(MARTHA’S VINYARD, MA) — A Texas sheriff said Monday he was opening a criminal investigation into Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ migrant flight to Martha’s Vineyard as the stunt continues to draw criticism from Democrats and even some Republicans and DeSantis defends what he calls a protest of border policies.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar announced the probe on Monday night, saying that his office believes the migrants who were shuttled to the Massachusetts island on Sept. 14 were lured under false pretenses, which DeSantis denies.

“What infuriates me the most about this case is that here we have 48 people that are already on hard times, right?” Salazar said at a press conference. “They are here legally, in our country. At that point, they have every right to be where they are. And I believe that they were preyed upon.”

Immigration attorneys working with some of the asylum-seekers told ABC News that the migrants were given misleading information, including brochures, about benefits they could receive in Massachusetts.

The governor defended the migrant drop-off as a protest of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies as border encounters remain at a record high. DeSantis has repeatedly insisted the migrants volunteered to be taken to Martha’s Vineyard from Texas.

“Why wouldn’t they want to go, given where they were?” he said during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Monday night. “They were in really, really bad shape.”

What potential violations are being investigated?

Salazar said Monday that his office believes a Venezuelan migrant was paid a “bird-dog fee” to lure roughly 50 migrants to be taken to Martha’s Vineyard, where they would be promised work and a better life.

“There’s a high possibility that the laws were broken here in the state of Texas in Bexar County,” Salazar said.

But he declined to reveal any specific statutes he thinks may have been violated at the federal, state or local level.

He also didn’t identify any suspects.

“We do have the names of some suspects involved that we believe are persons of interest in this case at this point, but I won’t be parting with those names,” he said. “To be fair, I think everybody on this call knows who those names are already but suffice it to say we will be opening this case.”

“We’re going to discover what extent the law can hold these people accountable,” he added.

Attorneys say DeSantis brochures were misleading

Lawyers representing the migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard told ABC News that the information given to them before the journey was misleading because the migrants aren’t technically refugees. These people are seeking asylum but have not yet attained that status, the attorneys said.

Millions of Venezuelans have fled the country since 2014, hoping to escape political turmoil and economic strife. U.S. relations are strained with the country – which has for years been under punishing U.S. sanctions levied in opposition to the country’s president — and Venezuelans are typically exempt from being quickly expelled under Title 42, a Trump-era policy used to quickly expel migrants because of the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ivan Espinoza-Marigal, a leading lawyer representing many of the migrants, told ABC that most of the migrants’ current status is under humanitarian parole and therefore they are not eligible for the benefits described in the pamphlet they received.

“Only people who have already been granted refugee status are eligible,” American Immigration Council Policy Director Aaron Reichlin-Melnick told ABC News. “Asylum seekers do not receive any federal assistance and cannot receive work authorization until at least six months after applying for asylum.”

DeSantis has pointed to the brochures given out by a vendor working with the state of Florida to transport the migrants as proof they weren’t duped about where they were going or what would be available to them once they arrived.

“They all signed consent forms to go,” he told Hannity. “And then the vendor that is doing this for Florida provided them with a packet that had a map of Martha’s Vineyard, it had the numbers for different services on Martha’s Vineyard and then it had numbers for the overall agencies in Massachusetts that handles immigration and refugees.”

Rachel Self, an immigration attorney helping migrants who arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, said the map on the brochures was “cartoonishly simple” and contained information on how migrants could change their address with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) when they relocated.

“This is especially troubling as anyone with even the most basic understanding of the immigration proceedings knows that USCIS was not the agency with whom the migrants would have to record their addresses and has nothing to do with their cases in any way,” Self said.

Typically, migrants granted humanitarian parole and looking to file an asylum claim have mandatory court hearings scheduled in locations where they have said they have family or at courts closest to where they were processed by immigration authorities. That means that migrants who went unknowingly or under false pretenses to Martha’s Vineyard are at risk of missing those court dates, which may result in them being fast-tracked for deportation.

“The brochure is full of lies for this particular group of people. Material misrepresentations made in furtherance of the unlawful scheme,” Self, one of the attorneys, told ABC News.

What DeSantis’ team is saying

Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’ communications director, responded to the investigation by the Bexar Sheriff’s Office in a social media post on Monday.

“Immigrants are more than willing to leave Bexar County after being enticed to cross the border and ‘to fend for themselves.’ [Florida] provided an opportunity in a sanctuary state [with] resources, as expected – unlike the 53 who died in an abandoned truck in Bexar County in June,” Fenske wrote on Twitter.

DeSantis during his appearance on Hannity called the accusations that migrants were deceived “nonsense.”

He has promised additional operations to send migrants to so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions,” saying last week that he intends to use $12 million from the state’s relocation program for more transports.

“Those migrants were being treated horribly by Biden. They were hungry, homeless, they had no opportunity at all. The state of Florida — it was volunteer — offered transport to sanctuary jurisdictions,” DeSantis said at a press conference on Tuesday as he doubled down on his comments made to Hannity.

Lawmakers weigh in

Members of congressional leadership on Tuesday waded into the ongoing discourse surrounding DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s moves last week to ship undocumented migrants to various cities across the U.S.

House Democratic Caucus chairman Hakeem Jeffries lambasted both men during a Tuesday press conference at the Capitol, noting that the two GOP governors needed to “stop behaving like human traffickers.”

“They are putting politics over people in the most egregious way possible,” Jeffries said.

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed support for the Republicans’ actions, saying he “thought it was a good idea” to send undocumented immigrants to blue states.

Though not by name, McConnell defended DeSantis and Abbott by saying on the Senate floor that they were merely giving Biden and the Democrats “a tiny, tiny taste” of what border state governors have been grappling with for years.

White House Press press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back on the idea that the GOP governors are implicating non-border states in sharing the burden of caring for migrants who come to the U.S.

“So the way that we see it is alerting Fox News and not city or state officials about a plan to abandon children fleeing communism on the side of the street is not burden sharing,” Jean-Pierre told reporters during Tuesday’s briefing. “That is not the definition that we see of burden sharing. It is a cruel, premeditated political stunt.”

 

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(NEW YORK) — Author George M. Johnson has found himself at the center of a culture war over what kids can read.

Johnson’s memoir, “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” which chronicles his experience growing up as a Black queer man, is the second most banned book in the U.S. and has been taken off the shelves in at least 29 school districts across the country, according to a Pen America report released Monday. The schools have cited the sexually explicit content, including descriptions of queer sex and sexual trauma, as reason for removing the collection of essays from bookshelves.

“It’s been bittersweet to see our stories be attacked in this way, but it is also amplifying many of our stories and I’m able to get the book out to the teen readers who really need it the most,” Johnson told ABC News Live in an interview that aired Tuesday.

“If there’s anything I’m thankful for, it’s that it’s actually getting to the hands of the people who need to read it to heal from it.”

Johnson is this year’s honorary chair of the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week” celebration – an annual event that launched in 1982 – that has gained increased attention over the past two years as droves of books are being challenged and taken off the shelves in public schools and libraries across the country.

“Banned Books Week is much about providing space and opportunity for local libraries to talk about censorship and to highlight the importance of celebrating the freedom to read,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told ABC News.

PEN America, a nonprofit advocacy organization working to advance freedom of expression through literature, documents the “rapid acceleration of book censorship nationwide” in its latest report and finds that nearly 140 school districts in 32 states issued more than 2,500 book bans during the 2021-22 school year.

According to the report, the vast majority of the challenged books are written by authors of color and center on stories about people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. Meanwhile, states like Texas and Florida are leading the way, with 801 bans in 22 districts and 566 bans in 21 districts, respectively.

Following the release of the PEN America report, LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD said that “banning books is just one arm of a larger, organized campaign to target and harass LGBTQ youth nationwide.”

“Everyone deserves to see themselves represented in books and other forms of media, and the targeting of LGBTQ youth through book bans and other anti-LGBTQ school policies must end,” GLAAD told ABC News in a statement.

Republican Texas state representative Matt Krause, a leading voice on this issue, told ABC News that for him this is not about banning books.

“Being a father, I want to make sure that there are age-appropriate materials in our schools,” Krause said.

Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, two former school board members in Florida, told ABC News that as they observed their children’s experience with virtual schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic, they became concerned over some of the content their kids were being exposed to.

They co-founded Moms for Liberty in 2021 — a grassroots nonprofit that grew “organically” among like-minded parents and now has hundreds of chapters in 40 states across the country, Descovich said.

The group, which fought against mask mandates in schools, is also on the frontlines of demanding that parents have more control over what their children read in school.

“When you’re talking about what’s age appropriate for children, parents need to be a part of that conversation,” Justice said.

Summer Lopez, PEN America’s chief program officer of Free Expression Programs, told ABC News that by targeting so-called “sexually explicit” content, conservative politicians and parent advocacy groups have targeted LGBTQ+ content without taking the entire work into context.

“None of this is to say that parents don’t have a role to play in their children’s education – of course they do,” Lopez said.

“The problem is when you decide that your concerns about your own child should apply to everybody else’s children,” she added.

Johnson said that when he was growing up, he did not see himself represented in books and hopes that works like “All Boys Aren’t Blue” can help children and young adults find validation and support. “It’s extremely important that our curriculum starts to mirror what our actual school systems look like,” Johnson said.

“Everyone should be allowed to be seen and represented in the books that they read in a way that I wasn’t when I was a teenager,” he added.

Lopez said that the growing national and political movement to restrict what kids can read has a “chilling effect” where fear of controversy or being targeted leads to self-censorship.

“The most nefarious restrictions on freedom of speech are the ones that the government doesn’t have to make, that we make for ourselves because of the environment that we’re living in,” Lopez said.

“In order to be a vibrant democracy, we have to make sure that people feel they can say things that might be radical.”

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