for rounding up highly vulnerable individuals on false pretenses and publicly injecting them into a divisive national debate.”
Iván Espinoza–Madrigal, executive director of the leftist open-borders lawfare organization Lawyers for Civil Rights, called the 77-page ruling a major victory in the Martha’s Vineyard case.
He said in a statement that the ruling sends the message that private companies can be held accountable for helping rogue state actors violate the rights of vulnerable immigrants through what it characterized as illegal and fraudulent schemes.
It is unclear whether illegals lied to by the Biden administration and leftist NGOs would also be eligible to sue over the false pretenses of their relocation. An estimated 11 million have entered the country since Biden took office in 2021, leading even far-left sanctuary cities such as Denver to initiate active efforts at turning them away.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
