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      Republicans’ lawless leaders at odds with midterm law and order message

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      Republicans’ lawless leaders at odds with midterm law and order messageRepublicans running in next month’s elections cast their party as tough on crime, despite top party names’ legal scrapes “John Fetterman wants to release convicted murderers from prison,” warns the narrator, as a black-and-white photo of Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor is shown beside pictures of convicted killers. A caption adds darkly: “Socialist John Fetterman loves free stuff … but we can’t let him free murderers.”The campaign ad from Mehmet Oz, candidate for the US Senate in Pennsylvania, is vintage Republican strategy: casting a Democratic opponent as soft on crime. The party is zeroing in on fears over public safety ahead of November’s midterm elections in an effort to change the conversation from abortion, climate or democracy.But Republicans’ own claim to be the party of law and order is this time undermined, critics say, by the behavior of its party leaders. Former president Donald Trump, who is under myriad criminal, civil and congressional investigations, is not alone. Many senior Republicans have rallied to his defence or displayed their own contempt for the rule of law.“The Republican party is quickly becoming a party of anarchy and lawlessness,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “This is supposed to be the party of conservative principles, of tradition, of respect for customs and rules that make society governable.“The idea that the law does not apply to Republicans is something that has now become part of the mainstream of the Republican party. We see it in terms of the approach to elections. We see it in terms of the treatment of immigrants. Some of the actions with regard to abortion may approach that level. The Republican party appears to consider the law and the constitution to be optional and to have lost legitimacy.”Over seven years Trump has refashioned the party in ways obvious and subtle. That has included a willingness to defend conduct that, from any other politician, would have been seen as beyond the pale.US intelligence resumes national security review of Mar-a-Lago documents – as it happenedRead moreAfter FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida in August and seized classified documents, including some marked top secret, Trump could be indicted for violating the Espionage Act, obstructing a federal investigation or mishandling sensitive government records. The former president also faces a state grand jury investigation in Georgia over efforts to subvert that state’s election result in 2020.Last month, Trump and his oldest three children were accused by New York’s top prosecutor of lying to tax collectors, lenders and insurers in a “staggering” fraud scheme that routinely misstated the value of his properties. Despite it all, Trump remains the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024.His chief rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, may have violated federal law recently by using more than $600,000 in taxpayer money to lure about 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers on to flights to the small, upmarket island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, and transporting them across state lines with a false reason.Authorities in Massachusetts have requested that the justice department pursue a human trafficking investigation. A sheriff in Texas, where the flights originated, has also opened an investigation into whether DeSantis acted criminally under a Texas penal code that defines the crime of unlawful restraint.The rot goes deep in the party.Republicans won’t commit to honoring vote results this fall. That’s troubling | Robert ReichRead moreNumerous members of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as midterm candidates seeking to join them, have refused to condemn or have actively supported Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, siding with the violent mob on January 6 rather than the US Capitol police officers who resisted them.Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist, faces up to two years in prison after being convicted on contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena from the House of Representatives committee investigating the insurrection. Rudy Giuliani, an ex-lawyer to Trump, had his law licence suspended after a court in New York ruled that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while seeking to overturn the results of the election.In addition, Republicans have long been criticised for prioritising laws that protect gun owners over those that protect the victims of gun violence. And since the supreme court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Republican-led states are accused of legal abuses: the justice department is suing Idaho over a near-total abortion ban.Critics believe that such examples make a mockery of Republican efforts to saddle Democrats with rising homicide rates in Atlanta, New Orleans, Philadelphia and other cities.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “The rank hypocrisy of the Republican party trying to use these issues under the auspices of law and order when they continue to support a professional scofflaw in Donald Trump is laughable.“Republicans have turned a blind eye to Trump’s behavior before, during and after his presidency, which is giving a permission structure to other Republican presidential hopefuls like Ron DeSantis to act in potentially extrajudicial ways to accomplish their agenda of fearmongering and ‘owning the libs’.”Trivialising the rule of law extends to party cheerleaders. Last month, Tucker Carlson, a host on the conservative Fox News network, spoke at the funeral of Ralph “Sonny” Barger, the longtime president of the Hells Angels motorcycle club – deemed by the justice department to be linked to organised crime.Self-awareness in short supply as Trump calls for law and order in DCRead moreBrett Favre, an American football star who endorsed Trump for president in 2020, is embroiled in controversy after Mississippi spent millions of dollars in welfare money on his pet project, a university volleyball arena. The state’s then-governor, Republican Phil Bryant, texted Favre in 2019 that federal money for children and low-income adults is “tightly controlled” and “improper use could result in violation of Federal Law”.Yet Republicans have always been quick to accuse Democrats of flouting the law. In 2015 they argued that Barack Obama’s administration acted illegally when it hid a prisoner swap that freed the army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from the Taliban. Ilya Shapiro, a former vice-president of the Cato Institute thinktank in Washington, wrote that “the Obama administration has been the most lawless in US history”.But Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, believes that such comparisons are disingenuous. “These are the same Republicans who ran around with their hair on fire, concerned with what President Obama was doing through executive orders on guns and on immigration. That was nowhere near as legally dubious as what Republicans are doing today.”It was 1968 when presidential candidate Richard Nixon claimed the mantle of “law and order” for the Republican party, promising to fix a nation in disarray: “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night.” Six years later, Nixon was forced to resign after breaking the law in his efforts to cover up the Watergate break-in.But Republicans believed they had found a winning message. In 1988, a political action committee supporting George HW Bush’s election campaign funded an ad blaming Democratic rival Michael Dukakis for the case of Willie Horton, an African American convict who committed rape during a furlough from prison. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, boasted that he would make Horton “Dukakis’s running mate”.Now, the familiar drumbeat is being heard again in midterm races from Oregon to Pennsylvania, from New Mexico to Washington state. House Republicans just launched a “Commitment to America” manifesto that blamed “defund the police” efforts for law enforcement officers’ tough working conditions, “to say nothing of the liberal prosecutors and district attorneys who fail to do their job and keep criminals off the streets”.Joe Biden and other Democrats have worked hard to disown the “defund the police” slogan, with many Democratic-led cities pouring money into police departments. But the issue remains a vulnerability: voters say they agree more with Republicans on crime and policing by a margin of 10 percentage points, a recent New York Times/ Siena College poll found.Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The Republicans are basically using the same playbook that Richard Nixon used. Richard Nixon ran as the candidate of law and order and we all know what happened next: Watergate. This is the same playbook. The Republicans constantly go back to their old playbooks in order to find a new way to reach the electorate. I think voters are smarter.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022Donald TrumpRon DeSantisUS crimefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Ron DeSantis changes with the wind as Hurricane Ian prompts flip-flop on aid

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      AnalysisRon DeSantis changes with the wind as Hurricane Ian prompts flip-flop on aidMartin Pengelly in New YorkThe Florida governor ‘put politics aside’ to ask Joe Biden for federal – unlike when he voted against help for Hurricane Sandy victims As Hurricane Ian has devastated parts of Florida, the national political spotlight in America has shone brighter than ever on Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, rising star of the hard right and probable presidential contender in 2024.Since his election in 2018, DeSantis has made his name as a ruthless culture-warrior, an ally of Donald Trump but also perhaps his most serious rival.Hurricane Ian leaves trail of destruction in Florida – in picturesRead moreDeSantis has embraced an extremist agenda on everything from immigration to election integrity, positioning himself as Trumpist on policy but more mainstream on personality and temperament. He has championed “don’t say gay” legislation in Florida schools and this month used taxpayers’ money to send two planeloads of migrants from the southern border in Texas to Massachusetts, a Democratic-run state.That move prompted anger, investigation and legal action. The transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, said DeSantis was “hurting people in order to get attention”. But such opprobrium did not deter a governor playing to a Trumpist base. For his next move, DeSantis suggested, he would send another planeload of unsuspecting asylum seekers to Delaware, where Joe Biden has a weekend home.But then Hurricane Ian hit. And like ambitious Republicans before him – most famously Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose photo ops with Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were reckoned to have hurt him in the 2016 primary – DeSantis realised he needed to talk to the president.On Wednesday, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked: “Given how politicised things are at the moment, are you confident you’re gonna get the federal support Florida needs?”DeSantis said: “So I actually spoke with the president and he said he wants to be helpful. So we did submit a request for reimbursement for the next 60 days at 100%. That’s significant support, but it’s a significant storm.“We live in a very politicised time, but you know, when people are fighting for their lives, when their whole livelihood is at stake, when they’ve lost everything, if you can’t put politics aside for that, that you’re just not going to be able to do so.“So I’ll work with anybody who wants to help the people of south-west Florida and throughout our state.”Critics were quick to point back to Hurricane Sandy, which battered the east coast 10 years ago, and how DeSantis approached the matter of federal aid then.DeSantis was elected to Congress in November 2012, becoming a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, the far-right House group which would morph into the nest of Trump supporters and election deniers it constitutes today.Sandy hit in late October, unusually far north, bringing chaos to New Jersey and New York and leading to more than 100 US deaths. Months later, in January 2013, DeSantis was one of 67 Republicans to vote against a $9.7bn federal aid package for Sandy victims.He said then: “I sympathise with the victims of Hurricane Sandy and believe that those who purchased flood insurance should have their claims paid. At the same time, allowing the program to increase its debt by another $9.7bn with no plan to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere is not fiscally responsible.“Congress should not authorise billions in new borrowing without offsetting expenditures in other areas. If a family maxes out its credit cards and faces the need for new spending, it is forced to prioritize by reducing its spending in other areas … this ‘put it on the credit card mentality’ is part of the reason we find ourselves nearly $17tn in debt.”Times change. Now DeSantis – who budgeted $12m, from federal Covid relief funds, for efforts to move migrants to Democratic states – is facing “one of the biggest flood events we’ve ever had” and needs federal help.“Dear Mr President,” his formal aid request began. “I request that you issue a Major Disaster Declaration for the State of Florida as a result of Hurricane Ian and authorise and make available all categories of individual assistance and public assistance.”Ironically, in light of his comparison of aid for Sandy victims to irresponsible home economics, DeSantis also said that as Ian would “hamper local activity … federal aid through the Individuals and Households Program will help alleviate these household budget shortfalls”.Reporters noticed. Responding to the New York Times, a spokesperson said DeSantis was “completely focused on hurricane response” and added: “As the governor said earlier, we have no time for politics or pettiness.”Late-night comedians, however, had plenty of time for pointing out DeSantis’s hypocrisy – and pettiness.Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show on CBS, perhaps put it most pithily: “If you can, get out of the storm’s path. Worst-case scenario, tell Ron DeSantis you’re Venezuelan, maybe he’ll fly you to Martha’s Vineyard.”TopicsRon DeSantisHurricane IanFloridaUS politicsHurricanesanalysisReuse this content More

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      Republicans playing the migration card: Politics Weekly America

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      Ana Ceballos, a political reporter for the Miami Herald, tells Jonathan Freedland about the Republican party’s attempts to dramatise the question of migration ahead of November’s midterm elections

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      After Governor Ron DeSantis sent migrants in Florida on planes to Martha’s Vineyard – the predominantly Democratic enclave in Massachusetts – we look at Republican attempts to use the issue of migration as a vote winner. Will it work? Subscribe to The Guardian’s new six-part series Can I Tell You a Secret? on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Democrats call for justice department to investigate migrant flights

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      Democrats call for justice department to investigate migrant flightsDozens of Congress members seek inquiry into whether transport of asylum seekers from Florida and Texas broke federal law Democratic lawmakers have called on the US justice department to investigate whether Florida and Texas officials broke any federal law when they moved dozens of Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard under allegedly false pretenses.The letter from the congressional representatives Gerry Connolly, Sylvia Garcia, Ted Lieu and dozens of other Democrats followed the emergence of a report in which a 27-year-old Venezuelan said he was paid $200 by a mystery figure known as “Perla” to find people outside the San Antonio migrant center to board a flight.New York City mayor plans giant tents to house migrants sent by RepublicansRead moreThe migrant, who was called Emmanuel, told the San Antonio Report that he gave Perla contact information for 10 other migrants.“As the federal government retains jurisdiction over cases that involve interstate travel, we request the Department of Justice investigate whether any federal funds were used to operate a fraudulent scheme and request the Department of Justice make a determination as to whether officials in Texas and Florida violated federal law,” the letter said.At least one criminal investigation has already been opened into the situation by a Texas sheriff, and Connolly and others said the justice department should do the same.Multiple media reports have depicted how the asylum seekers had been misled once they arrived in Texas and were incorrectly told they were being flown to Boston.“It is alleged that immigration officials knowingly falsified mailing addresses for the migrants by selecting arbitrary homeless shelters across the United States, with the expectation that migrants would be required to contact the wrong agency,” the letter said.Details have not yet emerged about the planning and execution of the plan, which was spearheaded by the office of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.DeSantis has defended his administration’s actions and denied that migrants were misled.The Democrats pointed out that the migrants who were used in what was called a political “stunt” were fleeing communism, authoritarianism and violence, having walked thousands of miles for what they called a “dignified life”.Justice department officials declined to comment.Got a tip? Please contact Stephanie.Kirchgaessner@theguardian.comTopicsUS immigrationUS politicsMigrationRon DeSantisnewsReuse this content More

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      DeSantis to face trial for suspension of prosecutor who defied abortion ban law

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      DeSantis to face trial for suspension of prosecutor who defied abortion ban lawAndrew Warren, a Democrat, sued Florida governor for suspension after saying he would not enforce new 15-week abortion law A Florida prosecutor suspended by Ron DeSantis for defying a new 15-week abortion law says a federal judge’s decision to send his reinstatement appeal to trial means a reckoning is coming for the state’s Republican governor.Andrew Warren, a Democrat, was removed as Hillsborough county state attorney on 4 August after saying he would not enforce the abortion ban or prosecute providers of gender transition treatment for young people.DeSantis cited Warren’s alleged “woke agenda” in reasons for his decision.At a hearing in Tallahassee on Monday, Judge Robert Hinkle denied motions from DeSantis to dismiss Warren’s lawsuit, and another by Warren seeking an immediate return to office, instead requesting their differences be settled at a trial in the coming weeks.“The governor now has to answer it to a court of law where facts matter and where you have to tell the truth,” Warren said in an interview with the Guardian.“It’s a victory for the truth. A federal judge has ruled that the governor has to come into court to explain the reasons behind my suspension, to show that it wasn’t political, to show that it wasn’t in violation of my free speech rights, to show that it wasn’t in violation of the voters’ rights to have the state attorney of their choice.”The closely watched case is expected to give clarity to DeSantis’s power to purge elected officials who disagree with him. In recent weeks, the governor has also removed four members of a school board in Broward county that defied him over Covid-19 mask mandates.“The governor is entrusted by the people of Florida to utilize his constitutional powers and may suspend elected officials in Florida who refuse to enforce the law,” DeSantis’s office said in a statement following Monday’s hearing.Critics, however, have accused the governor of selective application of the principle. The Orlando Sentinel noted that DeSantis has taken no action against so-called “constitutional” sheriffs who say they won’t enforce certain gun laws.But he did act in 2019, suspending the Broward county sheriff, Scott Israel, a Democrat, for “neglect of duty”.Warren said he believed a trial, which could begin as early as next month, would cut through any political posturing.“This has always been a fight for democracy, and rule of law, and for elections,” he said.“This is our fight for the truth. And now the people will get the truth because the governor is being forced to explain himself.“Ultimately, he may be called to testify in court. The court was pretty clear that it wants to hear from the governor in terms of the explanations about the suspension to make sure that the reasons why I was suspended are consistent with Florida law, and with federal law.”Warren said his reinstatement was not the sole objective of his lawsuit.“I would have liked to be back in office already but there’s more at stake than just my job,” he said.“Regardless of what party you belong to, or who you vote for, yours always matters. No elected official has the right to throw out anyone’s vote. And the governor here has tried to throw out the votes of hundreds of thousands of Floridians and overturn an election.“If he gets away with it, what’s left of our democracy? What’s the point of having elections?”Warren ran as a progressive when he unseated long-term incumbent Republican Mark Ober as Hillsborough county state attorney in 2016, and was re-elected with 53% of the vote four years later.He immediately set about enacting policies that upset conservatives, the Tampa Bay Times reported, including a pledge to introduce programs to rehabilitate convicts and prevent recidivism.According to Tampa’s Fox13, Susan Lopez, whom DeSantis appointed in Warren’s place, has already reversed several of his policies, including the reinstatement of a controversial law enforcement “bike-stop” measure that critics say unfairly targets minorities.TopicsRon DeSantisFloridaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Criminal investigation launched into DeSantis asylum seeker flights

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      Criminal investigation launched into DeSantis asylum seeker flightsTexas county sheriff says it seems evident that asylum seekers had been ‘lured’ to travel to Martha’s Vineyard ‘under false pretenses’ A criminal investigation has been launched in Texas into whether dozens of asylum seekers were illegally flown from the state to Martha’s Vineyard, as new evidence continues to emerge suggesting they were misled.Attorneys for ‘duped’ migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard call for criminal investigationRead moreThe Bexar county sheriff, Javier Salazar, said on Monday that his office was investigating the flights, chartered on behalf of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, which brought dozens of migrants to the island in Massachusetts.While Salazar did not name possible subjects in the inquiry, he said: “Everybody on this call knows who those names are already,” according to NBC News.Salazar did not discuss what specific laws might have been broken, but said it seemed evident that asylum seekers had been “lured under false pretenses”, with a recruiter given a “bird dog fee” to gather dozens of people who were outside a San Antonio migrant resource center.“They were promised work,” said Salazar. “They were promised the solution to several of their problems.”Many of the asylum seekers were given pamphlets advertising cash assistance, help with housing, job training and other resources if they came to Massachusetts.But the promised benefits are only available for refugees, a specific categorization under US immigration law that the asylum seekers do not currently fall under.Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based group representing 30 of the recent arrivals, shared links and images of the brochures on Twitter.“This is additional evidence that shows in writing that those false representations were made in order to induce our clients to travel,” said Oren Sellstrom, the group’s litigation director, to NBC News.The group has also called for a federal and state criminal investigation into the chartered flights.A spokesperson from DeSantis’s office defended the flights and the brochures, saying that migrants were sent to “greener pastures” and to places that had more resources than Bexar county.The flights are just one instance of a broader pattern of Republican officials sending thousands of asylum seekers to predominantly Democratic-voting areas, a stunt that Democrats have slammed as illegal and wrong.“There is a process that is in place. And what they are doing is an illegal stunt, is a political stunt,” said the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.TopicsUS immigrationRon DeSantisFloridaMassachusettsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      DeSantis actions on migrants is ‘mini-ethnic cleansing’, expert warns

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      AnalysisDeSantis actions on migrants is ‘mini-ethnic cleansing’, expert warnsStephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington Philosophy professor says treating Republican’s decision to move unwitting migrants to Martha’s Vineyard as a political stunt risks diminishing its ‘moral seriousness’Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to move unwitting migrants to Martha’s Vineyard last week has been compared to a “mini-ethnic cleansing with genocidal precedence” by a philosopher who has closely studied dehumanization and its role in genocide and the Holocaust.“Of course this is not genocide, but it is somewhat reminiscent of awful things that have happened in the past. As soon as you start treating human beings as undesirable problems to dump on others, you are in very dangerous territory,” said David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England.“What frightens me most actually is that someone who does these sort of acts is capable of doing much worse,” he said.The remarks by Smith, who is the author of Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, come as dozens of more people, many of whom are migrants who are believed to have come from Venezuela, arrived in Washington DC on Saturday morning after being bused from Texas. The migrants, including a one-month-old baby, were dropped in front of the Naval Observatory, where Vice-President Kamala Harris resides.The shuttling of about 50 migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard – with a stop in Florida – last week has been condemned by US president Joe Biden and human rights groups after it emerged that the migrants were misled and told they were being sent to Boston to find jobs and opportunities. Lawyers for the individuals have called on state officials in Massachusetts to investigate the incident, including the circumstances around the two charter flights that transported them to the Massachusetts island, which were arranged by DeSantis.The Florida Republican, who is expected to run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, has claimed that “every community in America should be sharing in the burdens” of migrants and that he was seeking to draw attention to the Biden administration’s handling of immigration issues between the US and Mexico.But Smith warned that seeing the incident as merely a political “stunt” by an attention-seeking Republican politician risked diminishing the “moral seriousness and the possible future implications of what they are doing”.“In effect,” Smith said, “DeSantis is intimating that this is an ethnic cleansing operations, that he will take these so-called undesirables and pick them up and dump them in the lands of [his] political enemies.”Stone said he was also struck by the way in which both DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott appeared to see liberal American cities like Washington DC or the wealthy liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard as being like a foreign country.“You could say that’s no surprise: there’s often talk of ‘real Americans’ living in the heartland. But this takes it to a new level. To use a gross but apt analogy, it’s as if someone is taking their garbage and dumping it in their neighbors’ yard. DeSantis talks about it like that,” he said.Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who regularly engages in racist diatribes on his show, raised the idea of dropping migrants on Martha’s Vineyard in this summer. In a segment that aired on 26 July, he suggested sending “huge numbers” of migrants to the Massachusetts island, which he claimed must be “begging for diversity” since its major city was overwhelmingly white.“Let’s start with 300,000 and move up from there,” Carlson said.Fox News spokesperson Irena Briganti did not respond to questions about whether Carlson had discussed the issue with DeSantis directly or whether Fox had any concerns about Carlson encouraging human trafficking.Carlson has also praised authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who argued in a speech earlier this year that Europeans should not become “peoples of mixed race”.TopicsUS immigrationRon DeSantisUS politicsRepublicansanalysisReuse this content More

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      DeSantis criticized for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard: ‘It’s un-American’

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      DeSantis criticized for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard: ‘It’s un-American’Democrats outraged at the ‘reckless’ and ‘soulless’ actions and question the legality of what some called a political stunt Joe Biden has accused Ron DeSantis of “playing politics with people’s lives” for flying Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal island community of Martha’s Vineyard without warning, while the legality of the Florida governor’s move is also under scrutiny.In what immigration activists and Democratic politicians have decried as a “political stunt”, DeSantis, who is expected to run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, arranged for two charter planes of about 50 migrant adults and children to fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday. DeSantis sends migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, causing ‘humanitarian situation’ Read moreClaiming that “every community in America should be sharing in the burdens,” DeSantis told a press briefing he wanted to draw attention to what he claimed was a failure by the Biden administration to secure the US-Mexico border.The president attacked DeSantis’s action in a speech late on Thursday, also criticising Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott.Abbott arranged for two buses from his state to drop off more than 100 migrants from Colombia, Cuba, Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela at the Washington DC residence of the vice-president, Kamala Harris, on Wednesday, shortly before the Massachusetts planes landed.The leader of the anti-trafficking charity Polaris on Friday issued a strongly-worded statement that pointedly questioned whether the governors’ actions amounted to human trafficking, citing migrants’ claims that they were deceived about where they were going.“Acts of calculated deception were reportedly used to trick migrants onto buses and planes,” the statement from Polaris chief Catherine Chen said. “Unfortunately, this tactic is one that we know far too well in the anti-trafficking world. Migrants are regularly tricked and defrauded as part of their trafficking experience, with traffickers and exploiters taking advantage of their recent arrival, limited English proficiency, and unfamiliarity with our government systems and labor laws.”Chen added: “If migrants were defrauded, and if this fraud was intended as a vehicle for anyone’s material gain, including that of an elected official, then there is a case for investigating it as trafficking.”DeSantis, Abbott and Doug Ducey, governor of Arizona, have sent thousands of migrants to predominantly Democratic-run “sanctuary” states and cities they deem to be liberal over immigration, although Massachusetts has a Republican governor, Charlie Baker.Attack on asylum seeker in New York sparks outrage over conditions Read more“Instead of working with us on solutions, Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props,” Biden said at a gala for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in Washington DC.“What they’re doing is simply wrong. It’s un-American, it’s reckless and we have a process in place to manage migrants at the border. We’re working to make sure it’s safe and orderly and humane.“Republican officials should not interfere with that process by waging these political stunts,” he added.Veronica Escobar, a Democratic congresswoman from Texas, meanwhile, said DeSantis was “a soulless human being”.On Friday, as Baker said he had ordered up to 125 members of the Massachusetts national guard to help move the migrants to more secure accommodation at a military base in Cape Cod on the mainland, questions were mounting over the legality of DeSantis’s action.The US attorney for Massachusetts, Rachael Rollins, said she planned to speak with the justice department, and Nikki Fried, a member of the Florida cabinet and the only statewide-elected Democrat, wrote to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, to demand a federal investigation into potential human trafficking.California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said he had also written to the justice department, which declined comment when contacted by the Guardian on Friday.Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for Florida governor, who will challenge DeSantis in November’s midterm elections, said he had filed a sunshine law request demanding information about the state’s legislature-approved “relocation programme”.Earlier this year politicians granted $12m (£10.5m) for DeSantis’s plan to relocate migrants to other states, but the language is specific to undocumented immigrants physically in Florida.Both flights to Massachusetts touched down briefly in Florida en route between San Antonio and Martha’s Vineyard, but DeSantis’s office did not say if that was an attempt to meet the requirement of the programme.The southern Republican governors have been transporting migrants who are, at least temporarily, legally in the US waiting for their immigration cases, such as seeking asylum from violent regimes, to be processed.Crist in a statement accused DeSantis of trafficking humans with Florida taxpayer money. “He owes the people of our state answers,” Crist added.In Edgartown, the Martha’s Vineyard county seat and old whaling port, on Friday, residents and aid groups were working to care for and relocate the Venezuelan families, many of whom speak no English and say they were not told of their destination when they boarded the plane.Several told journalists there was nobody at the airport to greet them, and they walked almost four miles to find help in the town, where they were put up in a church overnight.“They were told there was a surprise present for them, and that there would be jobs and housing awaiting for them when they arrived. This was obviously a sadistic lie,” Rachel Self, a Boston immigration attorney assisting with the migrants’ cases, said at a press briefing.Self said she believes the migrants in question were kidnapped and defrauded, and any who cooperate with investigators may become eligible for a visa granted to crime victims.On Friday afternoon, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre accused Republican governors involved of lying to migrants, and said DeSantis did not notify Massachusetts that “migrant children, in need of food and shelter, were about to land on their doorstep”.“These vulnerable migrants were misled about where they were headed.”She condemned what she called Abbott and DeSantis “creating political theater [without] creating actual solution.She noted, however, that any legal challenge would have to come from the US Justice Department rather than the White House.Shaw Drake, senior policy counsel on border and immigration at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the Martha’s Vineyard case has raised “particular concerns about the level of coercion and lack of informed consent”.“The issue of consent is of core legal concern,” Drake added.Meanwhile, NBC News reported friction between the White House and the Department of Homeland Security about how to cope with the latest rise in unauthorized border crossings.TopicsUS immigrationJoe BidenRon DeSantisUS politicsnewsReuse this content More